Category — Friday Blog Roundup

I want a secret treasure room.

It doesn’t even need to be a secret.

It could be a completely-out-in-the-open treasure room.

I loved the story this week about the couple who kept the door to a crawlspace hidden from their child for four years, and then turned it into his own secret hideout.  The finished product may be a little claustrophobic for my taste, but this is my fantasy:

Somehow we find a hidden, unused room in our house.  (Not in the basement.  There could be a cricket in the basement.  So any floor but the basement.).  It’s fairly large.  We fashion a speakeasy-like hidden entrance by placing a bookshelf door in front of it.  You pull a certain book off the bookshelf, and the door swings open to reveal my hideout.

The hideout has blue walls.  A muted, grey-ish blue.  And cinnamon-y orange, cozy chairs.  Maybe two of them?  And a little wooden table to rest your drink.  There is a computer on a desk in the corner.  This fantasy space could double as my workspace, I don’t mind.  There are bookshelves where I’ve culled out my favourite books such as Harry Potter or Hitchhiker’s Guide or anything Jasper Fforde.  (I still haven’t had his love-child… crap.)  And there would be one extra hour built into the day — an extra 25th hour — to spend in the room, reading and playing games on the iPad or watching a movie.  It would be completely silent in the room except when I turned on the sound on the iPad.

I want my treasure room.

What would be in your treasure room?

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Yes, this is your weekly reminder to back up your blog, social media accounts, and email.

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.

I started using BackWPup, a plugin on WordPress, this week.  So far it’s a bit confusing.  I’ll let you know if I figure it out.

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:

• “In the Depths of Hell That is Depression” (Real Life & Thereafter)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Serenity Now has a post about opening yourself up to love.  It makes you vulnerable, letting someone into your heart.  They could always leave or treat your heart poorly.  Or they could stay and cherish you right back.  My favourite part of the post came at the end: “When I find myself getting stressed or anxious, I’m going to stop what I’m doing and hug someone.”  What a perfect solution to a temporary moment of panic.

Kmina’s Blog has a post about her son turning four.  It’s a tiny slice of a life, and I love this line: “They know not to touch things that we do not buy, for example, like fruit or bakery products, or bottles, that can break, yet sometimes it is such a fun thing to run in the booze aisle, open arms.” She thinks she has nothing to blog about, but obviously, she does.  Sometimes life in general makes the most interesting post.

It’s not an IF post, but… it feels like she’s part of the community?  I loved Jodifur’s final post on her blog, enough that I’m quoting from it twice in one week.  She writes, “People stopped commenting, and maybe stopping reading, so she stopping writing.  Sometimes fairy tales don’t end the way you want them to, but they end anyway.”  Replace blogging with any other endeavour you attempt in life and it is the perfect way to sum up life: how other people’s actions matter as well as finding your own ending.

The death of Robin Williams brought out a lot of people in the community writing about mental illness.  I want to highlight three posts: “Why Suicide Isn’t Selfish” (No Way to Say It), “Robin Williams, Death, Life, and Freeing the Genie” (BioGirl), and “The Thing You Never Knew” (The Kir Corner).  All three posts were beyond moving.

The roundup to the Roundup: What would your secret treasure room look like?  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 8th and August 15th) 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.

I was reading Susan Sontag’s best productivity tips on Lifehacker, and they were… as you would suspect from Sontag… simple and brilliant:

I will have lunch only with Roger. (‘No, I don’t go out for lunch.’ Can break this rule once every two weeks.)

I will write in the Notebook every day. (Model: Lichtenberg’s Waste Books.)

I will tell people not to call in the morning, or not answer the phone.

I will try to confine my reading to the evening. (I read too much — as an escape from writing.)

Lifehacker’s point was that she made rules for breaking her rules, but I was sort of more amazed that she set up clear, unapologetic boundaries for herself.  I do not have said boundaries.  I mean, yes, I have them in theory, tucked somewhere in my brain, but I rarely follow them.  I also do not want to “do lunch” in the sense that I lose an hour or more of work time when I do (from an already truncated work day).  And yet I say yes to lunch.  Because I like the person and want to spend time with them.

Because I work from home, people think nothing of calling to chat during my work day.  When I’m not on deadline, it isn’t technically a problem, except every minute I spend on the phone talking is a minute I’m not moving forward with a project.  The answer is that I should pull a Sontag and not answer the phone.  But then I feel rude.  I guess the point is that Sontag didn’t care if she was rude, and she reaped the consequences of having people think of her as rude.  But she got stuff done.

