745th Friday Blog Roundup

I am so excited for the Downton Abbey movie. We’re currently only in season five, but we’re furiously working our way through the remaining episodes so we’ll be ready to go to the theater on September 20th when it opens.

We came to Downton Abbey late in the game–we often wait until shows have ended before we begin watching them–but we are so in love with the family and staff. ChickieNob and I are awful about reading spoilers before episodes, so we mostly know everything that will happen in the series. I will be very sad when we finish the last episode, though we’ve already planned to try Victoria again. We couldn’t get into it when we tried the first episode because we associated Jenna Coleman with Doctor Who. But maybe enough time has passed that we’ll be able to see her in something else.

Who else is excited for the Downton Abbey movie?

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Measure of Love is still on sale for a few more days for only 99 cents. It’s the same price on every e-book platform. So… grab a copy for the beach? For a friend? For someone who wants to hear about the olden days of blogging?

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled writes about the series finale of The Big Bang Theory, where a child-free-by-choice character is suddenly happily pregnant. I don’t know much about the show, but this would have made me cringe, too: “Perhaps this abrupt shift in character development wouldn’t have been quite so eyebrow-raising/infuriating if Penny wasn’t the show’s SECOND child-free-by-choice female character to wind up pregnant.” Loribeth makes me want to stand up and cheer with her final paragraph. Click over and cheer, too.

It’s Inconceivable asks how people answer when they get asked whether they have children. She explains, “Obviously, I have no (living) children, but it doesn’t mean I want to necessarily explain my whole childless existence to someone casually inquiring, or being more probing, or fishing for information.” She explains how she decides how to address it. Great post for anyone grappling with how much to reveal.

Lastly, Life Without Baby has a post wishing that one person had “acknowledged that my inability to have a child was an enormous loss for me and that I needed to grieve that loss, as if my children had existed.” In other words, we express condolences over a death, but we rarely express condolences or see infertility as a loss, too. She breaks down the hierarchy of loss, pointing out, “people have no idea how to react when they can’t see the thing that was lost.” It’s an excerpt from her book, Life Without Baby, so you can get a taste for what you’ll find in the pages.

The roundup to the Roundup: So excited for Downton Abbey. Measure of Love is still 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 17th and 24th) 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.