So I gave up my Hay Day farm… at least, temporarily.  My virtual farm replaced Candy Crush last year as my obsession-of-choice.  I took it up to the 70th level, opened all the fishing slots, bought all the machines, all the animals, all the crops, and gathered over $3 million in virtual coins and 300 diamonds.  By all intents and purposes, I “won” this unwinnable game.

I loved playing in the morning.  I loved waking up and greeting the river boat, filling the crates with the items I made overnight.  I loved gathering my crops and replanting the seeds.  I loved to collect all the gifts from my townspeople and fill their new orders.  All in all, waking my town up in the morning took about 20 minutes out of my day, and it was a happy 20 minutes where I felt like I was setting everything right in the world.  It was like a really relaxing virtual cleaning session, with a clear end-point, and it made me feel as if I had accomplished something before I started my day.

The gaming equivalent of starting the day with a clean email inbox.

But the night was a different story.  At night, I was constantly telling Josh that we couldn’t start something because I “just had to take care of my farm.”  I would predict a task to take me 5 minutes, but it was more like 10.  I had to clean up my farm from the day and get it ready for the next day, which could take anywhere from a half hour to… an hour.  Or more.  It was eating up my life.  And unlike the beginning, I wasn’t really enjoying it anymore.

So I told Josh that I was putting my farm to sleep for a few days.  Nothing would happen unless I opened the app (and I warned the kids not to touch it), and I didn’t plan to open the app until the weekend when I would give myself a little play time and then shut it down until the next weekend or so.

It has given me a lot of time this week.

I guess I’ve been looking at my time wasters — what am I doing that doesn’t really add to my life but I do it anyway out of habit or some thought that I “should” do it, etc.  Hay Day had gone from a game into a slog.  So it was out.

I’ve kept yoga, morning coffee, reading, and blogging.  I’ve cut out Hay Day, a bunch of non-personal blogs I was reading because I felt I “should,” and snacking after dinner.

Everything feels a little neater in the moment.

What are your time wasters?  Why haven’t you dropped them?

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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:

• “Thoughts on Donor Cycles” (Amateur Nester)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Mojo Working is back with a brief post about acknowledging loss after everything changes.  It’s powerful in its simplicity.  I can’t say much more than that without ruining the effect of the words, so I’m going ask you to click over and let them speak for themselves.

Two Adults, One Child has a post about blogging which I think is particularly relevant to our community where burnout is common because of the high emotional content of our blogs (both writing and reading).  I like her approach on how to make blogging something that adds to her life instead of detract.  She can sum it up with one perfect sentence: “to use this space as it was originally intended — as an outlet for me to express my thoughts and feelings.”  But you’ll need to read the whole post to get the greater context.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ has a post that I wish were pinnable to the front of Google.  And perhaps you can help me to push it up the Google ranks by clicking over to read and spread it around yourself so Google gets the message that we want people to be able to find it.  She goes through the emotions she experienced when she resolved her infertility by living child-free after treatments.  This piece is so powerful for someone who is in the throes of it; to see that things could get better even if the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t visible.  Her honesty about the length of time she went through the emotions is helpful as well.  Not everyone will experience the same feelings, but if they are feeling these things, this post will help them feel less alone.

The roundup to the Roundup: What are your time wasters?  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 December 26th and January 9th) 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.

On December 31st, I took off my problems and hung them over the back of the chair like a pair of jeans. And on January 1st, I woke up in the morning and put back on my problems, because, hey, they looked sort of clean.  Because that’s the thing with artificial, man-made starting points like a certain date on the calendar: nothing is really different the next day.  You’re the same and your situation is the same.  Just with a different year tacked on the end of the date.

But it feels different.

The start of all my problems — the snake’s mouth, so to speak — are all back in 2014.  And now I am dealing with either the snake’s body or the snake’s tail.  And that is a powerful thing, no?  I mean, by now I’m accustomed to the dangers of the snake, and at least I don’t have to worry about a snake bite.  Sure, the body may crush me or the tail could slap me, but there is something so much scarier about the snake’s face lunging at you, or even the snake simply approaching.

(Apologies to all herpetophiles for this analogy.)

Problems also seem scarier when you can see them coming at you, or when you’re grappling with them in the beginning.  At this point, 2015 could contain solutions whereas I know that 2014 contained situations I didn’t want to be in.

So… yeah… nothing is really different.  But it feels different.  So I’m going with that.

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At this point last year, my back went out.  Like went out to the point where I couldn’t move, couldn’t work, couldn’t think because of the pain.  Since then, I’ve done yoga most mornings to stave off that ever happening again.

Of course, I ended up taking a break over winter vacation.  I slept in, and then there wasn’t time for yoga.  Or the kids were now awake and there wasn’t a quiet space for yoga.  I could always come up with a reason why I had to skip my yoga session.

I let myself eat thoughtlessly.  That’s the best way to describe it.  I ate without thinking about what I was eating or how much I was eating.

I kept thinking, January 1st.  On January 1st, I’ll restart all my good habits and get rid of these bad ones.  But the kids were off until the 5th, so… the bad habits continued with the excuse that I would restart things once we were back to a normal routine.  But then it was Monday and Monday was going to be so hard, emotionally, so I gave myself a pass.  And then Tuesday was a snow day, and I couldn’t be expected to start all of these good intentions on a snow day.

