I had a sobering realization my first week being 40.  I wasn’t entirely sure of the sex of all the Kardashian-Jenner children.  Or, rather, I should admit that there was one I assumed was a boy based on the name, and then discovered was a girl, and… well… the whole thing made me realize that I’m doing a terrible job keeping track of the Kardashian family.  You could even say that I can’t keep up with them.  I am not keeping up with the Kardashians.

This made me feel very old.  Like walking corpse old.

I told Josh that we need to keep on top of this.  We need to start watching more reality television.  We need to know what the kids are talking about, and no, they’re not talking about Wicked Tuna so those are wasted viewing hours.  We need to put our precious viewing minutes into things like Teen Mom and I Want to Marry Harry and one of those Real Housewives shows.

I feel like I’m pretty solid with good television.  We started Silicon Valley, which is really funny.  We’re watching In the Flesh because… you know… zombies.  And I’m super excited about seeing A to Z this fall, which sounds a little bit like a 500 Days of Summer-like show.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I need to up my bad television watching minutes this summer.  I’d like to know how to use them in the best way possible to keep up with Kardashian-like entities.  So if you have any recommendations for bad television, I would like to party my eyebrows off like the Rich Kids of Beverly Hills.

*******

Time for your weekly nag:

Tip of the week: Find an email client that will allow you to see emails while offline.  The reason?  You can use this email client as a space to back up your email.  Lifehacker had an article this week about email clients for Mac, though some, such as Outlook, also work on non-Mac computers.  Try Googling email client, work offline; a bunch come up.

This is just your friendly nudge to do your weekly backup.  I know, I know, who has the time to create backups on a weekly basis?  No one.  But you still need to do it and forgo ten minutes of something else, once a week.  Right now, before you do anything else, use this post to roll through a quick backup of your email, documents, images, blog, social media accounts, and mobile devices.  Reading the Roundup on the go and don’t have the ability to do your backup right now?  Email yourself a copy of the Roundup so that the email will serve as a visual reminder to get this task done.  Ten minutes of your time once a week may save you a major loss of time and data down the road.  Don’t have regrets.  So, on your marks, get set, back up!

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:

• “#YesAllWomen” (Stupid Stork)
• “A Month Out” (My Scar Smiles at Me)
• “Why Does She Get Two?” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “An Open Letter to the Baby Loss Community” (CarlyMarie Project Heal)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Infertility Voice has a post about the embryos being stored at her clinic and making the decision on what will become of them.  It’s not as simple as sticking to the ideas they had back when they started down this road.  They now also have information from their pregnancy to consider and maternal health — two factors that they couldn’t have known when they created and stored the embryos.  It’s an interesting look on this idea of making decisions before you know all the information, and how we make choices after the fact.

Inconceivable! often slays me with her gorgeous writing.  This week, she had a post about life after loss.  She writes of the figurative shoreline: “In the life I live in front of other people, I am fine. I get up each morning. I bathe, brush my teeth, arrange my hair. I laugh. I talk with people. I go to work. I’m a normal, functioning adult.  But when, inevitably, I find myself in the quiet spaces between the motions, I’m there on that lonely stretch of sand.”  I cannot do this post justice; especially when she melds life after loss with the idea of those first immigrants.  This post made me hold my breath.

Darling Propaganda, IVFer and sex worker, has an eye-opening post on #YesAllWomen which brings into play the hazards of her job.  But it’s also a thought I’ve heard echoed many times since the hashtag started making the rounds: that talking about it is just as hard as living it.  That sometimes it’s just as difficult to sit with all of those stories and think about them as it is to walk down a deserted street alone at night.  It’s a thought-provoking post.

