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

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I had a gift certificate for $10 for a store I frequent that was due to expire.  I don’t buy myself a lot of things — usually only books or games — but I decided to splurge and put the money towards a new purse.  My old one was falling apart, and a new purse would make me feel organized and put together.

I measured my current purse, and I looked at my options online.  I ordered one that I thought looked perfect.  Then it arrived and it was definitely not perfect.  So I returned it.  (And lost my $10 gift certificate in the process.  Sniff.)

I was going to let the whole thing go when I decided to poke around in different stores, suck it up, and just spend the money on myself.  So I did, and I got a completely awesome black backpack.  It does make me feel more put together.

What was your last splurge?

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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.

The first MicroblogMonday entry two Mondays ago was about whether people really change.  My first, knee-jerk response was yes.  I am not the person I was years ago.  Things that used to phase me now don’t bother me at all, and things that I used to love now are anathema.  Like camping.  Ugh.

But the longer response is that at the core, I remain the same.  Everything that makes me… Me.  Like me with a capital “M.”  My me-ness.  Those things remain constant.

But that solid core is surrounded by softer and softer layers, until the outer leaves are as flimsy as romaine lettuce.  Those outer leaves, the ones rubbing up against by the world, change massively over time, change in smaller ways day-to-day. It’s the outer layers that worry me, especially when I feel that the change is negative.  That I’m losing a piece of myself that I once liked.

I feel like something clicked out of sync last spring, and I’ve been trying to get it back.  But maybe it really is like lettuce.  Maybe those outer layers need to be shucked, tossed aside.  Because… you know… lettuce isn’t really repairable.  Maybe the key to getting back to having outer layers I like to look at is to remove the damaged ones and move on, rather than trying to fix, smooth over, perfect.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday once again.  Get writing!

So I went to the dentist this week, and they offered me an itemized list of services to submit to insurance, even though our insurance will not cover services at this dentist. It’s a good thing I accept the paper.  When I got home, I was looking at the itemized list, I realized they were charging me for services that I never got. That I wasn’t even offered.

I called the office and they took it off my bill.  Well, I’m being optimistic… They said they took it off my bill, but I’m still waiting to see the reimbursement receipt.  Still, it’s a little PSA to ask for that itemized receipt when you go to the doctor or dentist and check it BEFORE you pay.  Even if you’re not going to submit anything to insurance.

I will never pay without seeing what I’m being charged for again.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “24 Ways Losing My Children to Infertility Has Changed My Perspective” (Infertilityhonesty)
• “My Answer” (Not a Wasted Word)
• “Seven” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “MicroblogMondays: Muscle Memory” (Infertile Girl in a Fertile World)
• “Plans Interrupted” (Project Pomegranate)

Okay, now my choices this week.

A Woman My Age vents all her anger as she watches her mother’s decline.  It is the most raw, moving post that I read all week, made all the more poignant by the post she wrote after her mother’s death.  Sometimes you need to feel that anger.  Sometimes love, indeed, liberates.

River Run Dry has a post about grief.  She writes: “Until I read that blog post, I never realized that my New Years resolutions are my way to try to FIX my grief.”  It’s a really interesting take on the choices we make because we think we should make them, and the choices we make because they are what we actually want.  Moreover, it’s about accepting sadness and carrying it instead of trying to change it.

Lastly, Waiting to Expand has a post about surprises.  You’ll need to read the whole, brief post to get these last lines, but they’re an important reminder: “Life is full of surprises, friends.  Sometimes they freaking suck.  And sometimes, they are breathtakingly beautiful.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Check your medical bills before you pay them.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between October 30th and November 6th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

Screenshot of Crown of Kings (a.k.a. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons)

This is a cautionary tale about an online review that led me astray.

Back in September, my cousin and I were talking about old video games, so on and so on, and I ended up buying all of the games on the Activision and Atari apps, and then adding in the Midway Arcade app since they had Joust.  It wasn’t a bad purchase at all — I’ve played them a lot — but most of the games I really missed weren’t offered as part of the in-game purchase.

The games I wanted were on the Intellivision Flashback, but I was nervous to buy it because of a review I read online.  It was long and detailed, which is probably why I fixated on it.  Though now reading it again after playing with the machine (oh, yes, the machine will enter my house… spoilers!), I can see that if I knew the reviewer personally, I probably would have decided that we purchase gaming machines for very different reasons and what matters to him/her will not be what matters to me.  More on what does matter to me in a moment.

