Every morning this week, I woke up and immediately thought, “I only have X days until my birthday.” It would be fair to say that I have been highly aware of my birthday this year. It felt a little bit like when you know there is a spider in the room, and you’ve determined that you’re going to wait for someone else to take care of it, but you sort of can’t stop yourself from tracking the spider… it was that except in birthday form.

I saved an Anthony Horowitz book to read. There will definitely be French fries, amusement park rides, and wishes made.

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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.

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And now the blogs…

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:

• “#MicroblogMondays: Information Overload vs Creativity” (The Road Less Travelled)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Barreness gives an update on her parents. My heart hurt for her when I read this note about her mother: “I am often her therapist explaining how things are not ever going back to how they were and that this is the new normal. She asks again hours later, like I am that magical fridge that you open the door to and new things appear.” It is a really really really hard situation, and she could use a kind word. So please go over and let her know that she has people holding her up as she does this hard work.

Lastly, Scientist on the Roof has a post that felt very familiar, in that this is how I process stress, too. But I love this so much: “I keep telling myself – this is not like grad school. I can quit. I can look for another job … Or maybe I’ll just do the best I can and let things be what they will be.” It’s hard to get to that place of acceptance, so sending deep breaths.

The roundup to the Roundup: Birthday weekend. 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 24 – May 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.

I read something recently that I feel so deeply to be true:

The secret to enjoying life online boils down to one simple piece of advice: Protect your peace. Mute words, block bad posters, unfollow the person you only met briefly years ago on a work trip. It’s an algorithmic world, and anything you let into your orbit is what Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter will use to inform what they funnel into your feeds.

I don’t think you need always to cut ties, but I’ve temporarily hidden people this year, and it has brought me a great deal of peace. On the other side, I have added things (people, words, images, videos) that spark joy, bringing greater enjoyment to my time online vs. just removing the drains.

But I think the larger thought in that quote is that you inadvertently tell the algorithm you want more of the thing bringing you stress when you leave the thing causing you stress in your feed. If you watch dozens of videos about X, you can’t blame the algorithm for thinking you want more of X, not realizing that X actually upsets you.

So watch carefully. Read thoughtfully. Unfollow when it needs to happen for your own peace of mind.

In the early 1980s, Cabbage Patch Kids occupied a substantial portion of my waking thoughts. My grandparents stood multiple times in line at a toy store to get me my baby-powder-scented doll, and I loved that toy with all of my heart.

And then I mostly forgot about them, even though the twins liked playing with our old dolls when they were young.

Fast-forward to this week and I was speechless when I learned about the existence of BabyLand in Georgia. I didn’t believe the first story I read about it, and I had to keep Googling because I couldn’t wrap my brain around its existence. Or the fact that the dolls were still around.

I don’t know when I will ever be in Cleveland, Georgia, but I think I may need to go and see it with my own eyes if I’m ever in the state.

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

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I have a new life goal: Stay in an underwater hotel.

Traveler put out a list of underwater hotels. Most start above ground and then move underwater, or they’re really aquarium-view hotels (as in, your window looks into an aquarium). I’ve fallen in love with all of the options in the Maldives. The first one is probably my favourite.

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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.

One night after dinner last week, I picked up my iPad and said, “I’m going to go read the news.”

“Spoiler: It’s all bad,” Josh warned me.

It feels like the news has been bad for a long time, and I’m hitting my bad news saturation point earlier and earlier in my feed. I don’t think this is about just getting through X or that after Y happens, things will calm down. Maybe the world has always been like this, but the reporting has changed. Maybe these are the end times.

I liked this article on nine things you can do to stop catastrophizing when you do enter a panic spiral while reading the news. I’m placing this here in case it helps anyone else.