Category — Uncategorized

While Beorn is definitely better than he was last Saturday, he still isn’t completely himself. He’ll wheek for treats or food, but he doesn’t popcorn around while waiting for me to do his bidding. He’ll eat vegetables if he doesn’t see his green bowl. That thing TERRIFIES him, which is strange because if you remember, he deeply mourned the matching green hay dish.

He will not walk into two-thirds of his cage. If I put food in the back of the cage and set him down, he’ll eat for about four minutes before he remembers that he doesn’t like this section of the cage and runs back to the front third of the cage, leaving the food behind. He will not drink from his water bottle even though I moved it to the front third of the cage. He will not sleep inside his hide-y house or go near it. He will not play the game we play with an alfalfa cookie every night before bed.

I spoke to the vet, who told me to give him time. He had a big scare, and he needs to gain confidence. In the meantime, I should do what makes him comfortable, including placing the vegetables on the ground near him and giving him cuddles instead of exercise.

I am dubious whether this will help him return to his old ways, but I’m giving the cage another thorough washing this weekend, so we’ll see if he resets on Monday.

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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.

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And now the blogs…

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.

Infertile Phoenix got a baby shower invitation. She writes: “I’m excited to be invited. I’m looking forward to celebrating my friend’s daughter. I’m not making plans for after the shower in case it stirs up my emotions. But it might not. The truth is, I don’t want to be pregnant anymore.” I think that’s such a brilliant point — leave yourself space after the shower. It’s a tiny thing you can do for yourself, just in case.

Middle Girl writes about the dreaded household task of taking care of the laundry. It’s not the folding or sorting; it’s that the activity is a time-suck as she waits for it to be done in a noisy space. It made me think about the household task I would be most happy to give up. It may be meal planning. I dislike the planning even more than the cooking.

The roundup to the Roundup: Getting the pig confident 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 October 11 – 18) 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.

Asha Dornfest wrote about shredding her journals recently. 38 years of recorded thoughts… gone.

This is a topic I think about a lot. I keep a bullet journal and process my feelings mixed in with my daily tasks. I have journals going back to third grade. What do I do with this writing? It’s not the sort of thing you want people to read after you’re gone because it’s not the sort of thing you want people to read while you’re still here. I kind of wish those journals could be connected to my existence, and once I’m gone, they disappear in a puff of smoke. (Or some more environmentally-friendly option.)

The point is that you don’t know when you’re going to die, so waiting for a perfect last moment to destroy them means possibly waiting through the final moment I had to destroy them. So, do I do it now? Wait a few years? Write out my wishes and tack it to the front of each notebook? Trust people will respect my wishes?

I can’t imagine destroying my journals. And I can’t imagine keeping them. I’m stuck between these two thoughts. It’s not feasible to go through them and rip out certain pages. What bothers me today may be different from what bothers me in ten years.

Would you shred your journals?

Yesterday morning, I came downstairs, singing Beorn’s good morning song. Yes, our pig gets a good morning song. I took away his sleeping space and set down his food bowl, as I do every morning, still singing the song, when he suddenly jumped forward, terrified, and hit the wall of his cage. I jumped back, terrified, and stopped singing.

Whenever I approached the cage, he would run frantically, bouncing off three walls, and scream.

I went to get Josh and thus began 12 hours of trying to calm down the pig. We missed services. We tried giving him his favourite foods. We tried taking away foods that seemed to make him more upset. We tried speaking to him in a quiet voice. We tried speaking to him in a normal voice. We tried to reason with him. We gave him back his sleeping space. He stood at attention for 12 hours, sniffing the air, his back hunched in fear, too afraid to move.

He was okay out of the cage, so we cleaned the cage. That helped in the sense that he would allow us to place things back in his cage, all cleaned. But he still seemed skittish. We gave him a bath, which helped more. He finally stopped freaking out and ate hay, watching us to see if we were judging him.

The most likely explanation is that guinea pigs will mark places they deem dangerous if they’re scared to let other pigs know that something scary is there. But it was like Beorn forgot HE was the pig who marked the space and spent the entire day worried about a danger that didn’t exist, which is super sad. But I’m glad he’s not running and screaming anymore.

He smells so good this morning because I used baby shampoo.

While we’ve encountered the lack of stamps on and off for the past few years, I just learned that the EU is phasing out passport stamps for travelers on November 10. This is a bummer because of the two ways I used my stamps.

One, trying to remember the dates we had been somewhere. This seems the most obvious use: Open the book, look at the stamp, and check the date.

Two, there is a point on every trip — usually early on — when I silently freak out and think I cannot possibly be this far away from home. When that happens, I usually flip through the passport book and note all of the other times I’ve freaked out but made it through this stage of the trip and been fine. From now on, especially once my passport renews, I’ll flip through blank pages and think… nothing. Because I will not see a visible reminder of where I was the last time I freaked out.

I’m sad they’re going away. Not everywhere, of course, but in many places, and I fear it’s the path forward for the future.

I read the most lovely, well-written, deeply honest personal essay about infertility recently, so I am setting it here in case you missed it, too.

It’s about stating where she is right now. She explains:

An actress friend of mine went public about her fertility issues ONLY AFTER becoming pregnant. Usually, when someone addresses infertility, there is a baby at the end of the struggle; a happy ending. But my story is different. My story is about not getting that proverbial ‘happy ending’ and navigating defeats without being defeated. Honoring that loss is part of life.

Go read it in full because the title is perfect.