There is a huge sale this week for Life from Scratch. Starting July 18th (tomorrow) and running until July 24th, Life from Scratch will be on sale for 99 cents. 99 cents! A small cup of Starbucks coffee is more than double that amount. It’s on sale on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google, and Apple — yes, everywhere. I would love your help in spreading the word.

So please Tweet about it. Or throw up the announcement on Facebook. Or email a friend about the sale. Or buy a copy for a friend and send it to them. Or Pin the book cover. Or… Instagram yourself reading the book… I will be eternally grateful.

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I’m here at BlogHer, but I wrote this Roundup yesterday before I got on the road. So… while I want to tell you about all that is happening at the conference, it is slow-going typing it on the iPad. Expect an update on Sunday.

In the meantime, the twins went to the White House and reported on the Kids’ State Dinner last week. I’m aware that I am biased and an insanely proud, emotional mother (especially when I think about their beginning months of life and everything it took to get to this age), but I think it’s a great article.

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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:

• “My Body Image – My Infertile Struggle” (Unpregnant Chicken)

Okay, now my choices this week.

It was a week for beautiful stories and confessions.  Inconceivable! has a post about the embroidered towels she received in a moment when they thought their baby would die, and how she felt when she saw her mother using them recently.  She writes, “It occurred to me how I’d referred to E since the day she’d been conceived, more so once the bleeding started and especially after my water broke. If the baby lived, if she came home, if, if, if. I’d been saving these for that disaster.”  It’s about the if being confirmed and shifting the mind to follow.

Searching for Our Silver Lining has a gorgeous post about being the daughter of a mother with scars, and now being a mother with scars herself.  It is about not repeating what she experienced from the older generation.  She explains: “I was faced with the reality that I needed to find a way to begin healing from infertility in order to save my sanity. Since learning about the existence of the Beats, there’s been even more of an urgency as I’ve worried about repeating the cycle I learned from my mother’s trauma; tainting their lives with the demons that haunt me.”  Weaving in the practice of Kintsugi, she explains her path forward to healing.

So… I’m reading the Listserve this week, and AN IF BLOGGER WAS THE WINNER.  I had already decided to write the person before I got to the end, and then I looked at the name and email address and was like… is it?  AND IT WAS.  I am so happy that R. Sativus won.

Lastly, another post about healing comes from Family Rocks about feeling disconnected.  I think the most eye-opening part of the post was comparing the time she took off after the birth of her sons to the lack of time she took off after incorporating her sibling’s children into her family.  The difference between how we honour the life change of parenthood and how we don’t build that into other situations as people struggle to find their new normal.

The roundup to the Roundup: Please help me promote the Life from Scratch sale.  Twins reported from the White House.  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 July 10th and 17th) 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.

Despite what I’m about to say, I love it when BlogHer is in New York.  Well, anywhere on the East Coast.  It’s easy for me to get to.  I can take the bus, which I actually like a lot.  I have family and friends in the city that I get to see between panels and keynotes at the conference.  It’s all very easy.

But I really dislike New York.

I know I’m in the minority with this thought, that other people really love the city, but it’s a dementor-kind-of town for me.  I pass through the Holland Tunnel, and it feels like all the happiness has been sucked from my body.  I don’t feel this way about all cities.  For instance, I feel springy when I’m in Boston.  I feel happy when I’m in London.  I even feel good in Chicago and Philadelphia, and, of course, I love Washington.  But New York just drains me.

It smells like urine.  And it’s really dark.  Like there isn’t enough sun reaching the ground.  Probably because it can’t due to the buildings.  The people are fine, but they’re all standing against a really noisy and grimy backdrop.

I’m glad that other people like the city; that there are people who enjoy visiting or living there.  I’m just not one of those people.

But I love BlogHer, so I am going to BlogHer in the city.  I likely won’t leave the hotel much; in fact, I went to New York a few weeks ago with the twins and got the one thing I wanted to do out of my system so I wouldn’t feel like I had to leave the hotel.  (It was go to Tannen’s Magic Shop.)  For those who wish they could go to New York, this must sound like a complete waste.  But there is so much that happens at the conference.  There is meeting new people and catching up with old people and Voices of the Year and panels and lots and lots and lots of stuff.  So… that’s where I’ll be.

I’ll try to update from the road, though photos and long stories will probably have to wait until I’m home and at a computer again.

New York — yay or nay for you?

Josh and I had a date night last night. We wanted to see Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, but it was playing at the new “luxury” theater for the time we wanted to go.

