This is pretty much it — the end of August and the last chance to get Measure of Love at $1.99. (Amazon featured it as a monthly deal for the Kindle for the entire month of August.)  I would deeply appreciate any help you could give in getting word out about the promotion.  Telling a friend, Facebooking it, tweeting it, blogging about it, etc.

I notice when you do.  It means a lot to me.

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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:

• “Goodbye Ramona, Hello Margaret” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Tiara.
• “Whatever It Is…” (Where the *Bleep* is our Stork?)
• “Just What?” (Where the *Bleep* is our Stork?)
• “On Acceptance” (Two Adults, One Child)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I too had marked “On Acceptance” by Two Adults, One Child for the Roundup when I read it last Friday.  It begins with a moment of perfect peace on the ride to work.  It was a difficult day emotionally: the unfulfilled due date, what should have been her second child’s second birthday.  She juxtaposes that internal turmoil with the quiet, constant hum of the car engine, and what the reader gets is a heartbreaking thought: acceptance that her babies are truly and irrecoverably gone.  She writes, “I am tired.  And I don’t particularly want to play this game anymore.”  It’s just a gorgeous post.

Stepping Stones has a post about the movie Up, making me see it in a way that I hadn’t seen it before.  The first time she watched it, she didn’t know she was infertile.  And now she is step-parenting while still trying to build her family years later in this new marriage.  While her description of what people can draw from the plot is amusingly accurate, it was the end lines of the post that got under my skin: “I love Bear for asking if I wanted to turn the movie off (which I did after the funeral scene) and for holding my hand while I was watching it and for offering to put it on for the kids sometime when I’m not home.”

Lastly, In Quest of a Binky Moongee has a post about her husband’s second cousin’s baby.  Namely, about a text that may or may not have been sent years earlier, highlighting a tension that exists in the family.  Compounding that is the fact that the cousin got pregnant easily, and it is now time to see the baby.  After outlining all the ways she planned to comport herself before the door opened, she writes, “I don’t know why I am holding grudges against a fertile woman and her baby.   When that door opened and when I saw that little face, my heart melted.”  It’s a really sweet post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Measure of Love is on sale for only a little bit longer (and I’d love your help continuing to get word out).  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 16th and 23rd) 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.

Our camp (the site of the Wishing Tree) had an enormous field that was surrounded by woods, and in the middle of the woods wound a creek.  Sometimes I’d go with some older campers into the woods and down to the creek, and as we crossed the field, I would have to jog to keep pace with their longer legs.  I didn’t want them going too far ahead of me, swallowed up by the trees.

As summer winds down, it feels as if it’s an older camp kid who is moving too quickly across the field, barely paying attention to the fact that I am chasing summer to keep up.

I don’t like the return to school; I never have.  I thought it would get easier, but it has only stayed the same.  August rolls around, and I start feeling morose.  Four weeks left, then three weeks left, then two weeks left… and then there is only one week left and then it is gone too.  The twins are excited to start school again; to see their friends every day even if they’re not looking forward to the return to homework and long days in the classroom. They want to know which teacher they got, who else is in their class.

But I don’t want them to return to school and leave me alone in the house with all the stillness.  It feels extra still after they have been here for weeks, and then suddenly gone again.

I can’t tell them this (can you imagine the therapy they’d need for that burden?); so instead I’m telling all of you.  Because I think you understand what I mean, both wanting them to grow up and wanting them to stay small forever.

My friend sent me one of those Snopes-worthy mass-freakout emails informing me that KILLERS COULD TELL WHERE I LIVE BY CODE EMBEDDED IN MY FACEBOOK PHOTOS!!! (Side note: why are killers always hanging out on social media sites?  Don’t they ever congregate somewhere else?)  I immediately went to the urban legend site so I could disprove the hysteria.  Except that I learned that the hysteria is actually… true.

Well, not the fact that killers are perusing your Facebook photos, but the fact that geotagging on photos has made it possible for people to see exactly where a photo was taken.  And if that picture was taken inside your kitchen… well… now they know exactly where your darling child eats pancakes every morning.

Image: Drnantu via Flickr

It’s an old bit of information, and I possibly remembered it inadvertently when I got my phone because I don’t have geotagging enabled, but if you have location services on your smartphone or digital camera, every picture you take is pinpointed by latitude and longitude.  Though it isn’t posted on the front of the photo like a timestamp, that information is accessible to others via an browser extension.  And you may not have known that it existed since it isn’t apparent at a glance.

You can see how it works in this old video:

How do you turn off geotagging if you don’t want people to know all the places you take photographs such as your home, school, or workplace?  Icanstalku.com has a guide for various devices.

Spending time on the Snopes site did allow me to peruse dozens of other common social media urban legends including how Facebook Open Graph is going to allow everyone to see all my postings (false), a Facebook status notification hack (undetermined), and your tweets are at the Library of Congress (true).

But back to geotagging: it’s true and it’s mostly unnecessary when it comes to your photographs — how often do you need to pinpoint the spot where the image was taken?  So turn off geotagging on your photos, and if you really want a higher level of privacy and don’t mind a little inconvenience when it comes to GPS-dependent sites such as Google Maps, turn off location services altogether.  I still use maps, and I sometimes turn on location services for a moment if we want to use turn-by-turn instructions.  But my default setting for location services is off.

We don’t have that much privacy in this world, but I can make it at least a little bit harder to know where my images were taken.

