598th Friday Blog Roundup

Thank you for the birthday wishes.  My birthday, for the most part, was wonderful.  I got woken up with cards, cashed in a massage gift card I’ve held onto for 10 years, and picked up my free Starbucks drink.

And then Truman started acting weird.

He had actually been acting weird for about two days.  He was very quiet.  He would eat if I brought him food, but he wouldn’t wheek for food when I opened the refrigerator.  He wasn’t responding to his name.  He wasn’t greeting me with squeaks in the morning.

In the afternoon, he started to wheeze, so we called the vet.  She was heading out of town and trying to finish up appointments, but she told me to bring him over immediately.  He has an upper respiratory infection that we caught early, and I think he also has an ear infection.  We currently have him on antibiotics, so he’ll hopefully be better soon.

But I’m really scared this time.  I don’t like the way he is tilting his head and hobbling around.  This is what Cozy did right before he died.  Granted, Truman clearly has an infection and mucous in his nose and ears, and Cozy had a brain tumour and his eyes were popping out.  But it’s hard to watch him stumbling as he walks and trust that all will be fine in a few weeks.

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Life from Scratch has been chosen for an Amazon promotion.  It’s currently only 99 cents — a fraction of a cup of coffee.  So… pick up a copy for yourself or gift to a friend and get your beach reading set?

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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:

• “This Dream Stands Before Me” (Inconceivable!)
• “Seeds” (A+ Effort)
• “Mind Your Own Womb” (Nadirah Angail)
• “Truth, Death, and Mother’s Day” (Infertilityhonesty)
• “Politics, Babies, and My Body” (The Barreness)
• “I Want to See My Story” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Empty Cookie has a fantastic post about the recent Captain America controversy.  Not exactly infertility-related, but I loved this post because she sums up so well the problem with dismissing history (or, really, pretending that origin stories aren’t important in the present time period).  Captain America, like many comic superheroes, was created by Jewish writers using art to respond to anti-Semitism.  Comic books have always been a home for power fantasies, where the disenfranchised could fight back.  To make Captain America part of Hydra shows a lack of understanding on the part of current writers as well as a complete insensitivity to the current rise in anti-Semitism.  She writes, “It’s piss poor writing from someone who obviously needs to check his privilege. It’s gross and dishonoring to the people who created him and the millions of people murdered by Nazis.”  It’s something we talk about often in this community — do you always keep the origin story front and center in your mind, or do you rewrite family building history and pretend the current situation is the only situation?  And what do we lose when we sweep history under the rug, and how does it affect the people around us?

A Half Baked Life also has a non-infertility-related post that I think has a powerful message that also ties into our community and the greater world.  She writes about the shooting at UCLA, both as a former UCLA student and as a current administrator on a college campus.  She asks such an important question: “With all of our social media voyeurism and instantaneous sharing of news, why do we do so much ‘looking out,’ instead of looking out for each other, from the moment we understand what empathy means?”

Lastly, Bent Not Broken has a post about the move and her new home, and I love the idea of fresh starts.  She writes, “This house will be a house for healing.  This house will be a house for us to grow, not in number, but in love.  This will be the house where we put infertility behind us.”  I love that so much.

The roundup to the Roundup: Truman is sick again.  Life from Scratch is on sale.  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 27th and June 3rd) 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.