497th Friday Blog Roundup

I had a sobering realization my first week being 40.  I wasn’t entirely sure of the sex of all the Kardashian-Jenner children.  Or, rather, I should admit that there was one I assumed was a boy based on the name, and then discovered was a girl, and… well… the whole thing made me realize that I’m doing a terrible job keeping track of the Kardashian family.  You could even say that I can’t keep up with them.  I am not keeping up with the Kardashians.

This made me feel very old.  Like walking corpse old.

I told Josh that we need to keep on top of this.  We need to start watching more reality television.  We need to know what the kids are talking about, and no, they’re not talking about Wicked Tuna so those are wasted viewing hours.  We need to put our precious viewing minutes into things like Teen Mom and I Want to Marry Harry and one of those Real Housewives shows.

I feel like I’m pretty solid with good television.  We started Silicon Valley, which is really funny.  We’re watching In the Flesh because… you know… zombies.  And I’m super excited about seeing A to Z this fall, which sounds a little bit like a 500 Days of Summer-like show.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I need to up my bad television watching minutes this summer.  I’d like to know how to use them in the best way possible to keep up with Kardashian-like entities.  So if you have any recommendations for bad television, I would like to party my eyebrows off like the Rich Kids of Beverly Hills.

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Time for your weekly nag:

Tip of the week: Find an email client that will allow you to see emails while offline.  The reason?  You can use this email client as a space to back up your email.  Lifehacker had an article this week about email clients for Mac, though some, such as Outlook, also work on non-Mac computers.  Try Googling email client, work offline; a bunch come up.

This is just your friendly nudge to do your weekly backup.  I know, I know, who has the time to create backups on a weekly basis?  No one.  But you still need to do it and forgo ten minutes of something else, once a week.  Right now, before you do anything else, use this post to roll through a quick backup of your email, documents, images, blog, social media accounts, and mobile devices.  Reading the Roundup on the go and don’t have the ability to do your backup right now?  Email yourself a copy of the Roundup so that the email will serve as a visual reminder to get this task done.  Ten minutes of your time once a week may save you a major loss of time and data down the road.  Don’t have regrets.  So, on your marks, get set, back up!

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:

• “#YesAllWomen” (Stupid Stork)
• “A Month Out” (My Scar Smiles at Me)
• “Why Does She Get Two?” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “An Open Letter to the Baby Loss Community” (CarlyMarie Project Heal)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Infertility Voice has a post about the embryos being stored at her clinic and making the decision on what will become of them.  It’s not as simple as sticking to the ideas they had back when they started down this road.  They now also have information from their pregnancy to consider and maternal health — two factors that they couldn’t have known when they created and stored the embryos.  It’s an interesting look on this idea of making decisions before you know all the information, and how we make choices after the fact.

Inconceivable! often slays me with her gorgeous writing.  This week, she had a post about life after loss.  She writes of the figurative shoreline: “In the life I live in front of other people, I am fine. I get up each morning. I bathe, brush my teeth, arrange my hair. I laugh. I talk with people. I go to work. I’m a normal, functioning adult.  But when, inevitably, I find myself in the quiet spaces between the motions, I’m there on that lonely stretch of sand.”  I cannot do this post justice; especially when she melds life after loss with the idea of those first immigrants.  This post made me hold my breath.

Darling Propaganda, IVFer and sex worker, has an eye-opening post on #YesAllWomen which brings into play the hazards of her job.  But it’s also a thought I’ve heard echoed many times since the hashtag started making the rounds: that talking about it is just as hard as living it.  That sometimes it’s just as difficult to sit with all of those stories and think about them as it is to walk down a deserted street alone at night.  It’s a thought-provoking post.

There were a few controversies in the community this week, one of which is referenced in one of the second helping posts above.  But I really loved the post on  Today’s the Day! about the quality of our comments and the moderate button.  It brings into question who owns the comment box — the blog writer or the blog reader?  Is there an unspoken, loose contract between reader and writer, where both get to speak their mind as long as they’re being respectful?  If you’re going to have a comment box, should you have to accept all comments that fit your commenting guideline?  It’s an interesting conversation, especially since it took days for her comment to finally appear on the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: I would like to keep up with the Kardashians and welcome your television recommendations.  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 May 30th and June 6th) 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.