The title of this piece spoke to me a few weeks ago: Addiction to Prediction.

That is how it feels these last few weeks have felt, trying to predict how this election will turn out. The reality is that if I just wait until the results are in, I will not need prediction at all.

Prediction is about knowing something ahead of time. Sometimes, we don’t know when we will learn something. But other times, we clearly know when the results will be in (beta results, college admissions, election tallies) or around the time the answer will be revealed, and we work hard, expending a lot of mental energy to know one day or a few hours earlier than expected.

Except we sort of only want to know good news early. Bad news, that can wait.

I recently read Liane Moriarty’s new book, Here One Moment, about a group of people who all receive the year and how they’ll die. On the one hand, if you know you’re going to drown, you can take steps to try not to drown for those 365 days, but most of the ways people were going to die weren’t avoidable. For people who heard they were going to die deep into their 90s, they felt a sense of peace. For those who heard they were going to die young, it weighed on them and impacted the present as they waited for the date.

But that’s the thing about prediction: If you’re working to find out something ahead of time, you’ll hear whether it’s good news or bad news, and you’ll have to live with that imperfect information longer.

Sigh.

I’m not sure we will watch the returns at all tonight. I may cave at the moment, though I’m saying that I won’t watch because it will only make me anxious. We’ll see what happens during the actual moment.

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

*******

Tomorrow is election day in the US, but we voted weeks ago when early voting started. We usually wait until election day and go to our local polling place, but this year, we went to early voting when it opened. My Tuesdays are full of meetings, and I didn’t want to try to time it between two and get stuck in line. But I’m also fairly nervous, and voting early meant I could try to give myself the day to not think about what was happening at the polls.

If you’ve voted early, thank you.

If you haven’t voted yet, please go tomorrow. A lot of domestic policy rides on this election, and every vote counts.

*******

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.

I read a statistic that only 28% of kids went traditional trick-or-treating, e.g., door-to-door. And in some places, it was much lower than 28%.

The trend now is to go truck-or-treating, where people set up in parking lots, and kids go car-to-car, collecting candy. It didn’t exist when my kids were little, though it makes a lot of sense to keep small children in an enclosed area without cars moving through. For other kids, it is less overwhelming than walking around in the dark or going up to stranger’s houses. It’s a solution to a trick-or-treating problem.

But it’s also a little bittersweet to think of the trick-or-treating from my childhood going away as fewer and fewer people do it each year.

After many years of talking about getting a symphony membership, Josh and I got ourselves a symphony membership. It came with 28 concerts, which may be too many concerts. We’ve narrowed it down to 14 that fit our schedule, and we can always add in more on a whim if we have time. It gives us a discount for popular performances that are not part of the package, and we have three that we’ll purchase separately for the spring.

It feels super grown-up to have a symphony membership. Who are these adult people living in our house with a symphony membership? Oh, they’re just us.

I like being a member somewhere again. We now have to talk friends into getting their own membership so we can have a group that goes together and nerds out on Chopin.

*******

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…

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:

• “Fractured Internet” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Phoenix!

Okay, now my choices this week.

I have never prepped for election results, but there are things in Swistle’s election prep piece that I’ve decided to do, too, after reading her post. Anything that doesn’t go out of my way to get anything or do anything I wouldn’t normally do, at least. If I end up going out next week, I’m two steps ahead of where I need to be. If I don’t, I’ll be happy I prepared.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ talks about the misogyny of ignoring women without children, especially in dismissing another person’s emotions. She writes: “By dismissing our emotions and feelings of loss over infertility and the life we now have, we are being told our feelings are not important … it reinforces that feeling of invisibility, of worthlessness, that so many childless women have to battle against.” Don’t want to harm women? Give space for women to feel what they are feeling without shame or dismissal.

The roundup to the Roundup: Feeling massively grown-up. 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 October 25 – November 1) 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.

Mari Andrews had a thought toward the middle of a newsletter that gave me pause. She was speaking about a podcast she found, and she said:

“Something that is both comforting and eerie to me is that you can’t choose your memories. You can ‘make memories,’ sure, but you really have no control over whether you end up remembering them or not.”

So you can do everything to make a moment memorable. You can plan out elaborate trips or plot out what you’re going to say or host an event, and in the end, there is nothing you can do to turn it into a memory for yourself, and even less you can do to turn it into a memory for someone else. I know my parents must have spent hours planning things for me, and then I forget all those things I did as a child, and I remember a random conversation with my mother while I watched her dry her hair.

It may help you to remember that whatever you do this upcoming holiday season, there is no guarantee anyone will remember any of it soon after the event. Maybe that takes some pressure off.