Category — Friday Blog Roundup

I really love posts about productivity, even though I rarely put any ideas into actions. My bullet journal works for me, so I’m sticking to it. But I recently read a paragraph that defined everything for me:

Productivity is about understanding what you really want to do, then building systems to make it work for you. The goal isn’t Inbox Zero. (Who gives a shit?) Your goal is to enable yourself to perform at your very best, every day, and over the course of weeks and months and years.

Forget the fact that I give a shit about Inbox Zero, that is the best summary of productivity I’ve ever heard.  And it’s black-and-white.  Do you have a system that works?  Then you have the potential to be productive.  If you can’t explain your system or it’s too convoluted to use consistently or you don’t have one at all or you can’t even define what needs to get done?  Then you have a lot working against you in the productivity department.

Like the author of that blog post, I have systems to cover the fundamentals.  Okay, I’m a little hazy on the psychology section.  I have a terrible time saying no, I’m not positive, and I would never describe myself as resilient.  I’m sort of like a walking Russian novel.  But wait!  I’ve got the detail triangle all sewn up with my bullet journal.  So I have that going for me.

If you’re not feeling productive, maybe that post will trigger a new system for you.

*******

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 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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inexplicably Missing has a post about being in one of those limbo spaces; needing to make decisions but not really having information to go on.  Thus is the life with unexplained infertility.  She writes, “I thought I was getting good with just not knowing. But then maybe I’m kidding myself to say that, because honestly, this whole infertility thing has got me feeling far less tolerant of uncertainty.”  Go over and read the whole post.

The Empress and the Fool is emerging from the newborn fog, seeing patterns begin to come back into her life.  She explains, “The girls napped at the same time today, and that precious window gave me a little time to write, to reclaim something of my own from my old life so I can better savor the blessings of my new one.”  I love that mental image of two sections of your life bridged by a common action.  Maybe I especially like that the action, in this case, is writing.

Anabegins has a post about tracking… everything.  This post resonated with me because I get very anxious when I track.  I need to write down everything (and it needs to follow capitalization and punctuation rules), and then it becomes one. more. thing. to. do. instead of a tool to help me live better.  I want to get started with My Fitness Pal again, but I don’t know how to track in a way that doesn’t drive me mad.  Posts like this give me hope, or at least let me know that I’m not alone.

Lastly, Empty Arms and Broken Heart has a post that may make you think the next time you see a kid melting down in a public space.  Instead of feeling irritated, it drives home the point that we all have hidden stories; things that inform our behaviour.

The roundup to the Roundup: How to be productive.  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 28th and August 4th) 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 frequently have songs pop into my head and cannot remember where they came from or how I know them.  It happened this week with a Hebrew one, so I called Josh at work and started singing it into the phone when he picked up.  When I finally ran out of measures that I remembered, he said, “Who is this?”

My heart stopped and I murmured slowly, “It’s Melissa.”

“Just kidding,” he said, and started tossing out possibilities, none that were even remotely close.  All I had to go on was that it was (1) an album that came out in the early or mid-90s, (2) was next to a Teapacks song on a mixtape but wasn’t a Teapacks song, and (3) had a woman who screamed out the bridge.

That afternoon, I searched the basement and found the mixtape.  (Well, mixCD.  It was one of my first mixCDs because I didn’t even have a CD player until 1999.  The mixCD is from 1997, and I had to play it on other people’s stereos.)  I put it on and found the song.  I was trying to figure out how to upload it to the Internet so I could ask someone the name of the song when Josh had the most brilliant idea: Shazam the song.

(I know.  He’s really smart.)

It was Ha-Mechashefot’s “Kesem al Yam Kineret.”  Of course!  I realized that I hadn’t heard anything about this band in years, so I Googled them, looking forward to buying myself a new album and discovered that the lead singer died probably somewhere around the time that I originally made the mixtape.  She was only 26.  Remember how I wrote this week about mourning the death of a celebrity?  What if it comes 20 years after a person’s death?

I couldn’t stop watching this video.  She was so… alive:

It has been stuck in my head all week.  But every time I start singing it, I feel sad.

