1049th Friday Blog Roundup

Josh was away most of the week at a conference. When the kids were little, they always got sick when he went to a conference. Things always broke. There was always… something. Don’t get me started on the time when he was overseas at a film festival, and the local government suggested that we all prepare for a dirty bomb, and I ended up at Home Depot filling my cart with duct tape and plastic sheeting.

Anyway.

Before he left, I thought to myself, whenever Josh goes away, all sorts of things go wrong. I bet I will have to deal with a cricket.

Quentin ended up having an accident in our bed while the ChickieNob and I were watching television (first time ever, which makes me wonder if he was having issues because he was also totally chill, which is not like him), which necessitated two loads of laundry late at night. I was swept up in that strange Facebook glitch, which locked people out of their accounts. (Though I thought at first that it was just me and felt all kinds of panicked.)

There was a salad dressing disaster where I tried a recipe the New York Times promised was the most amazing dressing in the world, wasted a lot of olive oil, and had an enormous clean up, and it was inedible.

And the cricket came on the last night. Our final night. All the cricket had to do was wait a few more hours, and it could have been Josh’s problem. But it wasn’t. It was my problem. And I made it the Wolvog’s problem. He sucked it up in the Dyson, but also got water in the Dyson. So now I’m drying out the Dyson for a few days and hoping it still works.

And these things happen only when Josh goes out of town.

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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.

The Road Less Travelled writes about her mixed feelings attending a wedding for a person who is the same age her child would have been. There is the happiness for the couple and the joy of seeing family, but there is the emotional pain of what ifs. It’s a reminder that loss doesn’t magically resolve at a single point. There can be triggers, 27 years later.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ leans hard on lessons learned through infertility as she experiences a different difficult situation. She asks if you remember going through infertility, when it consumed your whole day and every thought. But one day you reach a point where it is not your entire day. It’s just part of a day. And then it’s only part of a week, a month, a year. She reassures herself and the reader: “It helps me to understand that it will pass, eventually, whatever the outcome, although the fits and starts might last the rest of my life. It helps too to remember the nature of grief, of worry, of irrational thoughts, and know that it is all normal.” Sending a hug and a thank you for this reminder.

The roundup to the Roundup: When Josh goes out of town… 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 August 8 – 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.