So I wrote that GeekDad post, and the head of Intellivision wrote me.  We got into a conversation about the apps and the machine, and they offered to send me a console to test out myself.  The next day, I got word that it was on its way.

Somewhere along the way, it went from being a “yeah, that would make a fun blog post” to “my childhood is on a plane, flying toward me, and I am tracking it across states.” I got very jittery about it, like I was about to see an old camp friend after a long winter.  I sat there with the postal tracking system open on my computer, hitting refresh several times each hour.

I watched videos of other people playing Intellivision games on YouTube, like I was looking at old photo albums, wondering if things would still be the same when my friend got here.

Uh… my machine friend.  Like… my Intellivision Flashback friend.

It will surprise exactly zero readers to learn that I cried playing it.  The sounds… and the colours… and the click click click of counting my arrows in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (which is now called Crown of Kings) and the song in Snafu… all of it.  I felt like I was eight again.  I felt like myself again.

Do you know what I mean?  That moment when you magically access some deeply buried muscle memory, and it combines with the sounds and sights from your childhood.  Suddenly you are eight years old again and sitting on the floor (criss-cross applesauce), the only one awake on a Saturday morning.

But it’s even better now because the twins are in love with it, too, and they want to play with me all the time.  All those years when I couldn’t find anyone to play Utopia with me, and now I have two best friends living under my roof who say things like, “Let’s not go to bed.  Let’s stay up all night playing video games.”  Okay!  Let’s do it!

By which I mean I tucked them in and then went back downstairs to play by myself for a few hours.  Mama needs to get better at Brickout, let’s just say.

So this is the thing about that review: I don’t see the same things at all.  The quality of the video and sound?  It looks perfectly good to me.  Maybe it’s his/her television, because the games look and sound as I remember them.  Granted, I’m not a purist, and I don’t have an old system to do a side-by-side comparison.  But everything so far has played as I remember it.

But what my review would say, and I am planning to write a review to counter that one, is that if you want to feel like you felt playing your old Intellivision games, then you should get the Flashback.

It’s sort of like that old Maya Angelou quote: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  I will forget how the games sounded or how the games looked, but I will never forget how the games made me feel, and these games still make me feel that way.

So I’m really grateful that they made this machine and let me try it out.  You can peruse the game list on the Intellvision Lives! site as well as get the overlays and old manuals.  You can read more about the Flashback system over on GeekDad where I wrote about it a few weeks ago.  But moreover, better than a review, you can ask me any questions you have since I’m holding the product and happy to test anything out for anyone else.

And if you don’t have any questions, then at least share your favourite game list so I can see where we match up.  Mine: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Crown of Kings) will always and forever be number one.  In no particular order after that: Astrosmash, Space Armada, Horse Racing, Utopia, Snafu, Pitfall, and Brickout.  On the Atari, my favourites were Adventure and E.T.

A.M.S. (who no longer blogs… sniff) and I share a love of tiny houses, yurts, and homes that look like this.  I’ve been trying to convince Josh that we need a tiny house at the beach.  He is equally enamoured with tiny houses, less so ones placed on land that may be underwater in a few years, and we sometimes watch Tiny House Nation, talking about our own future tiny house.

Last week, we were watching a Halloween-themed episode when the host mentioned that the community of rentable tiny houses was located in my home state.  Are you kidding me?  Would A.M.S. come up to visit so we could squee?  I grabbed Josh’s hand and gasped, “Oh my G-d, we need to drive out there now!”

And then I Googled it.

And you know where it was?  My location casualty.

I know I wrote about possibly returning to this area back in 2011, mostly to show the kids Fallingwater, but we haven’t done it yet.  I want to in the sense that I want to show them Fallingwater, but I really don’t want to go back to that area.  It’s a shame because it’s so close, and yet the idea of going fills me with dread, even after this much time has passed.  Isn’t that ridiculous?  Except that if it’s possible to live your life avoiding an area, it’s really hard to talk yourself into going there for fun.  Because… you know… it isn’t fun to be there.

And yet… maybe the siren song of the tiny house will be the thing that pushes me over the edge?

Are there places you never want to return to?