Does your partner read your blog?  Is he or she following you on Twitter?  Hearting your Instagram pictures?  Liking your Facebook statuses?  Because, apparently, he or she shouldn’t.

I bookmarked and finally read this article about why you should not be connected to your partner on social media.  The reasons are what you’d expect: people are connecting less in the face-to-face world because they assume their partner knows everything from the online world, plus the situation is ripe for people to see things that are better off unseen, like a casual, cute comment between your current partner and one of their ex-partners.

And… well… yeah.  I mean, if you don’t connect offline, it’s obviously a problem.  And if you are going to fret over your partner receiving a comment from one of their ex-partners, it’s probably a problem.  But the article makes it sound like the only reason to be connected online is so you can tag your partner and chart your entire relationship in Facebook status updates.  Aren’t people just connected online for the sake of being connected online?  Because their partner is actually a friend, and it would be weird to be “friends” with a random stranger you met at a conference yet not “friends” with your partner?

Wouldn’t you find it a little curious if two people in a couple were active online but not connected at all to each other?

I would find it curious.

Ooooh, I’d probably sit around in bed with Josh at night and muse on why they’re not connected because I’m so nosy like that.

I love that Josh reads my blog.  I don’t think he has ever learned anything here that he didn’t already know (or couldn’t deduce).  The same goes for the rest of social media.  A blog post more often elicits an eyebrow raise and an “it’s interesting that you wrote about that” or an “oh, I thought you’d write about X today.”  He doesn’t have to read my blog, but it’s one more place he can connect with me, so I’m glad he does.  I’m proud of this space; I’m proud of what I write.  I don’t need him to hang onto my every word, but I always appreciate it when he says something about a post, which lets me know that he read it.

And I like seeing what he posts.  He’s not actively blogging anymore, but he posts sometimes on Twitter or Facebook.  It’s interesting to see what thoughts make it onto the screen.

So… does your partner read your blog?  Are you connected on social media?  And are you happy about it?  Or do you wish you could say whatever you wanted to say online knowing that the person eating cereal beside you isn’t wondering about your last blog post or status update?

A few weeks ago, I read about the podcast Jesse vs. Cancer.  The podcaster is a standup comic with stage 4 colon cancer.  Sort of off my beaten podcast path since I tend to lean hard on the NPR and NPR-like ouevre.  But the reviewer said that they laughed so hard that they had to keep pausing the episode, so I decided to download an episode or two and give it a try.

And that is how I almost crashed my car.

I was driving down the highway, listening to an episode when he started to cover the type of people who believe in ghosts in episode two.  I was laughing so hard that I started crying at the same time, and my chest hurt from trying to hold it together.

Actually, there have been so many moments like that.  I embarrassed myself as I shook all over at a traffic light, the elderly woman in the car beside mine staring at me while I jerked around.  I decided that I can’t listen to it while on the road.

Unfortunately, I probably shouldn’t listen to it in the house, either.  One night, Josh and I were falling asleep when a joke Jesse made floated into my brain and I laughed aloud, startling Josh awake.  “You were thinking about the broken dick joke, weren’t you,” he accused.

I was.

It is about the cancer, obviously, but it’s not really about the cancer.  It is about a very funny person observing life, and if you like dick jokes and are not easily offended, it is pretty much the funniest thing I have heard in a long time.  The highest honour I can give is to not delete a podcast immediately after listening, and I turned off the delete option on iTunes because I knew I’d want to listen again.

So… not the usual podcast I recommend, but so good.  The comedian says that he is currently putting together a tour, and I will definitely see him if he comes my way.  So you know he has to be really funny if I’m willing to actually have an evening out.

P.S. Give it two episodes before you decide how you feel.  The first episode is a lot of background information.  He really hits his stride by the third episode.

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

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Not Quite Nigella had a post recently about an ethical dinner she attended.  She explains:

The Ethics Centre’s new series of dinners called “Hard Things To Talk About” pairs innovative and surprising food, performances, speakers and thought provoking conversation. This isn’t a regular, “safe” dinner but one where your preconceptions may be dashed and you may be asked uncomfortable questions.

At her dinner, the theme was bias.  The food, the conversation, the speakers, the interactions were all meant to challenge her to think about bias.

It sounds like a cool idea, though one that could grow quite uncomfortable if not done well.

Do you think you would be up for a dinner like this?  Would it be different if you were paired with someone you would have to keep seeing in life vs. a stranger?