Cross-posted with BlogHer

Io9 recently had a post about birth order and how it influences your personality, taking into account children without siblings as well.  I don’t know why I have such an aversion to the term “only children.”  Maybe because “only” is one of those words like “just” as in “just adopt,” where it feels as if the term negates the noun or verb that follows.  Anyway, the post looks at our personalities through the very hazy lens of birth order.

Middle children are supposed to excel at team sports.  I not only don’t excel at team sports due to my lack of coordination and desire to exercise, but I am not a team player in any sense of the word.  I was the student who begged my teachers to allow me to work alone rather than in a group, and when I was forced to work in a group, I offered to do all the work just so I wouldn’t have to get together with the other kids in the group.  The only time I ever broke that personal rule was when I had the second highest grade in my quantum physics and relativity class in college, and we could either work alone or in pairs for the final take home exam.  I chose to work with the boy who had the top grade in the class.  And by “work together,” I really mean that we worked alone and then compared work so we could become a super-power.

But all other times, I opt for games one plays alone (Candy Crush!  Uh… solitaire) or solitary sports and activities such as running or yoga.

Middle children are supposed to be sociable.  If the above paragraph hasn’t convinced you, please recall that in six years of BlogHers, I have yet to attend a party (except for the time I promised Lori I would go inside, and I stayed for a full ten minutes).  I am not a shmoozy person.  I bring a book with me when I have to go into social situations.

I do relate well to older and younger people.  I love hanging out with children, and I used to do volunteer work at a nursing home.  I am not only completely faithful in monogamous relationships, but I am loyal to brands and businesses long after I’ve stopped benefiting from the relationship in any way.  And yeah, I am very sensitive to feeling that I don’t belong, but really, who isn’t?

The point of the post is also how difficult it is to match birth order with traits since so many elements go into influencing who we become.  But still, I love reductive lists like this and seeing where I do or don’t match up.

Check out your birth order characteristics (youngest, middle, oldest, no siblings) in the chart in the middle.  How do you measure up with the traits in your category?

King Charles in Pippin croons that “it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.”  And while that may be true for war, it is most definitely true for level 158 of Candy Crush.  Here is the thing, I don’t mind working my ass off towards a goal, knowing that all the brainpower I am putting towards solving a problem or completing a task will pay off in the end.  But I hate luck-based situations.  And level 158 of Candy Crush is a luck-based board.

It’s one of those levels that frustrate me because it feels a lot like infertility: there is nothing you can do to make those candies cascade as you need them to cascade in the same way that a person cannot make an embryo implant despite the New York Times misusing that word every time they write about IVF.  A doctor cannot implant an embryo; she can only transfer it.  Which means that treating infertility is like throwing spaghetti at the wall with the goal of making the pasta (or embryo) stick.  Sure, you can do things to up the chances that the wall will hold the pasta such as using a non-glossy paint or not washing the starch off a strand of spaghetti, in the same way that you can do things to up the chances — such as building a beautiful lining or taking PIO injections — that the embryo will burrow in and stay for nine months.  But ultimately, it’s luck, it’s chance, it’s doing the same thing over and over again until it works.

In other words, like this level of Candy Crush.

Is that, perhaps, why this game has such a hold over me?  Because my mind is so accustomed to lather, rinse, repeat?  To failing and failing and failing, but still trying again anyway?

For those who don’t play (or haven’t reached this level yet), it consists of a two-sided board.  Candy from the left side falls into the right side, and the goal is to move a single nut or cherry to the bottom of the right board.

At the bottom of the right side are two pieces of candy encased in licorice.  There are also two chocolate machines on the right side, generating chocolate with each move.  The point is to use striped candies to blow apart the chocolate and licorice on the right side of the board.  It’s not that there isn’t skill involved, but it sort of doesn’t matter how smart you are, because if you can’t make those horizontal striped pieces, you pretty much can’t win this board.

And I had a lot of rounds where I couldn’t make a horizontal striped piece at all.

As I was rounding on that point where I just wanted to give up on Candy Crush because I was no longer having fun, I had a board where I could break one of the licorice pieces in the first move.  My second move created a speckled doughnut.  My third move dropped that doughnut on the right side of the board via a cascading of candy.

And then everything fell into place, like getting asked to prom, getting a college acceptance letter, and passing your physics test… all in the same day.

In 9 moves, the board cleared with little effort and my nut dropped out the bottom while I tossed my head back in relief.  I had 11 moves leftover in which fish and striped candies ratcheted up my score.  I took a screenshot of my victory.  I’m not ashamed to admit that.  Well, yes, I am ashamed, but I’m pretending that it’s totally normal to take screenshots of my Candy Crush victories.

When Josh walked in the door, I asked him how his day was, and then volunteered that I had passed Level 158 of Candy Crush.  I reported on it as if it were my job, a fantastic break at work that will change our lives for the better rather than a random level in an iPhone game.

“What made you finally pass it?” he asked.

“It didn’t take any particular skill,” I remarked.  “It was just luck.”

“Smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.”

There are times in your life when you want to be smart; when you want to be able to see the solution, make things happen, have the great idea.  I can’t think of anyone who has succeed in their chosen endeavour who didn’t have a type of brilliance in their back pocket.  And then, there are times when you just want to get lucky.  When you want all the elements to fall into place, ensuring success, because intelligence is little help in these situations.

Would you rather be lucky or smart (and no, you can’t pick both)?