687th Friday Blog Roundup

Pesach begins tonight.  I’ve spent the week alternating between cooking and cleaning; two tasks that don’t really work well together.  Cooking creates more mess and requires a clean-up afterward, and cleaning burns energy and requires you to cook afterward.  But somehow the two tasks have slowly come into balance so I have a clean house and food for the seder table.

My cousin and I both host — one of us takes the first night and one of us takes the second night.  We’ve been having Pesach together for 42 years!  Isn’t that incredible to think about?  There have only been maybe two or three years where we haven’t been together for Pesach.  That is why I host; why I continue to do this tradition year after year: Because our mothers have had decades of Pesachs together, and we have had decades of Pesachs together, and our kids are now into their second decade of having Pesachs together.

Unlike the older generation, my cousin and I change the menu every year.  We make meat for the meat-eaters and make everything else on the table vegan for ourselves.  We make tiny tweaks each time the holiday rolls around to make it a little bit better, like last year’s realization that I could get Josh to roast the shankbone outside so I don’t need to smell it — win!

Realizing your own history is sort of amazing…

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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:

• “Words of Wisdom” (The Road Less Travelled)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Different Shores has a post about an article on living child-free that I would have missed otherwise.  I especially loved this point: “One thing that hit me around the same age as Elizabeth was the notion that my future was a bit amorphous, potentially a long stretch of nothing; what were the landmark events that would punctuate it, give it structure, slow down time?”  It’s the story of a woman who has taken control of her life and given it shape.

Pages, Stages, and Rages has a post about how the Beatles keep looping back in her life, including Yoko Ono’s experience with secondary infertility.  Like her, I never thought about Paul McCartney and gun violence together until the march, but he did lose his best friend not far from the march site in New York.  There have been many things written this week about the marches, but I loved this post because it weaves it into a personal history vs thinking of it as a single point in time.

Lastly, Dubliner in Deutschland has a post about finally holding her daughter at the end of a long family building road.  I was teary at the opening, imagining the world waiting while she looked at her daughter: “It’s Friday morning. The house is quiet. My husband’s at work. The kitchen is a mess. There’s a huge pile of laundry in the basket and I wonder if I’ll even find a moment to shower today.”  It can wait, and I’m glad you have these days of wonder in the meantime.

The roundup to the Roundup: Pesach begins tonight.  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 March 23rd and 30th) 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.