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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.

So I finished the Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde, and I’m continuing on with the next book in the series. (And yes, I snatched that one from the ChickieNob, too.  Who needs it more?  I do!)

One of the big themes in the book is destiny.  We get a feeling that we’re supposed to do X so we do X.  Or we encounter something for the first time and suddenly the whole world makes sense and we realize in that moment that we’ve always been meant to do X, we just didn’t know it.

Two quotes I loved about Jennifer Strange’s destiny:

It wasn’t what I expected, but then I don’t know what I had been expecting. That’s the thing about destiny: it can’t be predicted, and it’s usually pretty odd (page 133).

Sometimes your destiny takes you to dark places where you’d rather not be, but destiny, as they say, is destiny (page 271).

Her destiny seems pretty awful, and I have to admit, I would not have fulfilled my destiny if I had been in the same position.  I know myself.  I just wouldn’t have been able to do it.  But I have a weak will, so take that with a grain of salt.

And I thought about other options.  Like what if I found out that my destiny was to be a judge on Chopped, and I was going to have to eat those horrific creations?  I can’t even bring myself to put a straightforward piece of roasted chicken in my mouth.  I’m supposed to consume plate after plate of chicken brains in a strawberry jam and gummy bear sauce?

Or if my destiny was to become an astronaut?  I barely survived (and I really mean barely: I cried through the whole thing) the tame level of Disney’s Mission: Space.  I cannot go up in a space ship; it just isn’t happening.  But if it was my destiny?  That would suck so hardcore.

Do you think there is something specific that you are meant to do, and do you think that part of life is uncovering it?  Or do we simply do what we choose to do with no greater reason guiding us?

And if you were told that your destiny was something that you found ethically repulsive or horrifically boring, would you do it because all signs in the universe pointed it out as your destiny?  Or would you discreetly look the other way and pretend you didn’t see the signs?

Side note: tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Get writing.

I’m locking my door earlier this week when I see something brown near my hand.  I pull back and discover that it is an enormous cricket, hanging out above the door knob, just waiting to kill me.

Yes, the cricket was thinking murderous thoughts.

I looked up and down the street, but no one was outside.  So I did what any self-respecting 41-year-old woman would do.  I went and knocked on my neighbour’s door and asked her how she felt about crickets.  As in, could she save me from a murderous cricket.

I talked to her new baby while she went to my house and saved my life from a cricket who was pretty much plotting my demise while he clung to my door, dreaming up ways he would dismember my corpse.  My neighbour came back into her house holding a cricket in a tissue, claiming that my cricket must have hopped away because all that was there was this tiny, emaciated cricket.

Um… no.  That was the cricket.

The best part was that I kept telling her son that his mommy was a hero, and every time I said “hero,” he would give me this gummy smile like he totally knew his mother was a stone-cold-cricket-killing saviour.

I love my neighbour.  I love her with all my heart and soul.

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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:

• “Behind the Scenes” (Living in Bliss)
• “Intersecting Roads” (Torthúil)
• “Running” (Inconceivable!)

Okay, now my choices this week.

River Run Dry has a post about fall that stuck with me all week.  She writes, “I left my sunroof open a few days ago, when I parked at the pond for my swim. It was a short swim – only a half hour – but it was gorgeous and amazing and totally changed my mood. And when I got back, there was this little present waiting for me, right on the driver’s seat.”  Her post made me feel hopeful for each season.

Obsessivemom has a non-infertility post that I love about how our kids may seem grown up, but on the inside, they sometimes still want to be babied.  It was a lovely little reminder that I stored in my mind all week and took out whenever I panicked that the twins felt too mature, too independent.  They are still kids.

Waiting for Baby Bray talks about how the experience of infertility becomes something you cling to and think about when there is nothing else there to distract you.  She writes, “…sometimes it feels like it it is all you have.  All that defines you.  It’s not like we have pictures of our kiddies at dance recitals anyway.”  This post made me want to reach through the screen and give her a hug.

Lastly, Constant in the Darkness talks about how adoption is still a part of their lives, but it’s fading backwards into the rest of life as her child ages.  She explains, “I am finally coming to terms with the idea that there is way more to Moonbeam’s story than her adoption.”  It’s a great perspective on how living life adds to the story.

The roundup to the Roundup: My neighbour saved me from a cricket.  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 September 18th and September 25th) 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.