There were a few controversies in the community this week, one of which is referenced in one of the second helping posts above.  But I really loved the post on  Today’s the Day! about the quality of our comments and the moderate button.  It brings into question who owns the comment box — the blog writer or the blog reader?  Is there an unspoken, loose contract between reader and writer, where both get to speak their mind as long as they’re being respectful?  If you’re going to have a comment box, should you have to accept all comments that fit your commenting guideline?  It’s an interesting conversation, especially since it took days for her comment to finally appear on the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: I would like to keep up with the Kardashians and welcome your television recommendations.  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 30th and June 6th) 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.

This is the last Roundup I will write in my thirties.

Gulp.

I wrote all of the previous Roundups as a thirty-something.  What if something happens to me next week when I turn 40?  Like I start writing in all-caps?  Or I get an urge to change my font to a lurid shade of pink?  Or instead of the Roundup, I feel moved to rename it something New Age-y like The Encircling?

I guess we’ll know what is what in the 497th Roundup.  Whoa… I’m going to hit 500 Roundups by my blogoversary.  I mean, that is unless I get all-caps-y with The Encircling.

*******

I told you I’d do it, and so I shall.  As I said in this post, I am going to annoy you every week with a reminder to create a backup of all your important documents, images, and sites.  It will appear in this top section of the Roundup, like so:

This is just your friendly nudge to do your weekly backup.  I know, I know, who has the time to create backups on a weekly basis?  No one.  But you still need to do it and forgo ten minutes of something else, once a week.  Right now, before you do anything else, use this post to roll through a quick backup of your email, documents, images, blog, social media accounts, and mobile devices.  Reading the Roundup on the go and don’t have the ability to do your backup right now?  Email yourself a copy of the Roundup so that the email will serve as a visual reminder to get this task done.  Ten minutes of your time once a week may save you a major loss of time and data down the road.  Don’t have regrets.  So, on your marks, get set, back up!

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.

******

That wasn’t too annoying, right?  By putting a reminder every Friday in the Roundup, I will remember to do my backup.  And in turn, you will remember to do your backup.  And we will all walk around patting ourselves on the back for taking a small step to ensure that we don’t have a major headache in the future.

*******

So the first time I saw this on BlogHer — before I read the post — I was taken aback. BlogHer featured my image in their badge for the Selfiebration?

And then I realized that the coding pulled your profile picture into the 10.  So everyone who visits that page on BlogHer (as long as they’re logged in) sees their own picture.  Oh my G-d, I love this so much.

*******

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:

• “And, One” (Tales from the Waiting Room)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Thinking Miracles has a post about reclaiming her space.  She left her blog during a difficult time, and even though life is not currently easy street, she wants to document moments lest they slip away such as the breakfast with her nephew that features in this post.  Welcome back, Thinking Miracles.

A Woman My Age has a gorgeous tribute to Maya Angelou.  It was the single best one I read all week, and that includes every tribute I read on every literary site.  The heart gets it best, and her post made me cry.  I love this: “I just wanted her to see me, really see how much I loved her, her words, her very being in this world.”

Serenity Now has a post about the twenty years that have passed since her cousin committed suicide.  Wow.  This post blew me away.  From the twist in your heart lines — “Have they all changed? Or did I just not KNOW them before?” — to the story of her cousin crashing someone else’s psychic reading.  If you read nothing else this week, read this post.

Lastly, No Ways to Say It has a post about the hashtag, #yesallwomen.  She writes, “Social media can bring us together in ways we never dreamed were possible. How many of us felt comfortable talking about our experiences with sexual assault before now? Probably not many. I know I certainly didn’t. Yet, seeing other women speak up and share their experiences made me that much more willing to share mine.”  I especially love the end of her post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Last Roundup written in my thirties.  Your weekly backup nudge.  Fun with code in the Selfiebration badge.  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 23rd and May 30th) 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 I realized this week that I write the Friday Blog Roundup every Friday.  And I feel like I’m pretty settled in that routine since… you know… it has been eight years of writing the series and I’ve only missed maybe 5 Fridays, ever.  I’d like to add something to that real estate at the top of the Roundup post that will run every week and serve as a reminder.  I’m writing this post to unpack this idea (so I can keep the weekly note in the Roundup to a small paragraph), and I will link to this post every Friday in order to help people form a new habit.