On Wednesday morning, I woke up early to do yoga.  I hauled my ass out of bed even though I was miserable and tired.  I saw that we had a two hour delay after I got dressed in my yoga clothes and came downstairs to start, and I had a moment where I considered crawling back into bed and stating emphatically that tomorrow would be my starting point.  I promise.

And then I realized that if was going to keep setting these unnatural starting points, penciling in when I was going to do the right thing, I was never going to get started.  It was like I was waiting for a divine invitation to stop treating myself like crap.  But I am the only person who can send myself that invitation, and let’s face it, invitations like that are a waste of postage.  So I saved the stamp and forced myself to get started immediately.

So I’m back to treating myself well.  Yoga in the morning.  Tracking my nutritional intake.  Eschewing refined sugar and processed foods.  No snacking after dinner.  Sleep at a reasonable hour.

I’m trying not to look at it as a punishment but rather a decision to treat myself kindly.  I expect other people to treat me well, but that idea should probably start with me considering I have to live with myself all the time.

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It took me until 40 to realize that if I constantly said that I’d do something tomorrow or next week or next month that it wasn’t going to happen at all.  If I’m looking for the right time to start something new or instigate a change, pretending that life is just one big game of double dutch that I have to time just right, I am going to constantly be in waiting.

Because, you know, there was no reason why I needed to wait until January 1st to feel as if we were closer to solutions than to the start of our problems.  I could have started feeling better back in December if I had made that my choice rather than having the date dictated to me by a paper wall calendar.

I don’t like being in waiting.  Waiting is an uncomfortable place, especially when you don’t know when the waiting will end.  So it makes no sense whenever I hold myself back there.

So no more waiting.

Just doing.

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 4th until the 10th, so you have about five 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 candy (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 anything peppermint.

* 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.

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

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I’m now on the second book in Lev Grossman’s Magicians series.  I started reading it because I was working on creating an interactive fiction game about witchcraft and Josh suggested it.  And while I’m still working on the game and love the world I’ve created, I am equally in love with Grossman’s world.

So much so that I can’t get close enough to it. If I were a cat, I would be rubbing my cheek against the world’s leg. I want that magical world to be a sleeping bag I can crawl inside, soft and comforting and warm.

This certainly isn’t the first time this has happened.  The first time was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  The second time was Phantom Tollbooth, but that book equally made me want to create my own worlds.  I’ve felt this way about Jasper Fforde’s worlds, and Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and certainly Harry Potter.  But every time I find a new one, it makes me so happy.

What book (or movie or television) world would you like to crawl inside?  (Knowing, of course, that you couldn’t get hurt by stray orcs or unforgivable curses.)

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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.

Some people I read mentioned an argument that took place on Twitter near Christmas.  Hurt feelings ignited like flames on candles, burning brightly or fizzling out after a few moments of smoldering.  I didn’t see the original discussion, mostly because I’ve been keeping off of social media. (With the exception of blogs; I never do a good job untangling myself from blogs.)  So I read the follow-ups, the discussions, the debates and questions.

In the meantime, I was pulling together the Creme de la Creme for the year.  Because I read the posts one after the other, reading 10 or 20 posts per sitting, I tend to notice the yearly themes that pop up through the list.  Sometimes I wonder if it’s because we read each other’s posts and riff on them, hence why the same themes come up in the same year.  Other times I wonder if it’s just that we share a lot of common experiences even if we navigate infertility or loss differently.

I am very fond of this community.  It’s my home.  I have vacation homes elsewhere in other communities, but this is my base.  You guys are my base.  I lean on you hard.

But if you take a step back and look at us, we’re a fucking bizarre community.  We are connected by pain.  That’s it.  That’s what is holding us together; raw, emotional pain.  And even when we’re not still in the throes of that raw, emotional pain, we still want to be around those who understand that our current lives were born out of that raw, emotional pain.

Pain seems like a terrible foundation for a community.  I mean, by default, we are conditioned to move away from pain.  To try to work through pain and squelch pain.  And pain makes us cranky.  It makes us lash out.  It makes noise seem so much louder and lights seem so much brighter.  When you’re in pain, you can’t forget that you feel like crap.  Pain becomes the hand in front of your face, blocking out the view of the rest of the world.

When I put it that way, it makes complete sense that we’d fall apart every few months.  That we’d have to constantly rebuild like a phoenix.

I think we have a tendency — maybe because of our pain — to size up everyone else we encounter (including those within our community) to see if their pain measures up to our pain.  And I think we hold the inhabitants of our community to an impossible standard that we know we could never reach ourselves: that we will never ever hurt each other.

You may be wondering… since I brought it up… the theme I noticed running through this year’s list.  I would probably call it “what you don’t know about infertility.”  There were a lot of posts that I read as projected outward: what we want someone to know who isn’t in the experience.  But I realized that all of those posts could also be projected inward: what we all want each other to know because our experiences are different just as much as they are the same.  We don’t just want those outside of infertility and loss to hear our story and validate it.  We want those who are standing alongside us to hear and validate us, too.

I have no good advice.  By which I mean, I have advice: read the Creme de la Creme and try to see the ways we are alike and different.  Keep your anger off of social media and instead express it privately.  Know that everyone else is dealing with their own shit, and that you are often not privy to their shit.

But you all know all of that.  That isn’t good, magic advice that can fix a community.

Tomorrow is a reboot of sorts.  School starts up again, work starts up again, blog posts will hopefully trickle in (#MicroblogMonday).  Maybe that’s what we need every once in a while.  A resetting.  A reboot.  A deep breath, a cup of coffee, a statement of our feelings, and a pause to listen.