*******

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 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:

• “Negative Thinking in Infertility and Childlessness” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “I Did Not Give Up” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Countingpinklines has a post about the baby gifts she knits.  She writes, “I find the act of gift giving for a new baby bittersweet. On one hand, I truly am happy for the friends and hope everyone will be healthy and happy. On the other hand, well, there’s always a persistent thought of ‘when will it be my turn?’”  Just like every baby announcement, each gift hits her differently.  But all the knitted pieces are gorgeous in the end; infused with love and hope.

ChezPerky has a post about keeping things in perspective.  She tells a story about a stressful morning, and how a chance meeting with a new neighbour changed the way she viewed all the annoying moments in her day.  And I love this thought because we all make promises to ourselves that we can’t keep: “I need to carry myself with more composure and stop always looking like such a mess. I will make this promise to myself. But by tomorrow morning I will have made a mess of my morning again. Maybe this time I can keep the promise an extra day. Thursday is a good goal. Right?”

Lastly, Delayed But Not Denied has a mind-blowing post, wondering how people around her mother felt seeing her pregnant belly.  Many people talk about the here and now — are people triggered by their pregnancy — but I never thought about how I was probably the reason for someone else’s sadness back in the 70s.  That someone saw my mother pregnant and maybe they went home and cried.  It also drives home the universality of the experience; that we didn’t invent infertility, and it will still be here long after we’ve stopped trying to build our families.

The roundup to the Roundup: The happiness and sadness of listening to good music from someone who will never make music again.  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 21st and 28th) 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 try not to brag about the kids, but this is an accomplishment that affects everyone on earth. The robot the Wolvog designed beat up all the other robots in the robot-fighting ring. His robot was the victor in the robot death match.

Now you may wonder how that affects you. Well, people, when the robots take over the world (and you know that they’re going to take over the world), my son can invent and program a robot that can beat up the bad robots. (Unless, of course, he uses his power for evil and designs the bad robots that take over the world.) So we’re totally safe.  (Unless we’re not safe because he designed the bad robots.)

I told him that I was proud of him because he could protect me from the “toasters” (as they say on Battlestar Galactica) in the same way that he protects Mommy’s face from stray baseballs when we’re at Nationals Park. (Yes, I actually ask my son to wear a mitt so he can catch baseballs that may knock me unconscious. You can never be too safe.) He rolled his eyes and muttered, “That’s not the way things work.”

I have zero clue what that means because this is exactly the way things work. Four teams made robots. Four teams set their robots in a ring and had them fight to the death. Three robots were destroyed by one robot. My kid’s robot. I promise, he has our back and will protect all of us. Unless he doesn’t.

He was particularly tween-ish when I told him that I was letting everyone know that he could save us.  He rolled his eyes and said, “If you must.”  Which I like to think means, “Oooh, I’m so excited to have everyone know that I made a good fighting robot” in teen-speak.

*******

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 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:

• “I Held a New Baby Yesterday” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “Until You Have Children” (Different Shores)
• “Negative Thinking in Infertility and Childlessness” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “The Intangible Losses of Infertility” (Life Without Baby)
• “In the Desert” (Nine and Ninety Nine)
• “Hard or Strong” (Fighting Infertility)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Lavender Luz has an update about a situation she discussed on her blog last year.  An adoptive mother was talking about her adult son moving close to his biological family so he could get to know them better.  A year later, the woman reflects on the experience.  I love when people come back and let you know how things turned out.

Raven Rambling writes about a hard conversation she started with her husband, but once the words were spoken, she learned that he felt the same way.  It’s a post about what you hope happens when you speak your heart — that you are not only understood, but you learn something about the other person, too.

Lastly, River Run Dry has a post about the experiences that shaped her into the person she is now, and how she’ll never know the roads not taken; the person she would have become if life had not unfolded as it did.  It’s really a post about the weight of our relationships; they’re strong enough to pull us in a new direction.

The roundup to the Roundup: The Wolvog will save us from the bad robots.  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 14th and 21st) 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.

Skip this section if you get queasy easily.

We were at dinner before heading to a carnival and somehow the topic of people vomiting on rides came up.  “I’m sure it’s very rare,” I reassured the twins.  “I’ve never seen someone vomit on a ride.”

Well, friends, I needed to take back that statement because about a half hour later, at the carnival, I watched a man vomit from the paratrooper ride.  Again and again and again.