The Friday Backup.

Every week, I’m going to remind you to back up your email (yes, your email!), documents, images, blog, social media accounts, and mobile devices.  Anything and everything that matters to you.  Feel free to expand this idea by adding a comment below on additional places people should remember to back up and ways to back up (eg. external hard drives you love, backup plug-ins, etc).

Here are ideas on how to back up your email, documents, images, blog, social media accounts, and mobile devices in case you don’t already have a system in place.

Email

Yes, you can back up your email, and I do this weekly.  If I were ever to lose my email accounts, I wouldn’t lose my actual emails because they are saved to my hard drive (and backed up additionally on an external drive).  I will state now that I’m not a fan of giving access to my email account to another cloud-based system.  I know a bunch of them exist out there, and feel free to leave your favourite one in the comment section below.  But I won’t use them.

Instead, download an email client that you can use offline such as Outlook, Thunderbird, or MacMail.  Run your account through this client using POP or IMAP. (You will need to enter information both in your mail program and in the settings screen of you email program such as Gmail, but the whole thing should take under 5 minutes.)  Start downloading your messages.  This is going to potentially take hours or even days depending on the number of emails you have archived.

Once everything is current, take your account offline.  And leave it offline.  You’re not going to open up this email client again until next Friday when you bring the account online in order to create a backup.  This way, if you lose access to your account because you are hacked or your email program is down for the moment, you can still look at all your old emails.  Neat!

Documents

Do a weekly backup of your hard drive onto an external hard drive.  I personally like Western Digital’s My Passport, though I don’t use the cloud feature.  I like it because it plugs in like a thumb drive and unplugs when I’m not performing a backup.  A terabyte of space should cost about $80… maybe less.

Back up everything.  Just do a copy of the entire hard drive.  This will ensure that with one click, you will have copies of your music on iTunes or your documents or your pictures.  The other option is to back up certain folders, such as Pictures or Documents.  But really, one click and done.

The first time you back up your hard drive, it may take hours so leave a lot of time.  The next time you back up your computer, give the hard drive permission to skip anything already on the external hard drive.  It should be a quick update after that first, initial backup.

Images

Again, I’m not a fan of cloud-based services, though a lot of people use Flickr or Dropbox to back up images.  Instead, I have a copy of all images on an external hard drive and I burn a copy of same images on a disc.

Blog

Some automatic backup services are a violation of your Terms of Service and can get your blog shutdown if found.  Other people use free software such as Blogger or WordPress, so those plug-ins may not be accessible to them.  So to be more inclusive of all blogging situations, I’m going to recommend that you do a simple “poor man’s” backup of your blog.  Go into tools or a similar category and look for the word “export.”  Export a copy of your blog and save it to your hard drive.  This will give you a version of your posts and comments in a form that can be uploaded (if you ever need it) to a new site.  Now take a screenshot of the front page of your blog so you can remember layout, etc.  Lastly, cut-and-paste your posts into a Word Doc.  You won’t have your comments if the shit hits the fan, though hopefully you have a copy of your comments emailed to you.  Make sure your Word Doc and your backup copy are all in one folder that you can easily find on your computer.  You’ll add to the Word Doc every week, so make sure it is handy.

The first time you do this, it may take a bit of time.  But you’re going to do this every Friday like clockwork.  In the future, it will take up about two minutes of your life.

Social Media Accounts

You can create a backup of most social media accounts.  In Facebook, go into settings and choose “download a copy of your Facebook data” in general account settings.  Then click “start my archive.”  It takes a little while for Facebook to gather up your information, but they’ll send you an email when it’s ready for download.  Save your timeline information onto your hard drive. In Twitter, go into settings and scroll towards the bottom.  Click the box that says “request my archive.”  Again, an email will be sent when the archive is ready for download.  Save your tweets onto your hard drive.  Please weigh in through the comment section if you back up Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other social media sites and have a preferred method.