I’m sure the movie theater is lovely.  I’m sure it has big, comfortable seats and easy viewing from any point in the theater.  I know it serves actual food beyond popcorn and candy, and it has a drink menu.  It is not the sort of place where one places their gum on the bottom of the seat.

But I couldn’t bring myself to go.

It’s me, not you, Luxury Theater, really.  I mean, you’re great.  I just know you’re going to make another girl really happy one day.

I care about the personality of the theater, and I didn’t want to watch a movie feeling as if I was being smushed inside an alpha girl’s pushup bra.  Fuck popular.  I don’t want clean and perfect and leather chairs.  I want my theater to have a threadbare carpet that reveals just how many people have walked down the aisle before me.  I want adornments on the ceiling and crackily film reels and artificial butter smell hanging in the air.

I prefer old, historic theaters, and if I can’t have that, I want non-descript, completely average theaters.

I don’t want my movie theater to be a cheerleader or class president or the head of the football team.  I want my movie theater to be that weird kid who always skips lunch to sit in the library.  Or, at the very least, make my theater that nice girl who always lends you a pencil in math class.

If I can’t have that sort of movie theater then I don’t really want to watch the movie.  Because being in an annoying space is just as bad as going out with an annoying person.  A space talks to you, and I want the spaces I frequent to tell me good stories, not try to impress me with a pristine and perfect surface.

I’ve obviously given too much thought to this.

So we stayed in and rented a movie.

Listen, I don’t love this side of me, but I will choose to read or not read books based on the feeling I get from the cover.  I will only eat in restaurants I get a good feeling from when I walk through the door.  And I only watch movies in theaters that don’t try so hard to be something other than a movie theater.

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

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I recently read about fika, the Swedish coffee break tradition.  Like British tea, it sounds like something missing from my life: that purposeful break in the middle of the day with a good beverage and something small to eat.

I drink coffee and tea, and I eat meals, but I rarely take a break.  I am much more likely to consume the beverage while working.  Part of it is that my work day is both truncated and spread out — I work from about 9 am – 3 pm and then again after 8 pm.  When your work day is broken up like that, you tend to want to use every minute to its fullest.  Part of it is that it isn’t part of my culture; the break in the middle of the day.  I don’t know anyone who takes a break in the middle of the day on a regular basis.

But maybe I need to do this.  I need to declare from 1 pm to 1:20 pm, regardless of whatever else is happening, as my fika.  I especially like the idea of getting a cookie to boot.

Do you have any breaks built into your day?  And do you keep them sacred?  Or do they only happen when you can find the time?

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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.

After I spent an excessive amount of time trying to line up the pencil and ruler, and then wrote about said experience being unable to line up pencil and ruler, I cut my hair.

The last time I cut my hair was back in 2013.  Early 2013, so two and a half years ago.  As you can probably guess from that post about my last haircut, I wasn’t too keen to return and go through another round of “your husband is lying about liking your awful awful awful hair.”  I avoided doing anything with the rat’s nest that was slowly creeping down my back.

But I hit my breaking point and phoned for an appointment.  I drove over, bracing myself for commentary about my hair colour or hair care products (she hates everything I use from my shampoo to my comb).  But it never came.

Instead, when I sat down in her hair, we talked about what I wanted done.  And then she held my hair in a ponytail.

“Melissa, I am going to cut off your hair right now.”

I startled and started SINKING DOWN INTO THE CHAIR AS IF I COULD ESCAPE VIA THE VINYL SEAT.  As if it were a portal and my body was going to sink down into it like Super Mario Brothers and end up on another level.

She explained that if she didn’t take this drastic step, I was going to change my mind after she shampooed my hair, and I was going to go with a tiny trim that I would ultimately regret.  She told me to take a deep breath, and then she grimly chopped off four inches of hair.

“It’s done.  And now we need to really cut it to fix it.”

I have to admit that it was sort of a brilliant move.  I mean, it could have backfired terribly for her, but she was right.  I would have changed my mind.  And now I couldn’t.  The only way forward was forward.  So she shampooed my hair, trimmed off another inch or two to even things out, and sent me on my way.  No lecture about hair care products or greyness.

Just bouncey locks that I promptly washed and restyled the moment I got home.

I think I like it.

Neither picture actually shows you the haircut, but I have very short arms (hence why I was laughing in the first picture as I tried to balance the camera in front of me) and therefore cannot take a photo of myself (despite trying very hard to figure out where one looks while taking a selfie to prove they cut their hair).

Sidenote: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Get writing.