We did not go on the paratrooper ride after that.  (Well, I wasn’t going to go on at all, so it’s more accurate to say that everyone else didn’t go on the paratrooper ride.)

I love amusement parks, but I realized that I don’t really love carnivals.  Isn’t that odd?  I mean, they’re sort of the same thing: rides, games, entertainment.  But while I love it when it is permanently cemented into the earth, I’m not quite as fond of it when it can be packed up and carted away to the next fairground.

Does your brain make a difference between carnivals and amusement parks?

*******

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 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:

• “And Another” (Bent Not Broken)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inconceivable! has a post about storks (like the actual bird) and omens.  It is a gorgeous post that contains this thought: “When I was first diagnosed with infertility, the one thing I wanted to know was whether or not the acute distress of not knowing and the horrible limbo of waiting would ever end.”  It’s about not being resolved but seeing the possible paths forward.

A Woman My Age has a post about adoptive parenting.  Her son’s birthmother wants her address because she wants to send a gift, and it opens up confused feelings because the longstanding relationship is changing and they’re navigating other situations.  She states: “I knew I could not fully control things and I think that was bit of an issue for me. It reminded me of opening up my life to infertility doctors and social workers.”  It’s about trying to figure out parenting after adoption when there are not clear, concrete, perfect answers.  It’s about writing your own parenting manual; being your own guide.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ has a post about acceptance that stems from a very cool idea.  She writes, “I think I’m going to go through my blog here, from the very beginning, and reblog, or update, some posts.”  So we write things in the moment, but how many of us go back and update or blog again about the situation with the gift of retrospection?  I, for one, am really excited to read what she writes.

The roundup to the Roundup: Carnivals vs. amusement parks.  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 7th and 14th) 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 cracked up through Joanna Rothkopf’s piece in the New York Times about exacting revenge in creative ways.  She explains reading Dante’s Inferno and the idea of contrapasso:

While reading the book, terrified and exhilarated, I filled my evenings with grotesque fantasies of the punishments I might receive for my unchecked narcissism and offensive beauty. That is, until I remembered that “Inferno” was fiction and that hell was just an invention, designed to make people fear the consequences of their actions, as well as to comfort those who had been wronged without justice.

So she instead points out the ways she seeks revenge in the here and now, including punishing people who try to skip the line in Starbucks by remaining in front of them and then ordering something complicated veeeeeery veeeeeeery slowly.

But I really love the end thought:

Besides, doesn’t every decision ultimately originate at that same intersection of selfishness and altruism, exactly like that summer service trip I chose to take, looking at once to learn about the injustices of the world and to make out with boys? Aren’t we all a combination of totally horrible and vaguely heroic?

Aren’t we?

*******

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 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:

• “A Vacation Breakthrough that Led to a Healthier, Happier Family & Kindness for All” (Hands Free Mama)
• “Lack of Understanding is a Worldwide Problem” (Infertile Phoenix)
• “Is All This Worth It?” (Countingpinklines)
• “There’s Nothing Quite Like Pregnancy Absence” (Delayed But Not Denied)
• “No Omens” (Lady Part Adventures)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inexplicably Missing has a post about her mood changing during transfer day.  She realized that hearing the negative side of things (rather than focusing on the positive) was changing her experience with her cycle.  But before she could let the doctor know that she wanted to focus on what was positive about the blastocyst they were transferring, she heard bad news mixed in with the good.  She writes, “So yet again, I left the transfer feeling somewhat deflated. This sucks because in reality, having even just one blastocyst to transfer is a good thing.”

My Path to Mommyhood has a post about a friend getting the adoption agency call and processing her own feelings about being happy for someone else while being sad for herself.  She admits: “It’s a hard balance, this happy-sad dichotomy. I am not any less confident in our decision, and I know that the little voice is the most unhelpful bitch ever. I know we did what was right for us. It’s just so hard to see (and feel) this contrast at this particular moment in time.”

Lastly, A+ Effort has a story about an incident at a museum.  She tells the story in the form of a letter to the museum, pointing out: “I don’t know the volunteer’s name and wouldn’t presume to assign a motivation to his actions, but the impression he gave was that the rules are selectively enforced on the basis of race.”  But it’s the follow-up to the letter, the discussion of privilege extension that gave food for thought.

The roundup to the Roundup: Revenge creativity.  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 June 30th and July 7th) 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.