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

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I am admittedly terrible at this game — I’ve yet to win — and I don’t like timed games in general, but I keep coming back to this quick word-scramble game.

You start with three letters and have to put them in the correct order. Then the game adds another letter, and you have to rearrange them again, and so on and so on, until you are unscrambling an 8-letter word.

I will pass along advice that I never remember in the moment. If the game adds an “S” or “L” followed by a “Y” — really, anything that can be tacked on as an ending to a word — look back at the earlier words that you created and just tack on the ending to that word. I forget this every time I play, but hopefully, writing that down will help me remember that shortcut.

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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 connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

In third grade, my class read The Hundred Penny Box by Sharon Bell Mathis about a boy whose great-great aunt has a penny for each year of her life, a physical object representing the stories that capture a life lived.

We started the book a few days after I returned from my great-grandmother’s funeral. I hadn’t attended; I had stayed back with my mother’s cousin’s wife and her children, and she had taken my sister and me to Don’s and allowed us to choose a cookie from the bakery, which was exciting but also filled me with shame to be so happy about that when I didn’t have my great-grandma anymore. And as we read this book, I started crying during the reading group. I was never going to see my great-grandmother again.

I had forgotten about that until I saw the announcement that the mint was ordered to cease creating pennies. All of the news stories focused on what this would mean for pricing or how pennies would still be around for many years, even if they weren’t creating new ones.

But I was thinking about the hundred penny box and how the character’s great-great aunt wouldn’t have been able to have a 2025 penny to mark this year of her life. How each change has an impact we can’t always predict, bumping life out of place.

Once upon a time, even if snow wasn’t in the forecast, I would look outside right as I woke up. I’d start this in late November (you never know) and continue it until late March (again, you never know) because I didn’t want to mess up a snow day. I did once — back in 2015 when I put on my yoga clothes and came downstairs and THEN discovered we had a two-hour delay and I could have slept in. I was not going to mess that up a second time.

But now, snow days are meaningless. The twins are off at college, so we won’t spend a cozy day together. I work remotely, so I’m going to go to work as usual. I thought about this Wednesday morning when I woke up because I knew it had snowed overnight. For old time’s sake, I peeked out of the blinds at 6 AM. But it made me feel super sad to miss the anticipation of an unexpected break and realize that I had given up on the ritual of checking for it.

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Oh, and after all of that Eeyore-ishness, happy Valentine’s Day.

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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 to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ writes about you don’t have to be a parent to care about the next generation. It’s important to care about all people: It’s kind of the point to society. As she points out: “I may not have children, and I may feel isolated at time, but I have not dissociated from our communities, country, or world.” May we all step forward and take care of each other.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled introduces us to her childhood piggy bank, which she recently brought home with her. She explains: “She makes me smile every time I look at her. I know I can’t keep EVERYTHING from my childhood, but this meant something to me, and I’m glad I still have it — and have it here now.” It made me smile to see her pig and think about this childhood rite-of-passage to get one in North America. Do other countries give kids a piggy bank?

The roundup to the Roundup: Snow day shmo-day and happy Valentine’s Day. 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 Feb 7 – Feb 14) 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.

As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she reads that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better at doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from January.

You Be Mother (Meg Mason): I own Sorrow and Bliss, but I haven’t read it yet, so this was my first Meg Mason book. It was a gorgeous, beautiful, heartbreaking book. You will love Abi and want her to win. Such a great piece on how we form family and what we mean to each other. And how people can let us down, and we can still find a way back to each other and trust again.

Mr. Wilder and Me (Jonathan Coe): I listened to the audio version while on trains, and I was sucked into the story despite never seeing any of the films mentioned in the book. Coe is an extraordinary writer, and the writing here is so subtle and clever. My only quibble is that I feel like he may have missed sides of Billy and Iz’s life that would have turned them from black and white to technicolour, but even black and white and even without ever seeing a Billy Wilder film, I loved this book.

The List of Suspicious Things (Jennie Godfrey): This book has been on my to-read list for a long time, and I bought it for myself now that it’s in paperback. I wish I had gotten it sooner. It will go down as one of the best books I read this year. I want to get it for everyone I know. I plan on re-reading this one a few more times this year — it was that good.

All Her Fault (Andrea Mara): Solid thriller with great pacing that (I think) is being turned into a tv show. It feels very tv show-y. I don’t usually read child endangerment thrillers, but I wanted to read an Andrea Mara book. And this one was so solid that I bought another one immediately after.

Strange Pictures (Uketsu): It was billed as a horror-mystery, but I can’t say that I was ever scared or challenged. It was neat how the stories fit together, but the answer to the mystery was usually delivered a page or so later, and the horror didn’t feel like traditional horror. I’m glad I read it, but I don’t know if I would read a second book like this.

What did you read last month?

Beyond some halfheartedly-watched cooking competitions ten years ago, I’ve never gotten into reality television competitions, but I had read about the Traitors, and when we walked past a billboard advertising the show while in Norwich, I asked everyone if we could try it the next night.

We were coming in mid-season, and I couldn’t connect with it. The people were overly enthusiastic about some pretty annoying tasks and overly dramatic in the face of non-danger. When we turned it off, I said that I didn’t need to give it a second chance.

But then I couldn’t stop thinking about it the next day, and when someone suggested we give it another try, we ended up watching another episode. And by that point, I was invested. I wanted to see who won.

When we got back to the US, we bought a year of Peacock so we could watch through past seasons while waiting for the current season to reach the US. Once again, I started out feeling pretty meh about the whole thing and then convinced Josh we should give up our afternoon plans and watch three episodes in a row. Plus a little of the next episode because we couldn’t end on the cliffhanger.

I’m unsure what appeals to me because I would never want to be on it myself. I wouldn’t want to be a faithful OR a traitor. Maybe it’s just interesting to watch truthful people have to convince people they are being truthful, sort of like the opposite of the Turing test, where humans would have to convince people of their humanness. Which, now that I think about it, is going on now as people are not using AI but are accused of using AI, and they have to prove a human wrote something.

We haven’t tried the US, Australian, or New Zealand versions yet, so we have many seasons to get through before we run out of Traitors episodes.