And I guess I was struck by her admittance that she used reading as an escape from writing.  I have two ways I use reading — to enjoy a story and as an on-ramp to my own writing projects.  I don’t really need the on-ramp for blog post writing, but I often need to read a chapter before I can work on a fiction manuscript.  Reading that she confined her reading to the evening made me wonder what she used as an on-ramp.  Or did she not need an on-ramp?  Could she sit down and just… write.

Interesting thoughts.

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This is a really cool video on how passwords work on a lot of sites:

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Yes, this is your weekly reminder to back up your blog, social media accounts, and email.

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.

And if you don’t know how to back up your blog, read this post on BlogHer that talks about manual backups and plugins.

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:

• “Should Adoptive Parents be in the Delivery Room?” (Creating a Family)
• “Love is All You Need” (No Way to Say It)
• “We are Finally Having a Baby” (Dreaming of Dimples)
• “The Incredible Privilege” (Losing Lucy and Finding Hope)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about the wall of baby photographs seen in the doctor’s office or clinic.  She wonders if the hope that some take from the wall balances with the pain seeing those pictures brings for others.  If they get under the skin of some people, whereas others don’t consider them at all.  It’s an interesting post and an interesting discussion in the comment section.

Climbing the Pomegranate Tree has a post about a divorced friend who lamented three years ago that she would never meet someone to build her family with who recently announced her pregnancy.  It’s a brief post that packs a punch.  And the title made me think of the difference between the sail boats and motor boats zipping around the harbour.

Lastly, An Engineer Becomes a Mom has a post that I want to hand people every time they say the words “just adopt.”  There is no “just” in adoption, for any member of the triad, and this post sums up the complicated nature of adoption, considering a situation from a multitude of angles.  Your heart will go out to everyone in the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Susan Sontag’s productivity notes.  How passwords are stored (or not stored).  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 1st and August 8th) 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.

i09 had a post about the personality test that came in The Pigman — which, yes, I read in middle school.  You are given a brief situation and then need to mentally debate the actions of the characters.  Ready?

A husband and wife live on one side of the river.  They have a good marriage and genuinely love each other BUT the wife has a lover on the side.  She hates this fact about herself and tries to resist the relationship, but she goes to this lover every time her husband goes away.  The lover lives on the other side of the river.

One day, the husband needs to leave on a business trip.  The wife begs him to take her along, but he tells her that she’ll only be in the way.  He leaves without her and she goes to her lover’s house.

One morning, she is leaving her lover’s house, trying to beat her husband home so he won’t know about her infidelity, when she encounters an assassin on the bridge that spans the river.  She knows that if she tries to cross, he will kill her.  She doubles back and goes down to the water where she asks a boatman to take her across.  He agrees, but asks for a great deal of money.  She doesn’t have the cash, so she goes and asks her lover to give her the money so she can get home safely.  He tells her that getting across the bridge is her own problem.

So she tries to cross the bridge, and she’s killed over the river.

As i09 writes, “The cast of characters in this little drama is – husband, wife, assassin, lover, boatman. List the characters in order you consider them responsible for the wife’s death.”

Scroll down and put your answer in the comment section.  Then come back here to read the rest of this post and click here to see what each character represents.

*******

Yes, this is your weekly reminder to back up your blog, social media accounts, and email.

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.

And if you don’t know how to back up your blog, read this post on BlogHer that talks about manual backups and plugins.

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:

• “On Living with Ghosts” (Inconceivable!)
• “Mine” (MissConception)
• “Dreams and Reality” (Invincible Spring)
• “The Weight of Weight: Women and Body Image” (Lavender Luz)
• “Should You Be an ‘Open Book’ in Adoption” (Creating a Family)
• “At the Playground” (Baby, Borneo or Bust)
• “The Closing of Bones — Part One” (Schrodinger’s Catbox)
• “The Closing of Bones — Part Two” (Schrodinger’s Catbox)
• “My (Ongoing) Journey with Secondary Infertility” (Runnin’ in Circles)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Searching for Our Silver Lining has a post about feeling silenced.  She so eloquently points out: “There’s a problem that emerges when one is silenced. For most humans, voicing worries and frustrations is a way to process what is happening. A form of problem-solving … Silencing takes all of that away, leaving the person instead involved with a growing shapeless form that tortures and torments. It also instills a sense of shame and guilt, all the while destroying.”  Go read her post in full.

Tales of a Batty Nurse has an emotional post about searching for and finding her birthmother’s name.  It’s a brief post, but it summarizes so well why children should always have access to their birth records.

It’s not an IF post, but I feel that it speaks to a general feeling that pops up often in our community.  I love the honesty and openness in Sassymonkey’s post about depression.

Inconceivable! has a post about her tattoo, and I love this sentiment: “When I first started considering getting a tattoo, I wasn’t particularly serious. I was worried about the permanence. I worried about making marks, about forever altering myself in any way.  Then infertility hit and I realized something: life was going to put marks on me, whether I willed it or not.”  The ink she chose is pretty too; prettier than infertility and loss and stomach bruises and surgery scars.

