1039th Friday Blog Roundup

Thank you for the birthday wishes. It was a strange birthday because of something that happened last Friday night. We were driving on the main road through a residential neighborhood. There is a 25 mph speed limit on the cross streets and a 35 mph speed limit on the main road we were driving.

Every once in a while, you’ll have a person going over the speed limit who tries to pass you on this main road by driving either on the shoulder or in the median. Annoying and illegal, but you can see those people behind you before it happens.

That isn’t what happened this time.

This time, as we were approaching a cross street — one of these 25 mph residential streets off of the main road — a car drove across the road we were traveling on at 80-ish mph. A half second later, we were through the intersection, and they were already almost out of sight, two or three blocks away. There are always stop signs for each of the residential streets. Therefore, you can usually see someone waiting to turn onto the main road. But in this case, they skipped the stop sign and traveled across the road, going quadruple the speed limit. If we had been a split second faster, we would have likely been dead.

I jerked back in my seat when it happened, even though the car wasn’t hit. On Friday night, I was sore. By Monday morning, my back was on fire, and I couldn’t straighten my arm. I needed round-the-clock Advil to get through Saturday and Sunday and then moved to just Advil at night to sleep. I didn’t really return to feeling mostly normal until Thursday.

Please drive carefully. There are other people on the road, and we all just want to make it to where we’re going.

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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 to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Magpie Musing’s sister died, and she has a beautiful post about her. This part made me cry: “Go forth with love. See a movie, plant a perennial, bake some breadsticks, mail a postcard. Advocate for the voiceless, volunteer with a local organzation. All of these are the little acts that a good person does, day in and day out. And these little acts into the future honor the past.” Send a lot of love to her.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix looks back on the ten years since her last treatment, namely, how working with kids has changed. She writes: “I LOVE kids. I love working with kids. I love parents. I love supporting parents. But the truth is, I don’t like a lot of people’s parenting.” It’s hard to spend time around something that makes you upset, but good to have learned something about yourself and the boundaries you need to put into place.

The roundup to the Roundup: Please drive carefully. 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 30 – June 6) 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.