Speaking of the newspaper, did your local newspaper syndicate The Mini Page? Ours was housed in the Style section, and it was an insert that came out for kids to read on the weekend while the parents read the main newspaper.

I loved finding the word “mini” in the Mini Spy, and I shuddered as I read most recipes for Rookie Cookie because I only ate peanut butter and jam.

In my head, it looked like a section in my parents’ newspaper. Though looking through the archive, perhaps not.

I know a lot of people in the world are sad about the massive firings at the Washington Post, which follows on the heels of the closing of the Kennedy Center for two years (to likely have everything memorable about the building destroyed), which follows on the heels of the destruction of the East Wing. I know these things are not related in the sense that two different entities are dismantling Washington institutions, but they are connected in my brain because they are my childhood.

The Washington Post is our local newspaper. Maybe people read it all over the world, but it was designed to cover our local news in addition to global news. When I was little, it told me the movies in my theaters, followed the sports teams in my city, reviewed theater in my area, and covered events on our streets.

Reading the newspaper (fine, most often the Style section) felt impossibly grown-up when I was in grade school. Now, reading the newspaper feels impossibly sad.

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

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The kids have a week off where they align this summer, and I thought it would be fun for all of us to go to Venice. I got out the journal I kept the last time I was in Venice to get the name of the hotel. There was a long entry where I stressed over the cost of the place. My friend had made the reservation for us, and it would cost each of us $60 per night. I lamented that I was paying triple what we’d pay per night for the rest of the trip.

I looked up the hotel today to see the cost per night. Remember, it was $120 per night for a very nice hotel in Venice. That same hotel today? $1,132 per night. Yes, it has been 25 or so years, but that seems excessive, no?

In Rome, it was $40 per night for a whole apartment in Trastevere. A quick search on VRBO shows it will be about $540 per night for a comparable apartment.

I can’t tell if the price difference is normal inflation, supply and demand, or priced to curb tourism. In any case, we’re not going to Italy this year.

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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.

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.