827th Friday Blog Roundup

Wednesday morning started with gifts from Befana. She didn’t travel this year because of COVID-19 guidelines (and Fauci never stated that she was vaccinated along with Santa), so she instead used all of her powers to magic the gifts to our house. The twins refrained from rolling their eyes because there was chocolate.

Wednesday evening ended with discussing the terrorists at the Capitol with tearful teenagers who spent their afternoon glued to NPR. It is hard to have your worst suspicions about humans confirmed.

I have a lot of other sentences that I’m writing and erasing. I will encourage you, when you feel your chest tightening, to step away from social media. It helps me a lot to take in events only via a few trusted news sites to have my brain quiet enough to think.

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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:

• “Duke” (LindsayMader)
• “The Day After” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Grumpy Rumblings has a great opening to their weekly link love post, calling out people who post about doing things that go against COVID-19 guidance. They write, “Even if you don’t spread Covid yourself, you may encourage someone who does.” Even if you do everything according to best practices, you still may get it, so it doesn’t make sense when people write about how they’re considering doing things that are a risk. As they say, “It only takes two mistakes in a two week period to infect someone.”

Risa Kerslake has a post about processing her infertility while taking a memoir writing class. Her first piece is being caught off-guard by her feelings. “I wrote about church. Because where else can an infertile couple feel so completely alone than in the very place you really probably shouldn’t?” Her words allow other people to feel how she felt that day, and give her insight in the power of a memoir—both for the reader to understand and for the writer to process what they went through.

An Unexpected Family Outing has a post about taking a day off when you’re having a miscarriage. It’s actually bananas that we live in a world where it isn’t a given that you’d step back to deal with the emotional side of things even if you can keep going physically. It is such a powerful post, including this: “I’m not going to list the reasons why. If you’ve ever had a miscarriage, then you know why. If you haven’t, then words can’t quite justify the pain and agony endured.”

Lastly, it’s not infertility-related, but it is mental health-related and I didn’t want it lost in all the other news of the week. Our Congressman Jamie Raskin wrote a very moving piece about his son who died this week. It is a hard read, but it’s an important read.

The roundup to the Roundup: Terrorists in the Capitol. 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 Jan 1 – 8) 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.