607th Friday Blog Roundup

The twins and I have started reading The Cursed Child.  It took us a few days because we had other stuff on the to-do list that had to get done.  But now we’re chugging through it.

We had a few read-aloud methods we considered beforehand since we wanted it to be a one-woman show.  At first I thought I would place pieces of paper on the floor with each character’s name, and then stand on the correct piece of paper when I was speaking for that character.

But in the end, either due to laziness because moving from paper to paper started to sound less and less appealing or because it was going to take too long to shuffle through the papers and lay out each scene’s papers, I decided to read the character’s name aloud before saying their line.  So name (said in a normal voice) + lines (said with feeling).

I bawled reading the opening scene.  I know it’s just a repeat of what is already in the seventh book, but it’s a reunion.  I’ve missed these characters so much.

But I’ve got some strong feelings about some of the passages.  I’m going to write it up in a post and put a spoiler message at the top.  Skip it next week if you haven’t yet read the book.  Or bookmark it for the future.  But… yeah… there is no way to talk about some of it without mentioning spoilers.  Sorry.

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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 in order 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.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Things I Can Do and Things That I Can’t” (Torthúil)
• “Be Fair to Yourself” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Tribes” (The Empress and the Fool)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Mom PharmD looks at the bright side of nearing the end of family building attempts: no more vitamins.  As she goes toward a final attempt to add a third child to their family, she also sets a loose end date to the process.  It is, as she says, the only way to ensure that she doesn’t remain in infertility limbo.  It’s a tiny post about being okay with the end, whatever that ending may be.

In Quest of a Binky Moongee has a post about another facet of infertility: the age gaps that exist between people.  She writes about her 18-year-old niece, about the joy of being her aunt and watching her age.  But in that aging is another fact: “She is only a couple of hours away for college but it seems almost impossible for her to get to know my future child(ren) like the way she knows her little cousins because of all the time they have spent together.  My child(ren) will not know their oldest cousin the way I would want them to if they had been born a few years earlier and growing up in the same town together.”  It is just food for thought; one more thing infertility takes.

Lastly, for anyone who has followed the enormous love I have for Truman, it’s no wonder that Searching for Our Silver Lining’s post about quantifying love hit home.  She writes, “We encourage all types of love, make no mistake. But when one half of that relationship is suddenly gone, either through death or the relationship ending, grief is immediately quantified based on the type of love.”  She admits that while we can rationally say that the type of love we have for various people or animals is different, that one type of love does not trump another.  Love is love is love.

The roundup to the Roundup: How to read The Cursed Child aloud.  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 August 5th and 12th) 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.