832nd Friday Blog Roundup

I’ve been skipping impeachment coverage because I don’t want to see violent footage from the Capitol. Life is stressful enough without having that footage in my brain. Instead, I catch up on the details via email alerts.

Which makes for a very quiet impeachment.

In general, the volume has gotten much quieter with Trump out of office and off social media platforms. Delightfully quieter. I don’t cringe every morning when I scroll through the news. But adding in the decision to not engage in 24/7 impeachment coverage brought down the volume an additional notch.

I get a three-day weekend, and I’m beyond excited with the idea of not. doing. anything.

*******

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.

*******

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:

• “Shared Experiences in Beauty and Grief” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “What’s Saving Me” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ draws a connection between the pandemic experience and infertility. The lack of control. The limbo state. The general exhaustion. Moreover, she talks about the non-infertile response, especially because New Zealand is not experiencing the pandemic in the same way as the rest of the world: “I’m not truly experiencing this pandemic, in the way that some people never experience infertility, or think about it only as a future but unlikely possibility. So I am having to learn something new – how to sit with you, to listen to your frustrations and fears without dismissing them.” Such an interesting take on being adjacent to the experience.

By the Brooke brings back her advice column to answer a person’s question about a terrible exchange with a neighbour about “lab babies.” (The neighbour’s term, by the way.) The answer includes: “Her opinion is likely never to change if she’s never asked to reflect on it.” The best part is that she walks you through a sample conversation with someone who is anti-IVF and how you may want to guide the talk. Hopefully, no one needs this post. But if you do, here it is.

Lastly, Res Cogitatae points out that we’re not all having the same pandemic. She writes, “Very quickly it became obvious that we were living through different pandemics, our experiences shaped by our geographical location, employment responsibilities, and, perhaps most of all, the composition of our households and the stage of life in which we found ourselves.” And maybe that is the hardest part about the pandemic, especially when we’re talking about the same area: that the choices we’re making or the circumstances we’re in are so vastly different.

The roundup to the Roundup: A quiet impeachment trial. 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 Feb 5 – Feb 12) 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.