After years of making fun of Josh and his love affair with his Yeti cup, I have tried and given in to the magic of the Yeti. It keeps drinks hot or cold for hours. Two hour meeting, no problem. (Well, I mean, a two hour meeting is a problem, but I have my tea to help me power through.) My iced coffee is now followed by a decaf English breakfast and sometimes a Twinings’ raspberry and lemon in the afternoon.

It feels positively luxurious.

I like to annoy the twins by talking about how I’m now part of Yeti nation, living the Yeti life, and part of Team Yeti.

They’ll learn, in time. They’ll borrow the cup and see the difference. They’ll understand the siren song of the Yeti.

In all seriousness, my long cups of tea really do make an emotional difference in my day.

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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:

• “Musings on a Soft Heart” (TheFrugalGirl)
• “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” (Afterward Honesty)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I had Afterward Honesty’s post for this week. She revisits her old hometown, returning after nine years away. I love this piece: “As we proceeded through the quaint, well maintained town center, and I laid my eyes on the very sidewalk that used to carry me from school to my weekly flute lesson, I felt myself beaming into young Sarah in ways new and unexplored.” It’s a beautiful post about seeing an old place through a new lens, one that incorporates all that came after. But I especially loved the question at the end.

Lastly, The Uterus Monologues has written a book. She explains: “Just over a year ago, I started writing a book. A book about everything that happened on the road to having a baby. A book about miscarriage. A book about how society treats miscarriage – or, more to the point, doesn’t treat miscarriage.” It’s coming out this winter, but you can order it now.

The roundup to the Roundup: Living the Yeti life. 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 August 19 – 26) 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.

Are your preferences your own? It’s an interesting question posed by The New Yorker in regards to options dictated by algorithms. The thesis: “Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision. At times, the computer sometimes seems more in control of our choices than we are.”

Right.

So am I choosing the route I drive, or is Waze? Am I choosing the books I purchase, or do I purchase books I know about because an algorithm fed them to me based on other purchases in the past? I definitely have fallen down a rabbit hole of British murder mysteries. But did I dig that rabbit hole? I’m kind of happy to be here, but I don’t know what I’m missing out on by taking this path.

The piece goes on to talk about algorithmic anxiety, which I’m not sure I feel. I’m more algorithmically curious about where my preferences begin and outward influences end.

ChickieNob and I like to send each other pretty things. The Wolvog and I text back and forth links for video games, but the ChickieNob and I like to aim for things that make us scroll backward to look at again. Our latest find is Temple St. Clair. Look at this ring.

We text old Georg Jensen rings (Astrid Fog, 1971) and Cathrineholm dishes. It makes me happy when a text pops onto my phone, knowing that I’m about to look at something pretty for no other reason than the fact that it is nice to look at pretty things.

Show us something pretty.

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

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I didn’t expect to get this enthralled by an article about addresses. I thought the solution for no address would be to assign everyone a post office box in a centralized location, wondering how it would work because people may need to travel long distances to get mail.

But this system of using Google Plus Codes is brilliant.

Most articles about technology are about how much it sucks, but it’s important to remember how much we gain from tech.

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

While I have zero desire to read and then re-read Proust, I thought the idea of this book club focusing on one book (depth instead of breadth) fascinating. Thank you, Strong Sense of Place, for writing about this.

There are definitely books I re-read and gain new insights from each time I read them, but adding in the discussion element — continuously being exposed to everyone else’s growth and change and pouring that into a single book — and then being able to refer back to past discussions would be amazing.

I’m mildly interested in seeing the documentary about the 17-year-old book club mentioned in the article, but I’m more interested in which books could stand up to this kind of depth. There are plenty of book clubs built around a canon — Agatha Christie, for example — but few that are built around re-reading a single book.

I think it could work with Handmaid’s Tale, especially if you bring in current events. What other books could you see turning into a one-book book club?