This is a monthly series, published near the end of the month summarizing what I found, ate, watched, googled, and felt this month. New categories added from time to time.

Books Added to My TBR (e.g., books I just learned about that I’m excited to read… maybe)

• The Lowe Job (Grace Alexander)
• Valley of the Moms (Hannah Selinger)
• An Unlikely Visitor (Joanna Cannon)
• I Love You, I Love You, I Love You (Laura Dockrill)
• Alan Opts Out (Courtney Maum)
• The One Day You Were My Husband (Rosie Walsh)
• Fruit Fly (Josh Silver)
• Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger (Kazuo Ishiguro)
• The Ballad of Ronan McCoy (Colin Morgan)
• Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil (Oliver Darkshire)
• Mr. and Mrs. Dixon Hide a Body (Jennifer Holdich)
• A Planet Called Happy (Riley August)
• That Night (Gillian McAllister)

Notable Meals (new recipes, old favorites, and restaurant items we ate this month)

• Gnocchi alla Sorrentina at Da Mario.
• A vegetarian fry-up with potato bread.
• Fusilli pastore (pasta, pine nuts, spinach, cream sauce).

Television, Movies, and Music (watching and listening)

• We finished Last One Laughing UK, season 2, and it was fantastic. We missed the comedians from the first season, but we welcomed the new ones. Favourite moments: Jimmy’s prank on Romesh and the animal head-to-head session.
• We started Taskmaster, series 21. Delightful discovery: competitor Joanna Page is Just Judy from Love, Actually. We laughed hard every time Kumail Nanjiani left the room during a task, and Amy Gledhill and Joel Dommett would whisper to each other, “He’s so famous!”
• We watched so many episodes of The Chase while in the UK. I wish we could watch it here. Also Four in a Bed, which is on Tubi over here.

Added To My Ongoing Mix Tape

• “The Feminine Urge” (The Last Dinner Party)

Tabs I Left Open (things I Googled and left up on the screen)

• An article from 2019 about “Soviet Soldiers Dancing” from Twitter because we were talking about it.
• A menu for Honey & Co in London.
• A map of the ice cream trail in Maryland.
• The website for Hypnos mattresses.
• Jeremy Lee recipes on the BBC.
• The Wikipedia page for The Famous Five.
• A website about chalk horses in Wiltshire.

Micro-Joys

• Getting caught by the tide in St. Ives and running through the water back to land.
• Going to the amusement park with my nephews. I got dizzy on a ride, and my 7-year-old nephew said he would protect me by not having it spin, but then also let me know that because this was going to be less fun, he would like to go on the ride again. I love that kid.
• Talking to the kids at night and hearing about their travels.

Mood

• Trying to lean hard into only happy things.

What about you? Let me know what you’re eating, seeing, listening to, googling, feeling this month.

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

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Landmarkr has become a new joy because it’s not only a fun game, but it has given me travel ideas. The idea is that you’re given a picture of a landmark, and you need to name the country or city (it tells you which one). If you guess the correct continent but the wrong country, it will tell you that you’re at least in the correct general space. And then it gives you another landmark and another until you guess correctly.

The landmarks get increasingly obvious as you move through guesses. For instance, if the city were Paris, they may show you an obscure statue for your first guess, but by the time you get to your sixth guess, they’re showing you the Eiffel Tower. Landmarks can be buildings or items or natural formations.

Enjoy!

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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.

The Wolvog was able to make his research position start date align with the ChickieNob’s summer abroad program, so we were able to tack on a short family trip to Ireland beforehand. Josh and I have been to Ireland several times, but we had never been to Belfast, so after some time in Dublin, we headed to Northern Ireland. I finally got to walk on the Giant’s Causeway.

And we went out to Galway and Inis Mór so the kids could see the Burren.

We spent one day in London together, which happened to unknowingly coincide with Trooping the Colour.

And then it was time to say goodbye. That felt awful. Leaving London, the last place we were all together, felt awful. But Josh and I went to Cornwall for a week and walked on the beach and visited some of the towns listed in the Magicians, imagining where Quentin and crew emerged in Fowey or Rupert’s home in Penzance.

And then finally, we returned to Exeter to see the Exeter Book. It was our second attempt, this time successful, and it was worth the wait.

It was hard to leave and fly home. I apologize publicly to the poor man who ended up sitting on my other side during the flight. But the kids are having an amazing time with their work and travels. That’s a small good thing when I miss them so much.

Back in the day, I had a massive Candy Crush addiction, which was my gateway into other match-3 games. I got up to a disturbingly high level in Farm Heroes. It’s a little embarrassing. And then, like a fever, the hold that match-3 games had on me broke, and I was left shivering and wondering where all of my time went.

For whatever reason, many many many years later, I decided to Candy Crush Soda and start at the beginning. After downloading, I tore through the first 31 levels and finally made myself stop and read a book. It’s terrible. I’m glad they limit me to five lives.

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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:

• “The Priceless Gift of Being Part of Someone’s World” (The Next 15000 Days)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Apron Strings for Emily is back with a story about a new dog (and a seal) after losing her sweet Kirby. She explains about that earlier loss: “Kirby found us at the time when Hubby & I were finally able to fully accept that human children were not in our future. I’ve said it before, but Kirby was the son I never had.” It is a very sweet post. Welcome, Kona.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix points out that how you present information plays a big role in how people receive it. She tells a great story of a time when someone acknowledged her as the listener before sending a photo.

The roundup to the Roundup: Why did I restart Candy Crush? 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 May 29 – June 26) 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.

Every time I finish a book, I log it on Goodreads, give it a star count, and write a brief review. I do it (like I said yesterday) because those reviews make a difference to the author. I have a personal policy of not rating something if it will be below three stars. In those cases, I would just log the book and move on.

I read something that made me think about this whole system of rating and reviewing art. It’s so subjective. There are plenty of books that I can admire, quality-wise, that I didn’t enjoy, and other books that will never win major awards that I thought were brilliant.

She asks why our impulse is to immediately decide how much we like it vs. let it sit, unrated. She writes: “I’ve been trying to stop doing this—giving a work of art an immediate thumbs up or thumbs down, like I’m rating a mop on Amazon. But the habit seems to spring from my subconscious: watch movie, submit verdict. This is how I’ve been trained to respond.”

And because my four-star read is different from your four-star read, and how I would rate something ties into how I was feeling at the moment while I read the book, so many of those stars are completely useless in using to decide how you may feel about a piece. She writes: “The aggregate star ratings on Letterboxd presume to communicate something standardized, but in fact they give cover to chaos … Book ratings on Goodreads raise the same questions.”

These are all great questions. I don’t have answers, and I am going to keep writing those tiny reviews because I know (as an author) that they matter to authors. They help with book sales or making the decision to check out a book from the library. I could write the little review without the stars, but would that review hold as much weight without the star anchor to immediately give context to the words below it? Unsure. But this made me think. A lot.