Lastly, Amateur Nester has a post about weight gain and infertility.  She writes of the extra pounds: “It’s all due to a combination of fertility drugs, not being able to exercise during treatment cycles, poor eating habits, and not feeling motivated to exercise during non-treatment cycles.”  Infertility, the gift that keeps on giving!  As someone who had to buy new jeans (and cried hard doing so), I stand by her in solidarity.

The roundup to the Roundup: How did you rank the characters?  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 July 25th and August 1st) 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.

Ooooh, this is so trippy, but it totally worked for me. By this point, I get how he did it, but without touching the pause button or doing anything other than watch and play along (it’s only a minute video), tell me if it worked for you.  Make sure you watch all the way to the end!

Did it work for you?

*******

Yes, this is your weekly reminder to back up your blog, social media accounts, and email.

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:

• “The Problem with the Vocal Minority” (My Cheap Version of Therapy)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Better Full Than Empty popped up with a post recently.  (I’m late with this, and strangely, I read it and commented BEFORE I wrote the last Roundup.  But I missed my bookmark until now.  And since it’s my blog and I write the rules, I’m including it.  So there.)  She imagines the-child-that-should-have-been as a two-year-old.  She writes, “On days like today the giant pile of what isn’t weighs me down. I have hit a wall.”  It’s a beautiful, brief post about mourning.

Birds, Bees, and Medicine has a post about baby showers: why she doesn’t want one and why she is having one.  And I just liked the idea of a clambake/non-babyish baby shower.  It’s fun to see people thinking outside the box.

Lastly, The Road Not Travelled is reeling after being laid off from her job.  She compares the sensation of disbelief over hearing the news to the astonishment she felt after her daughter died.  She brings us right into the moment with “sitting on an almost-empty homebound train, staring out the window…”  As she says, she survived 16 years ago, and she will survive this too.

The roundup to the Roundup: Did the magic trick work for you?  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 July 18th and July 25th) 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.

So this is it.

The 8th anniversary of the Roundup.

8 years, 403 posts, about 1600 posts highlighted.

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Yes, this is your weekly reminder to back up your blog, social media accounts, and email BUT, it is also an opportunity to point you towards a post that Keiko sent me.

It’s a checklist every blog owner should fill out and keep offline (yes, you need to make a paper copy) in order to have this information at your fingertips should the shit hit the fan with your site.

So an extra little task to throw into your weekly backup (because you are performing a weekly backup, right?)

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:

• “Sailor on the Rainpool Sea” (Blood Signs)
• “Crying Over Spilled (Breast) Milk” (The Long and Winding Road… to Parenthood)
• “So… How Did it Happen?” (Just Stop Trying and It Will Happen)
• “Visiting My Sister” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Go Quickly” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Northern Star!
• “When Your Rainbow Baby Dies” (Diana Wrote)
• “Where Are the Health Professionals?” (Stillbirth Matters)
• “Broken” (Stop, Drop, and Blog)
• “Right Where I Am” (Still Life with Circles)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Something Out of Nothing has a post about anniversaries on the infertility calendar, in this case, a good one.  One year earlier was the transfer date that yielded her current child.  I absolutely love this line: “Prior to this week, he used to marvel at baby girl’s completeness and muse, ‘A year ago, you didn’t exist.’  He can’t say that anymore.”  But what I really loved was the idea of setting aside Fertilization Day as a day for all future siblings to celebrate with the embryos that came from that batch.  It’s a unique holiday only singletons born from the same embryo batch could celebrate.  A tiny silver lining?

Life as I Know It has an encounter with a stranger that leaves her unsettled.  She writes, “But I knew there were little ears listening–ears that miss nothing, that internalize everything. How I responded was important. Yet again, I was woefully unprepared for dealing with this kind of situation.”  Despite feeling unprepared, she handled the man’s question beautifully.

Bee in the Bonnet has an emotional post about losing fictive kin, her mother’s best friend who was a second mother to her.  How the outside world can’t wrap their brain around relationships; that we constantly ask (and judge) how close two people are based on what we assume about relationships.  And in this post, it is quite clear that the labels we put on relationships such as mother, daughter, aunt, or friend do not convey the amount of love that exists between two people.

Lastly, It Is What It Is (or Is It?) has a post about a breakthrough that came in therapy, connecting all of her current and past behaviours to a single event: feeling trapped.  It’s a fascinating post about how the brain works; how our experiences inform our future actions.  And how we can rewire our brains to think differently once we know what informs our decisions today.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s the 8th anniversary of the Roundup.  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 July 11th and July 18th) 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.