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866th Friday Blog Roundup

I got to see my best friend from childhood for the first time in two years this week. She lives now in Canada, though her parents still live locally, and she hasn’t been able to see them for two years either due to the closed borders. So… it was an emotional reunion; to go over to her childhood home and sit outside and talk with her parents and see my friend.

(P.S. Visiting her is my empty nest plan instead of wine. I’m just going to her house for long weekends to eat Canadian candy because it’s better than US candy.)

There are so few people in my life anymore from my childhood. I was lamenting that recently with the ChickieNob because I had discovered a funny connection between an old middle school friend and another person’s sibling, and I had no one to tell who would care. Everything seemed so important back then, and I don’t even remember most of those people now when I flipped recently through my old yearbook with the kids. I certainly don’t remember the meaning behind most of the things we wrote in each other’s yearbooks.

Maybe it helped the twins put their own experience into perspective. It is important now, but with the exception of a few people you’ll carry forward into adulthood, the weight of it will slide away. The people who are upsetting you today will be the people you only vaguely remember tomorrow.

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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.

Much Ado About Nothing has been having strange dreams about loss. She writes, “There isn’t much in common with any of them, yet all involve a small baby somehow. A baby I hold and help care for yet isn’t mine to keep. It’s been 3 years since my last pregnancy ended.” I think the rest of the world thinks there is a day where you step over a line and no longer feel sad about pregnancy loss. But as she writes, it’s something that stays with you and pops up from time to time. She is definitely not alone in feeling this way. I think there are a lot of us who feel the same way, too.

Another Canadian on the go! The Road Less Travelled writes about seeing her family for the first time in 22 months for Thanksgiving. She writes, “When we arrived at my parents’ house an hour or so later, I sobbed in the embrace of both of my aging parents — a little slower, a little more frail and a little more stooped since the last time I saw them. I am beyond thankful to be here with them all.” I got emotional reading it, and I’m not even in her family! I had a huge smile with this post.

Lastly, Finding a Different Path created an awesome anniversary gift for her husband. I’ll let you click over and read about it. And, yes, she does look smoldering in the picture she posted. It’s a great story.

The roundup to the Roundup: I got to see my friend. 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 October 8 – October 15) 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.

3 comments

1 Sharon { 10.15.21 at 4:08 pm }

I loved this line of this post: “The people who are upsetting you today will be the people you only vaguely remember tomorrow.” So true.

I am not actively in touch with anyone from my childhood (connections via Facebook notwithstanding). I no longer have any living relatives to connect me to the town where I lived and attended schools from K-12 and have only been back there once in about the past 20 years, with no plans to return any time soon.

The “oldest” friend I have with whom I am still regularly in contact I met at age 25, when working at my second professional job after college. Anyone I’ve known longer than that I speak with infrequently or never.

Hard to have this perspective as a child or teen, though.

2 loribeth { 10.15.21 at 4:16 pm }

Thanks for the shoutout, Mel! It is good to (finally!) be home again (even as both “The Price is Right” and “Dr. Phil” blare loudly in the background on separate TVs — among my aging parents’ other annoying quirks, lol). I’ve had very little time online here this week, so I don’t have any blogs to offer for second helpings just yet, but if I find anything before next Friday, I will post it.

Have a great visit with your friend! Most Canadians have been able to fly to the U.S. throughout most of the pandemic (assuming they meet negative covid test & quarantine requirements, and now vaccines, etc.), but the land borders have been closed… it was just announced they’ll reopen in November.

I’ve always thought Canadian candy was better than American 😉 — even my American mother stocks up on KitKats before she heads south, because even though there are KitKats there, they are NOT the same. (Although my sister & I will stock up on Milky Ways when we are down there, because they actually are way better than the ones we get here, lol.)

And you’re right about how the things that seemed so important/earth-shattering in our school days don’t matter so much as you get older. There may still be a few people I hold grudges against (lol), when I think about them, but I really don’t think about them much anymore. I ran into my grade school bully when I attended an all-town reunion about 30 years ago. You would have thought we were long-lost buddies by the way she enthusiastically greeted me. It was actually kind of funny. I was polite to her and we chatted for a few minutes, but I was happy to say goodbye and move on to chat to someone else.

3 Jess { 10.16.21 at 12:03 pm }

Now I am insanely curious about the difference between US cotton candy and Canadian cotton candy… I’m glad you got time with your friend. It’s funny how by the time you get to adulthood, middle-aged adulthood (ew), you’ve kind of pared your friends down to the ones who mean the most. So true that what you worried and cared about from others in high school becomes so much less important later on.

Thank you so much for including my anniversary gift post! I had so much fun and can’t wait to see the results.

I loved A Blank New Page’s post on views people have on childless people’s views on parenting: https://ablanknewpagebl.blogspot.com/2021/10/views.html

(c) 2006 Melissa S. Ford
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