I now have both kids back for a short time before they go back to college. The Wolvog boarded a flight while I was doing yoga, and I got to watch him cross the sky during the workday via a flight tracker. My heart cracked open when he bounced up the steps to give me the biggest hug.

He can now commiserate with his sister about being bummed to be back in suburbia vs. make her jealous because he was still overseas, wrapping up in-person work in his lab before transitioning to remote work on the project.

I didn’t think I’d survive having them that far away, but I did. They matured and grew more into themselves and impressed me beyond measure. I love watching them figure things out.

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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.

I found Bereaved and Blessed’s post on using the last of her parents’ floss stash very moving. She writes, “This week, three years after my mom’s death and five years after my dad’s, I finished the last container. It’s another bittersweet reminder of both what I’ve lost and what my parents left me through their deaths.” When they bought it, they had no clue how their daughter would come to think of them every time she flossed her teeth.

Lastly, Kmina’s Blog returns with an update. She says what so many of us are thinking: “Adulting sucks. I want my money back, I was sold a chimera that does not fit in any way what reality is now. I am not older and wiser. I do not have things figured out. I cannot have it all. Being slim and healthy and fit is very hard.” The post is hard because life is hard. Go give her a hug.

The roundup to the Roundup: The Wolvog is back! 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 July 24 – July 31) 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.

This is a monthly series, published near the end of the month summarizing what I found, ate, watched, googled, and felt this month. New categories added from time to time.

Books Added to My TBR (e.g., books I just learned about that I’m excited to read… maybe)

• Death on the Royal Yacht (S.J. Bennett)
• Main Characters (Bobby Palmer)
• I Can’t Believe I Don’t Have a Boyfriend (Harry Trevaldwyn)
• Such a Nice Girl (Andrea Mara)
• Hide and Seek (Andrea Mara)
• The Mortons (Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld)
• Windsor vs. Windsor (Bert Tyler-Moore)
• Light Years (Hattie Williams)

Notable Meals (new recipes, old favorites, and restaurant items we ate this month)

• Soft serve ice cream at Jimmie Cone.
• Burrata and nectarine salad on butter lettuce.

Television, Movies, and Music (watching and listening)

• The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins is really funny. I know zero about American football, so I didn’t think I would like it. But they almost never talk about football. Tracy Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe are fantastic.
• We finished Widow’s Bay. That was the best thing we saw all year. It’s creepy more than scary, and you’re laughing too much to be tense. I cannot wait for season two.
• We loved Make That Movie. Some episodes were better than others. We especially liked Bog Prom and the Yooglet.

Added To My Ongoing Mix Tape

• Spin the Bottle (The Juliana Hatfield Three)

Tabs I Left Open (things I Googled and left up on the screen)

• A poem by Edward Lear.
• The Wikipedia page for the Saxons.
• A walkthrough of runestones in Sigtuna, Sweden.
• A menu for a nearby sushi restaurant we haven’t gone to in years.
• A sandwich from M&S that the ChickieNob wants me to recreate.
• Gudrun Sjoden clothing site.
• A socca recipe from The Kitchn.
• Evans and Peel Detective Agency’s site, a themed speakeasy in London.

Micro-Joys

• Ordering books and having them arrive in the mail.
• Hugging the kids after many weeks away.

Mood

• Trying to set a limit on how many things I’m worried about.

What about you? Let me know what you’re eating, seeing, listening to, googling, feeling this month.

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to refer to the way of online platforms, moving from awesome experience for users, to making it shitty for users to please businesses who are bringing money to the platform, and finally making it shitty for everyone as they focus solely on shareholders.

But the term works with programming and products, too. A few years ago, we signed up for a concert subscription. The first year, it was awesome. The second year, they reduced the number of concerts. Then they limited how many concerts you could sign up for at a time, so you constantly had to manage your account or get shut out of concerts because it was first-come, first-served (or get a 15% discount on full-priced tickets to account for the 15% discount you already paid for with your subscription). The third year, they raised the price of the subscription by 25%. And finally, they announced they had new restrictions, effective immediately, on bag size (only a small clutch) and banning personal water bottles.

It went from awesome to not very enjoyable, all in a three-year span. I’m trying to see it for what it is now vs. remembering what it was like three years ago. Is it worth the cost right now? We have a few months before the renewal date to decide.

But here’s the thing — in our experience, the first year was great. But we hadn’t been there for the year before that. What if people who had started their subscription a year before us thought that our year was terrible in comparison to the year they had come from? Totally possible. It only seems shitty because we have a comparison. Without a comparison, if we started now, we may think things are wonderful.

It is really hard not to think about things in comparison. To judge things as if nothing had come before.

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

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One more game that I’ve been playing for months and seemingly never wrote about is Neighbourle. You get a country highlighted on a map, with its neighbours in grey, and you have to state the names of all of the countries that border the daily country.

I can usually guess a country based on the number of kilometers and the direction, but this is harder because you have to know the names and shapes of every country that touches it. Even if it’s just a small piece of the border.

Enjoy.

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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.

I am very very very swayed by book covers. They will get me to try a book, even if they won’t get me to love a book. But isn’t that one of the hardest things? To get someone to give something a try? Book covers work on me.

But I saw this site featured on Kottke, and I decided to try it. The idea is that you read one page. If you like it and would keep reading, you can click reveal. If not, you go on to the next book. I ended up clicking reveal on a book I would never have given a chance to because I didn’t connect with the cover.

Point taken.

My TBR is already too long, so I’m not really looking for more books to add to it. But I thought it was a very cool way to browse books from home without cover influence.