It’s Friday the 13th, and as always, I have the compulsion to point that out in the Roundup when the date aligns. It’s not as if you don’t have a calendar or that the date even means anything. But I got it out of my system. Carry on.

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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.

Scientist on the Roof muses about what it’s like to be an extrovert amongst introverts. I related to this: “Having conversations can be a lot of work (I have to talk! and ask questions! and then ask more questions! it’s exhausting!)” People often talk about it the other way around — being an introvert surrounded by extroverts — but I hadn’t thought about the opposite situation.

Lastly, Bereaved and Blessed answers a set of reflective questions, something she has done every five years. She explains, “When I turned 40 and 45 I wrote and shared reflection posts here on my blog, which turned 18 this year. I decided to do it again, as I appreciate being able to revisit what I was thinking, as well as feeling, back then and how far I have come since.” It’s a long posts, and I love this question at the end: “What is your heart telling you that you need right now?”

The roundup to the Roundup: Friday the 13th. 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 June 6 – 13) 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.

My Sweet Dumb Brain had a profound thought that made me sad. She told the story about a cake that upset her father, joking about his age when he turned 40. She wrote: “He passed away in 2013, at just 58 years old. If life is a hill, he was already well on the other side when he turned 40. Maybe he knew that. No wonder he got mad.”

It’s such a strange idea. I think I’m middle-aged, but how can I know what the middle is if I don’t know the end? Perhaps my twenties were middle age, or I could still be a decade away from middle age if technology advances in such a way that the lifespan pushes on to 120.

It’s a lovely essay about what it means to age, gain wisdom, and change with time.

With the exception of situations like this, or the one Hank Green highlights in the video, we don’t know when we don’t die. We don’t know all of the times when we didn’t get measles because we received the vaccination or we didn’t die of a foodborne pathogen due to food safety laws.

I love this quote about prevention: “When it works, nothing happens.”

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

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A friend posted a link to a Wikipedia page, which had been edited to contain wrong information. It had 25,000 changes since January 2025 alone, and it looked like there were two main groups of people going back and forth to replace and reestablish immutable facts, such as names and dates. Exhausting and troubling.

Depending on the day you hit the information (or even the hour you hit the information), you may walk away believing one thing or another. It made me think of those old World Book sets or Encyclopedia Britannica — if the information was wrong or biased, at least we were all working from the same information, making it slightly easier to address it because we had all read the same thing.

I learned a long time ago to take anything on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. Someone changed the principal’s name on the twins’ school’s page, and while the new name made me snicker (and it had been up there for two years!), it also highlighted the reality of mass-edited information.

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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.

Many years ago — before COVID — an author ChickieNob loved was holding an event in a nearby town and signing copies of her books. After ChickieNob had her books signed, we were standing in the back, speaking with another author who had organized the event. The woman told me both writers were both part of a writing group.

Later that summer, we were at one of our favourite bookstores, and the writing group came up again. The owner was a member of the group, too, and she encouraged me to join. She had so many positive things to say, and I wrote the group down on my to-do list, but I mostly forgot about it.

Over the years, she would bring it up when I was in the bookstore. She let me know that it didn’t matter if I wasn’t writing; I was reading, and readers were welcome, too. I kept copying “join the group” over from one to-do list to another, talking to Josh about joining but never following through.

Until I made a note to call the bookstore to ask them to hold the new Anthony Horowitz for me, and I decided to join. I would join the group one weekend and then visit the bookstore the next weekend and talk to the owner about the group.

I signed up and was added to the listserv. But when I looked at the top message on the listserv archive, it was the invite for the celebration of life for my bookstore owner. She had died weeks earlier, and I hadn’t known. I was too late.

I don’t know if I believe that the two things are connected. I just know that I cried deeply when I thought about how silly it was that I waited over five years to do something that I was always interested in doing but felt like maybe I didn’t deserve to do it. That I wouldn’t belong. I was sad that I wouldn’t have her book recommendations anymore, and she would never know that she brought another member into the group. The lesson learned is not to wait on things.