Category — Microblog Mondays

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

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Many years ago, I read an article that said the Old Man of Hoy would fall into the sea one day, and I suddenly had to see this sea stack for myself. We took the ferry out to Orkney so we could pass it on the water, and we took a million pictures while we called our greetings. (Okay, I was the only one who called out things, but I think the rest of us were silently considering it.)

It’s the same impulse that made us schedule a tour to see Dark Hedges in Northern Ireland (damn you, COVID, for canceling that trip). Those trees will be gone one day, and we wanted to be there. To hang out with some tree friends.

It makes me sad when I hear about places we can’t go or amazing things that we can’t see anymore. Similar to closed restaurants or books out of print.

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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.

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

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If you’ve ever played the game Little Alchemy, you will love this new internet version by Neal.fun. However, it didn’t keep my progress when I closed the tab and reopened it to play again.

If you’ve never played the game Little Alchemy, you can now play it online, though I prefer the app version on my phone. The UX is a little clunkier than Neal.fun’s version, though the idea is the same: You combine items to make new items. For example, put two “earth” together, and it turns into a mountain. You can now combine a mountain with earth and get a volcano. You can add fire to the volcano and get lava. So on and so on.

Happy playing.

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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.

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

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We’ve always been a shoes-off-in-the-house home, but during the pandemic, we instituted indoor vs outdoor clothes, which we still do. I felt so seen by this recent article in the Washington Post because I didn’t know other people were doing this, too.

To keep things mentally straight, I made jeans my outdoor clothes and cargo pants my indoor clothes. So if I’m going to the store, I change into jeans and a sweatshirt, and when I return home, I change into cargo pants and a different sweatshirt. We never sit down on furniture or get into bed with outdoor clothes, though we’ll sit at the foot of the bed in outdoor clothes in a hotel room because… the whole place is kind of an outdoor clothes space. (Though I still want to keep outdoor clothes away from my face and the pillow, which is why the foot of the bed.)

Do you wear indoor and outdoor clothes?

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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.

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

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For the last ten or so years, we’ve been tied to the school calendar, needing to tuck travel either into the time between Christmas and New Year or wait until summer. When the kids were in early elementary school, we pulled them out of school for trips, but they stopped wanting to do that because catching up was so difficult on the other end.

This was our first year released from the school schedule. We have a long winter and spring break, and it was much better than summer. No crowds. No lines. The weather was fine — we could sit outside drinking hot chocolate.

Winter travel may be risky with cold temperatures or snow, but summer travel can also be risky with extreme heat or closures. (We’ve seen temperatures so high that the road melted.) We walked straight into places we’ve stood in long lines for in the past. We’re now Team Winter/Spring Travel, all the way.

What about you?

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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.

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

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The sub-head on this article — “My clinical work has shown me that happiness is a ghost that’s not worth pursuing – there are far wiser goals in life” — begs the question: What is worth pursuing? The article argues for “reasonable contentment,” which is sort of happiness lite. As in a balance of happiness with unhappiness with neutral moments in between. You don’t need to really pursue reasonable contentment in the same way you need to pursue happiness (or make yourself happy). Reasonable contentment is accepting what is.

I don’t know if happiness is not worth pursuing at all. If that were the case, we wouldn’t have an impetus to travel, view art, eat good food, engage in crafts, or engage in thousands of other actions that are all about pursuing happiness. We don’t shell out money for a restaurant meal we think will make us reasonably content. We can get that from a bowl of cereal at home. Why spend hours in a car, driving to visit someone, when you can achieve reasonable contentment with a FaceTime call?

What do you think of the argument?

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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.