My heart wasn’t into watching the opening ceremony, but it also felt wrong to skip it. You only get so many Olympics in life, and I can’t ever remember missing one.

But it’s frankly hard to sit down and pretend we’re one big friendly world, united in our love of sport. I mean, I know that’s the point. That we set aside our differences for a few weeks and remember that we all like to shoot ourselves very quickly downhill over the snow. But there is also something a little disingenuous about it.

Still, Sabrina Impacciatore was amazing. And I loved the tubes of paint pouring ribbons onto the stage. And the lighting of the torch always makes me feel weepy.

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.

Every once in a while, I think about spending a year or so living in another country — think of it like an adult version of study abroad. I would plant myself in one town and just… live life. Go to the grocery store, write blog posts, go to work, and read books. Just in another place.

I have places I would like to do this, but those places aren’t keen to have people just plop down and rent a cottage for a year. So I always bookmark articles that I find that talk about this concept for a place I may not have considered.

Enter Croatia.

I have not given a lot of thought to Croatia as a place to live for a year.(Visit, yes. live, no.) But Croatia has a program where if you pre-pay your rent for a year, you can stay for a year.

Croatia offers a little-known “apartment visa” that allows foreigners, including Americans, to establish residency simply by showing they own residential property or hold a long-term rental lease. Applicants also need to demonstrate sufficient funds and health insurance. The visa is generally valid for a year.

It doesn’t say it in this article, but more poking around turned up multiple spaces that said you need to pre-pay the rent for the year. There are likely other rules, but it was an interesting idea.

Many museums limit the size of the bag you can bring into exhibits to an A4 sheet of paper, or approximately 21 x 30 cm (8 inches x 11.5 inches… ish). My daily bag comes from Tom Binn, and I love it, but it’s 26.5 cm x 30 cm. It’s a small difference, but I get stopped and told the bag cannot come inside.

My other option is a 20 cm x 26 cm bag, which is always allowed in, but is a bit cramped. I carry a 12 cm x 21 cm notebook with me, and while it fits, the padding inside the bag means it often gets wedged in there, and I have to take everything out to slip it out.

Do you have an A4-sized bag that you love? Extra points if it has anti-theft protection and a cross-body strap. And is fabric and not leather.

This one is a little small, but I like it. This one is also a little bit small but getting closer. This one may be slightly too big.

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Did you know you could remove AI results from Google searches or only see results from a certain domain (e.g., .gov or .org). Now you do.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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A person recorded a monologue in English, moving from about 450 AD to the modern day. A timeline appears on the screen, and you note the date when you start to understand the monologue. Is this video accurate? Who knows! But let’s try it anyway.

I started being able to follow along in 900 AD, missing about half the words, but could mostly catch everything by 1300 AD. How did you do?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.