When I grow up, I want to be my kids. They have much firmer boundaries with protecting their emotional health and sticking to them than I do. A case in point: when content on a social media site made them feel distressed as they scrolled, they signed out of the account. They need to log in via a computer to see their account, making it unlikely they’ll go on more than every few days. Enough to check up on people, not enough to get them upset.

They are the Michael Pollan of consuming creative content and information (consume content, not too much, mostly heart-filling things).

I noticed the same reaction, and all I did was check more. I would see something upsetting on the app that caused me to set down my phone and worry. But then I thought, “I must recheck the app to see if there are more upsetting things.” And because I mostly went on social media in the evening after work, I was also carrying those last things I saw into bed, worrying about everything in the dark.

I wish I could tell you that I took the twins’ lead and logged out of the app. I didn’t. Social media is how I stay in touch with many people. But I did start to ask myself if I needed to recheck the app, reminding myself that I had just checked it a few minutes ago and meditating on how the news makes me feel. My goal is to take my scrolling down to twice a day — two quick check-ins.

Let’s see if I stick to the plan.

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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.

Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles comes to a profound thought while reading a romance book that applies to the political landscape happening right now. She explains: “So many people spend so much time denying women’s feelings and experiences. I want a space where women’s experiences and feelings and choices are respected.” As she points out, it’s not that we can’t make mistakes or change our mind; but sometimes you sense the character is leading the way, and sometimes you sense the author is making all of the choices.

The Barreness breaks down the current landscape, bringing in the personal including what she is doing to get her voice heard. This perfectly summarizes how so many of us feel right now: “I have found myself on more than one occasion staring off into space. Trying to figure out where the ground is, as everything seems to be floating in zero gravity.” That ending to the post — wow.

The roundup to the Roundup: Cutting back on social media. 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 14 – Feb 21) 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 went through a bit of a reading crisis recently where I got beyond the midway point in two books and stopped enjoying them. They weren’t actively upsetting me; picking them up felt like a slog.

I know the whole sunk cost fallacy of continuing to invest time into something you’re not enjoying, but one of the drawbacks of tracking your reading in a tool like Goodreads is that you want credit for that initial time investment. You want those pages read to count in your page total at the end of the year.

A bad reason to keep reading a book.

I read a statistic recently that gave me pause, and I’ve been using it as a barometer for whether to keep going:

You’re likely to only read 2,500, maybe 5,000 books in your lifetime. Is this book you’re slogging through really worth the time that could be spent reading another, better book?

Only 2,500 books? Would I get to the end of my life and be happy that I used one of those slots on the book I’m reading?

In one case, I kept reading the story. I didn’t enjoy it, but it wasn’t terrible. I was glad I finished it because it gave me insight into whether I’d like other books in that genre. (Probably not.)

The other book was in a familiar genre, and while a lot of other people would like it, I found that the author kept saying the same thing. I looked up and realized I was 120 pages into the book and hadn’t learned anything new about the characters or the plot. So I stopped reading that one and switched to something I was certain I’d be happy to have spent one of my 2,500 on.

It brings a certain weight to your choice if you think of it as a set budget of time. A limited number of slots. It doesn’t mean everything has to be profound or amazing, but I need to stop holding onto books I know I’ll enjoy for some future point and consume them now so I’m not using up those slots on things I don’t love and never getting to the ones I know I will.

There was a warning for damaging winds in my area on Sunday, but I had symphony tickets, and everything looked okay outside, so I decided to head to the performance. About 20 minutes into the show, the lights went brighter on the stage, then they went off, then the house lights went on, and then we were all plunged into complete darkness.

The musicians kept playing.

At intermission, the director explained that the light changes were due to the generator. The power was out to the building, and they were operating at 50% lighting capacity. He said they were going to try to finish the performance, and they would help people out of the building if the lights failed completely.

Many people left immediately. I decided to stay.

The conductor promised that he would finish with an Enescu piece that would be electrifying to make up for the ever-changing light situation. He delivered — it was the most impassioned, gorgeous, energetic performance of “Romanian Rhapsody” ever played.

I drove home carefully; traffic lights were out along the way, but everything was fine at home. We had clearly lost power while I was out, but it was back on. I ate dinner, spoke to the kids, and went about preparing to watch the SNL special.

And then the power went out. It came back on a few times only to turn off again a moment later and finally stayed off for good. I had one flashlight, so I went downstairs to Beorn because he gets scared in storms. He was standing at attention with all of his hair raised and his eyes wide, so I sat with him, spoke quietly, and shined a flashlight at the ceiling, telling him that I thought the lights would come back on soon.

And that’s when we heard a series of deafening cracks, one after the other, and thumping crashes that shook the house. I put my arms over my head, and Beorn let out a shriek. When the noise stopped, I looked around, determined the room looked fine, and gave Beorn his hiding house when I went upstairs to investigate.

Enormous tree limbs had fallen into our yard, exploding upon impact, so branches filled the space. I shone the flashlight outside, taking in the damage, and saw a single bird still standing on the branch. It had fallen with the tree and stood there for about 10 minutes, looking around, before it flew away.

I sat in the dark with Beorn, who whimpered inside his hiding house for hours. He wouldn’t even come out for a cookie, and there is nothing in life that Beorn loves more than alfalfa cookies. When Josh came home, we assessed the power situation and crawled into bed because it was getting cold. There was nothing we could do until morning, though the power came on a little before 1 am, which woke us up, and we returned the food we had moved into the freezer back into the refrigerator.

It felt a bit like the universe delivered a metaphor for everything going on in our country right now. A big storm causes enormous damage without any indication of when it will end or if the power will come back on. Standing by the window, assessing the damage, and making calls to try to get someone to help us. And then, hoping that everything will work out and that help will arrive, we’ll look back on this moment two years from now, knowing whether the damage was fixed.

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.