600th Friday Blog Roundup

This is the 600th Friday Blog Roundup… which means it’s really the 500th one.  At some point they got misnumbered, and blah blah blah.  But it makes sense.  The blog will be 10 years old soon.  I started doing this a few weeks after I started the blog.  520 weeks in 10 years.  By the time we reach the anniversary for the Roundup, there will be 510 or so Roundups.  Which means there has only been maybe one week per year where I don’t do this.

That is a lot of posts read.  A lot of posts discussed.  Just… a lot of posts.

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating.  This is how I choose the posts for the Roundup each week.  I read.  I read a lot and sometimes I bookmark things that stick with me.  And then on Thursday night or Friday morning, I look at all the bookmarked posts and I choose a few to talk about.  I’ve never accepted a request because… that makes it feel like work.  And it’s not work.  It’s just the words that reached into my brain and stuck with me after I walked away from the computer.

Sometimes they’re not the most profound posts.  Sometimes they just capture an everyday moment so well that it feels worth asking if it resonated with everyone else.  But sometimes they’re verbal symphonies.

I know some people think blogging is in a lull, but I still find little gems every week.  You just have to be willing to look.  You have to be willing to jump from comment section to comment section to find new blogs.  You need to step away from the spoon-feeding of links on social media and dive back into blogs themselves, waiting for a great post to rise up.  It’s sort of like fishing in that sense.

Thank you for providing so many fish over the years.

Here’s to the next 500.

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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:

• “A Father’s Advocacy Never Ends” (Stillbirth Matters)
• “The World Outside Is so Inconceivable Often I Barely Can Speak” (Real Life and Thereafter)
• “In Every Sense, Insensitive” (It’s Inconceivable)
• “When the Absence of Hope Is a Good Thing” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Um… like someone could write about Lord of the Rings and not have me mention it?  I love Inconceivable’s deconstruction of the ending of Return of the King and how that truth applies to our own personal walks through Mordor.  Grief changes us.  Stressful situations change us.  We can never go back and find things exactly the same.  Sometimes we need to keep fighting so our new future fits our needs.  It’s a gorgeous post.

Grumpy Rumblings has a damn good analogy for finding balance in life.  The post is brief and to the point, so I won’t say much more than that and ruin it.

Kmina’s Blog just celebrated its 7th anniversary, and she muses on the state of the world today as well as a hope for next year.  Again, just a lovely post that is so brief that it would be ruined by more description.  Just click over and read it.

River Run Dry has a gorgeous piece about the shooting in Orlando, her words shaking with rage.  She writes, “Our right to bear arms means our country allows anyone to by an assault weapon, without background checks. It means the CDC can’t even research the causes of gun violence.  And our right to bear arms means that more mothers will sit there, trapped, unable to protect their children.”  It is a must-read for anyone who is shaking with rage over gun violence.

Lastly, Pages, Stages, and Rages has a post about Renee Elise Goldsberry’s speech at the Tony’s announcing her family building struggles to the world.  It was such a profoundly moving moment, and I bawled when I watched it.  Sometimes you just need to see a reflection of your experience inside the greater whole.  Thank you, Renee Elise Goldsberry.

The roundup to the Roundup: The 500th/600th Roundup.  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 10th and June 17th) 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.