Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I want to live in a hobbit hole.  Mental Floss recently had an article about a manufacturer of prefabricated homes that are covered in sod and look like hobbit holes.  Though I realized looking at the houses that what I want isn’t the outside of the hobbit hole but the inside.

I like small, cozy spaces with lots of room for shelving books neatly (so they can be found quickly).  I like squashy chairs and throw blankets and wood.  I want a little bed like this for nap time.  (Actually, does anyone remember a few years ago that there was a picture of a bed like this — a frame that had books inside — that we were all covetously passing around the Internet?  I can’t find the bed of my dreams despite a lot of keyword Googling.)

What is your ideal home?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.

Back in the olden days of the Internet, the first full week of January was declared International Delurking Week, and I still celebrate this ancient holiday. It runs this year from the 3rd until the 9th, so you have about seven days to slither out of the reading closet and check in with an “I’m here” comment.

It is fairly easy. Leave a comment in the comment section below admitting that you’re here. You can simply raise your hand and meekly admit that you’re here with a simple, one-word “here” comment; or you can proudly raise your hand and tell us all a bit about yourself (my preferred method); or… you can tell me your favourite book (see, I’m trying to make it easy for you by even providing a comment prompt).

The point is that I want to know about the people who read me, since there is a huge discrepancy between the number of readers in actuality and the number of readers I actually know are reading. Or a tongue-twister like that.

And that’s all you have to do to celebrate.

So (clears throat to nudge you along), who is here?

And just to answer my own question, I am partial to the Harry Potter series.  And almost anything Tolkien.  And Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.  And Voltaire’s Candide.

* I make a badge every year to mark the occasion, and I give you full permission to right click and grab it for your very own.

Side note: tomorrow is also #MicroblogMonday.  So get writing!

While Friday is usually a Roundup day, this week was so quiet online that there wasn’t much to read.  Sniff.

So the Roundup will be back next week, and in its place, I give you puzzles.  Not my puzzles, but MIT’s.

Every year in January, MIT hosts a treasure hunt.  I’ve always wanted to go, though in speaking to people who DO go every year, I have exactly zero chance of actually succeeding in getting past the first few puzzles.  But I am not deterred!  What I lack in intelligence, I make up for in spirit.

This year, someone at MIT has put up an online version of (I think) last year’s game.  You can form a team and try to solve the puzzles from home.  Our family has a team, and we’re working together.  Again, what we lack in actual knowledge we make up for with exuberance and a complete refusal of acknowledgment of our inadequacies.

Let the games begin!

Last year was the last year of the Creme de la Creme.  I can’t say that it will never run again because who knows how we will all feel in another year or two or twenty?

But participation had dwindled over the years, so I declared last year’s Creme — the 9th one — to be the final one for the time being.  Part of me considered extending one more year just to have it end on a nice, even 10.  But that’s not life.  Life isn’t neat and symmetrical and orderly.  Things sometimes end on a 9th year instead of a 10th.

I felt an odd twinge in the fall when I didn’t put up the call for submissions, but I didn’t really think about the project again until this week.  In years past, this week has always had a panicky vibe as I move through the entries, reading and thinking and sometimes reading again and thinking again and then writing.  This year, there was no panicky vibe.  There were no entries to read or blurbs to write.

It’s an odd feeling to stop celebrating something, sort of like declaring yourself done with a holiday.  It still rolls around on the calendar, but all the rituals you once did to mark the occasion aren’t performed.

There is no point to this post except that I wanted to mark the moment.  Because I was thinking about it.  While I know the posts I liked and mark them in the Roundup, it’s different to hear the post each writer was proud of from their yearly collection of posts.

If I had to pick one from my blog, it’s probably “Lasts” because it’s summing up the year for me.  What is yours?

A long time ago, my cousin and I were in a store in Salem, Massachusetts.  There was a barrel of tarot cards by the cash register, and I got a strong vibe that I was meant to own a certain deck in the barrel.  So I plucked it out and paid for it without a lot of thought.

They look like playing cards, but they have an object on each card along with a short description of what the object means.  The cards came with instructions on how to lay them out and give a reading.

Like the cards, I was drawn to Mental Floss’s recent post about tarot cards.  I especially love that they were historically a form of Choose Your Own Adventure story since my new book is about interactive fiction.

Most of the time they sit in my drawer.  I’m not really sure I believe in it at all. (Even though I totally believe that my body somehow knew I was supposed to buy this specific deck in a sea of decks.)  The ChickieNob is always begging me to read her cards, though I have no clue what I’m doing.  It’s sort of anticlimactic when you need to keep pausing to consult the how-to directions that come with the cards.  It would probably help if I memorized the instructions.

But there’s another part of me that thinks it’s better not to know anything.  That hearing something could make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.  And while I would be okay with life spoilers since I like having time to get accustomed to change, this in between — this maybe real or maybe not — probably isn’t helpful.  Right?

If there was a time traveler who could come back and definitively tell you the highlights and low points of your life, would you want to hear them?  Even knowing that there was nothing you could do to change the path because the time traveler could prove these fixed events in time?  (And yes, this “what if” assumes that you have no free will and your destiny is set, so just roll with that.)  Or would you rather not know anything and be surprised by life in the moment?

A P.S. to the story: I was in Salem a few years ago, and I swung by the store again.  They no longer sell them, and when I asked about them, the woman said they never sold them.  Creepy.