Mobile Devices

Take a few minutes to plug in and back up your mobile devices.  Make sure you’re running the most up-to-date software.  Make sure you’ve transferred purchases you made directly from the device.  Make sure you’ve transferred a copy of any photos or videos off your phone or iPad.  Sync your calendar and notes.  Clean off any apps you’re not using.  Wheeeew, much better.

RSS Reader

Make a backup of your rss reader, so you will have access to your feeds if the site ever goes down.  Every reader will be different, but with Feedly, go to the bottom of the screen where you see the three dots in the bottom left corner.  Click on those dots.  It will open a menu where one of the options is “organize.”  Click that.  Scroll to the bottom of that screen and click “save as OPML.”  Then download your feed by clicking the big green button.  Move the file into a folder on your hard drive labeled “rss reader backup.”

But wait, there’s more.

Download it a second time, and this time, instead of saving it, use the “open file” choice on the download.  Select a program such as Excel to open the file.  It should have your feed listed, one blog per line of the spreadsheet.  Save this as a file too.  If you ever lose access to Feedly (or the rss reader of your choice), you can use the first backup to upload your feeds elsewhere.  You can use your second backup to see a list of your feeds if you want to just click on one or two.

What else do you back up weekly?  Also add any services or devices you use that you love to the comment section.  For the sake of reading ease, I will move information from the comment section up into the post from time to time.

We’ve had a pair of bunnies living in our backyard for a while.  I noticed the first one about a year ago, right after Cozy died.  And then another one showed up this spring.  We’ve seen the two of them hopping through the neighbourhood, but they keep returning to hang out under a bush in the backyard.

This week, I noticed a new bunny, a tiny one about five inches long.  It was wobbling around, trying to hop.  I went outside and left him some carrots. (I’m against feeding wild animals UNLESS you are going to be crazy enough to keep feeding them indefinitely, and I am that sort of poor thinker.)

He ignored them for a bit, but I saw him creep up to them while I was doing yoga and start chowing down.

Pure love.  I hope he stays.

*******

Last weekend, we went to a wedding in Boston.  On our way home, we swung off the highway to stop in Tarrytown.  The twins had just read Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, and they wanted to see Mouse Ellis’s house where Washington Irving once slept.  We wove our way through the town, musing on locations where Sheila Tubman may have walked, and finally found ourselves on a winding road, traveling to Sunnyside.

Or, more accurately, the locked gates of Sunnyside.  It isn’t open on Mondays.

A lot of the town doesn’t seem to be open on Mondays.

So it’s now on our to-do list: hot vacation in Tarrytown.  I want to do the cemetery tour at night and freak ourselves out reading about the Headless Horseman while in Sleepy Hollow.  I love literary vacations.

*******

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:

• “Battle in My Brain” (On a Baby Quest)
• “How Infertility Has Changed Me in a Positive Way” (Battlefish)
• “Mother’s Day Conversation” (Weathering Storms)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Searching for Our Silver Lining has a post about milestones, starting with her twins but then extending that to the milestones we are anxious to hit as adults, or how hitting milestones too early can affect us as well.  She writes, “In a strange way, infertility has prepared us for the unknowns that come with parenthood. Sure, we knew it would be hard and there was no way to predict how, but the one thing we learned is how to survive moments of uncertainty and hardship. To find joy when it would be tempted to focus solely on the negative.”  Gorgeous, right?

Edenland made me smile with a post about teaching kids how to write.  She writes, “We all wondered aloud, where DO ideas actually come from? I said maybe all the ideas were floating around in the air and they just had to reach out and grab one.”  She manages to capture the wonder, the open-to-possibilities, the excitement of being a kid with a story.  Sometimes, as adults with stories, we need to remember how it felt to be a kid with a story: content just to tell it and not thinking so hard on how it is received and recognized.

