1072nd Friday Blog Roundup

A and I were talking after I wrote about the toys, and she wanted to see Quentin in action, so I filmed him last weekend as he solved his wooden puzzle.

It usually takes him about 3—4 minutes to get all the treats now. He likes to check a few times during each session as to whether I’m going to move the pieces and hand him the treats, which I did early on when he would quit trying. But he always runs back to the puzzle and keeps going.

Ignore the dust in his fur. Right before I filmed him, he rolled around in some old bedding, and I didn’t notice and brush it off until after filming.

Isn’t my pig brilliant?

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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.

I’m a little late, but I read this last Friday. Dear John sends birthday wishes to her husband on what would have been his 55th birthday. It’s a quiet letter, but this part made my throat ache: “There’s a Robin Williams special on HBO – I was going to watch it today but didn’t quite feel up to it. I still have your picture with him hanging in our bedroom, even though looking at it sometimes reminds me of how you both died.” Sending a hug.

I love this guest post by Half Baked Life about her trip to India. It was her second time in India, and the two trips were very different. The trip was essentially a gift, and I love what she says about gifts at the end: “There’s an anthropologist who says one of the essential qualities of a gift is that it must ‘move,’ that if gifts aren’t passed on, that they lose their tranformative abilities and become just things.” Isn’t that a beautiful idea?

Lastly, All & Sundry goes through all of the big and little things she wishes were different, from the personal to the universal. The story about her patient, Isabelle, stayed with me for hours after reading the post. It is so hard only to be able to move forward in this world, moving to the next minute instead of being able to redo the moments that didn’t go quite right.

The roundup to the Roundup: Look at my smarty-pig. 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 January 30 – February 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.