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 September.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Rachel Joyce): I saved this book to read when I needed a book exactly like this. So it was the right book for me at the right time. It was a book that may make you feel a little better if you’re also sad that life and time only move in one direction. Very beautiful, and I felt like I crossed England as I read it.

Knife Skills for Beginners (Orlando Murrin): This book is coming out in the US in December (though was already out for sale in Canada, where I picked it up) and totally worth getting. A mostly lighthearted cozy mystery, set in a cooking school, with plenty of cooking tips and recipes woven through the murder. I liked the voice, and while it sometimes got a little convoluted and convenient, it was still a very enjoyable read. Definitely putting his next book on my to-read list.

The Trust (M.H. Eccleston): So much fun. Yes, there are some inconsistencies, and every once in a while, I had to question some of the stated facts, BUT I liked every character. And rooted for them to win. And left the book immediately wanting to read the next one. This was a great purchase.

The Examiner (Janice Hallett): Janice Hallett can literally do no wrong. She is a gift to the literary world. Brilliant brilliant fun. Like all Hallett books, you’re quickly sucked into the story. She has a gift for making characters stand apart, so you always know who is speaking (messaging) before you look at the name. And I loved that it ended with a little bit of ambiguity. This one will have people talking for days afterward. It’s great for a book club.

A Death in the Parish (Richard Coles): I adore his writing, and while his mysteries are not traditional mysteries in the sense that the rector in the book doesn’t investigate in so much as have clues fall into his lap, it was the perfect book to get me through a time when I felt sad and quiet and needed the right book to fit the mood.

What did you read last month?

Asha Dornfest wrote about shredding her journals recently. 38 years of recorded thoughts… gone.

This is a topic I think about a lot. I keep a bullet journal and process my feelings mixed in with my daily tasks. I have journals going back to third grade. What do I do with this writing? It’s not the sort of thing you want people to read after you’re gone because it’s not the sort of thing you want people to read while you’re still here. I kind of wish those journals could be connected to my existence, and once I’m gone, they disappear in a puff of smoke. (Or some more environmentally-friendly option.)

The point is that you don’t know when you’re going to die, so waiting for a perfect last moment to destroy them means possibly waiting through the final moment I had to destroy them. So, do I do it now? Wait a few years? Write out my wishes and tack it to the front of each notebook? Trust people will respect my wishes?

I can’t imagine destroying my journals. And I can’t imagine keeping them. I’m stuck between these two thoughts. It’s not feasible to go through them and rip out certain pages. What bothers me today may be different from what bothers me in ten years.

Would you shred your journals?

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

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One of the more annoying features of the US health system — and I’m sure the same is true in other countries — is that you need to wait at least one year from your last visit for certain appointments. So if you go on October 14, next year, your appointment has to be after October 15. The year after that, October 16, and so on. You cannot go October 14 this year, and go October 13 next year.

Of course, weekends and appointment openings mean that your yearly visit may get pushed very far off-course. Add in that the twins now live far from their doctor, which means their annual wellness visits have been moved to school breaks.

The visit this year is currently set almost six months beyond the year mark, and I realized that the visit after that will likely not happen at all. We’ll loop around back to summer and start the cycle over.

It would be lovely if you could call into insurance, explain the situation, and reset the timeline. Big plans for when I rule the world.

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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.

Yesterday morning, I came downstairs, singing Beorn’s good morning song. Yes, our pig gets a good morning song. I took away his sleeping space and set down his food bowl, as I do every morning, still singing the song, when he suddenly jumped forward, terrified, and hit the wall of his cage. I jumped back, terrified, and stopped singing.

Whenever I approached the cage, he would run frantically, bouncing off three walls, and scream.

I went to get Josh and thus began 12 hours of trying to calm down the pig. We missed services. We tried giving him his favourite foods. We tried taking away foods that seemed to make him more upset. We tried speaking to him in a quiet voice. We tried speaking to him in a normal voice. We tried to reason with him. We gave him back his sleeping space. He stood at attention for 12 hours, sniffing the air, his back hunched in fear, too afraid to move.

He was okay out of the cage, so we cleaned the cage. That helped in the sense that he would allow us to place things back in his cage, all cleaned. But he still seemed skittish. We gave him a bath, which helped more. He finally stopped freaking out and ate hay, watching us to see if we were judging him.

The most likely explanation is that guinea pigs will mark places they deem dangerous if they’re scared to let other pigs know that something scary is there. But it was like Beorn forgot HE was the pig who marked the space and spent the entire day worried about a danger that didn’t exist, which is super sad. But I’m glad he’s not running and screaming anymore.

He smells so good this morning because I used baby shampoo.

Last week, for several reasons, we decided to watch services online rather than go in-person for the holiday. There’s a moment in the service where they blow a horn called the shofar, and it’s a mitzvah — one of the commandments — to hear it.

As the rabbi talked about the shofar (they always give people time to get back into the sanctuary so they can hear it), a family of five deer stepped into our yard. They were eating the grass a few feet away from the window.

When the man blew the shofar, the deer looked up and stared in one direction, twisting their ears. Another blast from the shofar, and they looked in a different direction, twisting their ears again. Each time the shofar sounded, the deer looked around, trying to locate the sound.

I’m not sure if it meant anything, but it felt like a sign of something.

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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.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

A Separate Life has a beautiful post about staying in touch with people, and the difference between the letter-writing years and the instant communication made possible by the internet. She writes, “I think I’ve lived in the best of times. I had amazing formative experiences in independence. Then the internet arrived in my 30s, when I could and did easily adapt to these new technologies, using them daily for work. But I wasn’t reliant on them.”

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix has a thought that I sat with for a long time. She writes about attending weddings alone now vs. before infertility/divorce. She writes: “Interestingly, I don’t think divorce changed weddings too much for me. I loved being married. And I love being divorced … But still, my experience with marriage and divorce doesn’t change my feelings about weddings.” It made me think about attending baby-centered events without children. While I don’t think weddings have changed a lot for me — I like a wedding and don’t think about the baby stuff connected to weddings while I’m there — I feel differently about attending baby-centered events, such as showers, after infertility vs. before.

The roundup to the Roundup: Signs abound. 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 4 – 11) 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.