Lastly, Bereaved and Blessed writes frankly about mental illness.  I love this post, walking you through the questions you may have about her diagnosis while admitting she shared a lot of these questions too.  It is a must-read post for… everyone.  Everyone who has been diagnosed or who knows someone diagnosed or who just wants to better understand what life is like with mental illness.

The roundup to the Roundup: The new bunny in our yard.  Love a good literary vacation.  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 16th and May 23nd) 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.

My friend (hi, E!) posted about Jessica McClintock shuttering her business, and I was mentally transported back to 1987 when a certain little girl (who would be me) stood before the congregation as a Bat Mitzvah wearing the most exquisite Jessica McClintock dress in the whole world.  It had a full pink skirt with a crinoline to make it stick out a bit. (One needed to be careful with said crinoline that it didn’t get tucked into the back of your tights after you went to the bathroom, creating a bubble of mesh across your bum.)  And white lace over the pink top.  It was the embodiment of innocence.  I loved that dress hardcore.  I felt like a princess in it.  Even though I sat with my legs open on the bimah.  Such a lady.

There were other Jessica McClintock dresses, but that one is still my favourite.

I went to a Bar Mitzvah last year and was stunned by the clothes.  As Josh commented, there was more material in the sleeves of some of the dresses we wore to Bar Mitzvahs than these kids were wearing over their whole body.  I somewhat live in fear of dress clothes when the ChickieNob grows up.  It is easy to find modest, everyday clothing in mainstream stores.  LL Bean swim suits, for the most part, cover the body.  Their t-shirts are not cropped to reveal preteen belly.  Gymboree clothes look as if they were made for a child.  I feel confident that I have choices when it comes to casual day-to-day stuff.

But dress clothes?  That’s a different story.  Spaghetti straps for toddlers?  Black spandex contraptions for tweens?  I haven’t deeply explored the world of dress clothes, but at first glance, I’m fairly nervous about how we’ll get through Bat Mitzvah season with bodies somewhat covered.  I’m not asking for a lot.  Just kids looking like kids until they’re not kids anymore.

So I’m sad to see Jessica McClintock go.   At least, the Jessica McClintock of the 1980s.  Those big, puffy marshmallow sleeves!  And lace, lace, lace.

*******

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:

• “Dear Infertile Friends” (Where the *Bleep* is Our Stork?)
• “A Love Project” (Where the *Bleep* is Our Stork?)
• “Remembering the 1 Samuel 1 Woman this Mother’s Day” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “Friendship 101” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Constant in the Darkness has an amazing post about the insecurities she feels in the role of adoptive mother.  It’s the battle between what she knows rationally, down into her bones, and the irrational thoughts that skim her mind.  I love this line: “This all seems crazy to a part of me that is very rational.  But it all makes perfect sense to a part of me that is frightened, afraid to let go, afraid to give in, afraid to trust.”  And I especially love the place she gets to by the end of the post.

Slaying, Blogging, Whatever has a post that starts out about being a special needs mother, but morphs into a look at motherhood in general.  That life doesn’t always go according to plan, and part of the job description is flexing your expectations.  Changing the way you do things.  Taking a step back to notice the good moments even amid the stressful ones.  It was just a great Mother’s Day eve post.

No Kidding in NZ has a moving post, poetically written, waiting for surgery while half a world away, people celebrated Mother’s Day.  It’s a brief post — just two paragraphs long — but it packs a punch.

Lastly, Mrs. Spit has a post about feeling like an ugly duckling while comparing herself to another woman.  She admits that there is no good answer to someone saying that they feel this way.  That telling someone they’re pretty doesn’t help.  And yet, we all have that need inside of us to hear that we are pretty.  It’s a post that you will think about even after you’ve stepped away from the screen.

The roundup to the Roundup: Goodbye Jessica McClintock.  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 9th and May 16th) 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.