Remember last summer when I wrote about the librarian refusing to renew my book?  This week, I had to speak to her about a book I was trying to return that wasn’t on my account.  When we originally checked out the book, the system didn’t scan it into our account.  The computer said we only had 5 books out, but we were clearly holding 6 books to return.

She fixed the barcode on the book while she looked at my account.  “You have one more book out that is due in a few days,” she informed me.

“I know,” I told her.  “I’ll be back later this week.”

“Want me to renew it?” she asked.  What the hell?  Last summer she wouldn’t renew a book I wanted renewed, and now she was offering to renew a book that I said I would be returning on time.

“I don’t think you can.  It has holds on it.”

“I can,” she said.  And she renewed the book.

I brought back the book on its original due date because the book had holds.  Meaning, someone else was waiting for the book.  But really, she couldn’t renew a book when I desperately needed someone to be kind, but she could renew it when I didn’t need it renewed?

I love my library.  I love the librarians in my library.  But sometimes they just don’t make sense.

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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:

• “A Memorial to Whom You Used to Be” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, St. E and Torthúil

Okay, now my choices this week.

Not a Wasted Word weaves a metaphor between herself as a parent and an operating system.  It’s a post about feeling over-burdened and recognizing the role she has played in finding herself in that space, but also feeling that it’s a space she was led to.  She writes, “I know I created this dynamic, or at the very least enabled it. I made conscious choices to take on all of this because the alternative was worse.”  It’s a thought-provoking read.

The Empress and the Fool has a post about finding a connection with the book Goldfinch.  I haven’t read the book yet, but this post made me want to run to my library to pick up a copy.  She writes so gorgeously: “With my hand on an empty womb and skin electrified with both hope and terror, my feet shuffle in the general direction of forward.”  Click over to read the whole post.

My Lady of the Lantern has a moving post about losing her aunt.  She writes, “There is a difference between the dying and the dead. The dead are dead and the dying are dying, and hence still alive.”  It is a post about not knowing someone’s last day.  My heart went out to her reading it.

Anabegins has an interesting post about finding the key that fits in your lock; in other words, finding which type of personality you have and using it to your advantage.  A cool idea.  And yes, she does find the answer to her personality conundrum.

Lastly, Torthúil has a post about the pictures she has taken with her phone.  She doesn’t have a phone with a fantastic camera, therefore, she takes very few pictures with it.  And the pictures she takes tell a story.  The stories are wonderful even if the photos are grainy.  It’s their graininess that makes them all the more poignant that the moment was captured.

The roundup to the Roundup: Uh, thanks for the renewal?  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 3rd and 10th) 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.

I was starting to pull together the Friday Blog Roundup, and I was going to share a non-IF post there but decided midway through the paragraph that the post needed to be pulled out to stand on its own.

Because it’s that important.

Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling has a post that has affected me deeply.  It starts out about the game Her Story but don’t be turned off by her promise of spoilers.  Yes, there are spoilers, but they’re pretty weak ones if you aren’t deep into the game yet.  And you can skip ALL the spoilers if you jump 10 paragraphs down to the paragraph that begins, “So what truth did I see in all this? I think: the social mutability of self, which is something that everyone inevitably experiences.”

At that point, this post veers far away from Her Story into the most astute capturing of what it means to be a woman in certain situations.

I read it… and sobbed.  Because it felt so immediately true.  Because it put into words something I’ve experienced.  Because it put into words something I’m grappling with right now.  Because it is about being female in the work place and female at school and female on the Metro.  Because even if you’re not a gamer, you will recognize the scenario she describes in some other context.

She writes, “And it’s also hard not to wonder, what am I doing wrong here? Women get told a lot – maybe men do too? – that people will treat you the way you let them treat you.”

It was a post I not only needed to read, but it came to me at the perfect time.  Perhaps you will feel the same way about it, too.

It doesn’t offer a perfect solution.  But somehow, reading someone else’s experience and thinking “me too,” was enough for this morning.

I just learned what tweaking was this week.  It’s taking a photo of your pregnancy test and then manipulating the contrast in Photoshop to see if you can discern a positive too faint to be seen by the naked eye.  There are groups dedicated to doing this for other women.  There are apps that do it.

I would have done this.

I mean, I would have sent a photo of my pregnancy test, or I would have tweaked it myself at home, playing with Photoshop until I found my line.

Because I know myself.  I would have kept doing it until I found a line, until I found the right combination of contrast or colour inversion or whatever other tricks I could try to find the line.  And when there was no line to be found, I would have continued to push buttons.

I’m not proud of this fact, but I own it.  I tested early and often.  I tested with multiple brands.  I tested with dozens of superstitious beliefs in hand, convincing myself that if I did X, Y, and Z, that a line would appear.

I’ll admit that I cried reading about it.  I don’t even know why I was crying — because I remembered hating myself so much when I would waste handfuls of peesticks every cycle or because my heart hurt for everyone still testing?  Maybe because I dove into the comment section (why, Melissa, why?) and read the judgmental words and wanted to scream at all of them, “I GET THIS.”

Because I get this.  I get that it’s not healthy but I get this.  And I would have done this.

Cosmo had an interesting article on how to know whether short hair would flatter your face or whether you’re better off with long hair.  You are supposed to take a ruler and place it under the tip of your ear lobe.  Then you are supposed to take a pencil and place it horizontally under your chin.  If they intersect at 2 1/4 inches, you’d look great with short hair.  But if it’s over 2 1/4 inches, you’re supposed to keep your hair longer.

This sounded easy and scientific.

I went to the bathroom mirror with a ruler.  Problem #1: the ruler was clear; a bit of swag from NASA.  Hey, NASA, I know you’re focused on outer space and all, but people may need to measure their earlobe to chin distance one day.  I had to place a post-it note behind the ruler.

Problem #2: I placed the pencil against my chin bone.  Then I moved it back a bit so it was under the chin.  Then I moved it forward again.  I couldn’t decide where to rest the pencil.  We were talking about fractions of an inch so placement of the pencil makes a huge difference.

Problem #3: The pencil and the ruler didn’t intersect.  At all.  The pencil was a good two inches in front of the ruler since my ear was farther back than my chin.  I couldn’t make these two pieces of office equipment align.  If I had to guesstimate, I would say that it looked like it might be 2 1/4 inches.  But… that isn’t very scientific.

So the short answer is that I have no clue whether or not I would look good with short hair.

How about you?  Do you pass the short hair face test?

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 the most isolated place on earth: Tristan da Cunha.  It takes a week to reach the island from the closest piece of mainland.  It’s 1000 miles from the nearest town.

I love islands: the moodier, the better.  I’m not really into happy, sunny islands.  I’m more drawn to the Outer Hebrides than I am to the Greater Antilles.

Part of me would love the chance to live somewhere like Tristan da Cunha for a year, even if I’d have to contend with slow Internet.  (Perhaps I should wait to go until they fix that problem.)  And part of me thinks I would go mad living somewhere that isolated when I’m accustomed to being near big cities, with all their conveniences at my fingertips.

Do you think you could live somewhere as isolated as Tristan da Cunha for a year if given the chance?

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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.