There is a saying that you’ll never be younger than you are today. I guess it’s not just a saying because it’s actually true. Whatever age you are today, tomorrow you will be that age + one day.

I’ve never quite understood the point. Is it that it’s easier to do many things when you’re younger, so if you wait to get things done, you’re making it harder on yourself? Or to not waste today because it’s technically part of your youth, even if you’re 89 years old?

It was in my head because we’ve been talking a lot in our house about whether today is the easiest day to be a human because tomorrow will be that much harder. And then that much harder the day after, and so on.

On one hand, it feels true. It feels like the world was easier in many regards when I was younger. But maybe that’s just because the hard things turned out to be surmountable because we surmounted them. I remember worrying a lot prior to this point. Maybe the media didn’t foment our anxiety to the same degree, but that doesn’t mean the anxiety wasn’t there.

A certain percentage of people have struggled terribly to meet (or failed to meet) their basic needs. A certain percentage of people have not struggled at all to meet their basic needs. And the vast majority of us are in the middle, worrying about how we’ll meet basic needs, sometimes making sacrifices we don’t want to make, but ultimately meeting our basic needs.

Is it harder to be human today? Will tomorrow be that much microscopically harder than today? Or, unlike the original idea about aging, do changes come around in time to help us move forward again?

We had our penultimate wellness visit with the pediatrician. Our doctor will see patients until they leave college, which means next year will be the final time we go to her office.

We secured her as their doctor while they were still in utero, and she saw them when they came home from the hospital in tandem with their neonatologist. She has known them their whole lives, through every stage, every milestone, every vaccine, every ear infection.

It would be easier to go to a GP at this point. The pediatrician’s practice is out-of-network, which creates extra steps for simple things. But I’m finding it hard to say goodbye to someone who has known them their whole lives, and the kids are not eager to start over with someone new.

But very soon, they will need to start going to someone who doesn’t know them at all. It’s such a small relationship; a person we only see once a year at this point. But somehow it feels much bigger than 0.27% of our year.

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

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I blame Dear John for adding another game to my daily game sessions. Wordiply is from The Guardian. You get a few letters in a row, and you need to make the longest word possible that uses those letters in a row.

For instance, if the letters were CHIC, you could make CHICken. But you could also make hierarCHICally, which is 14 letters vs 7 letters. “Hierarchically” would win over “chicken.” The point is to make the longest word possible and when you think you have, reveal how close you are to the actual answer.

I am terrible at this game and usually settle too early. But it’s also pretty clever and not timed, so I like that I can think about it while I go about the rest of my day.

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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.

Because Quentin is super smart — he can find a timothy hay treat in record time — we got him two toys.

The first is a set of stacking cups. He loves to pick up things and throw them, and stacking cups felt like something he could spend hours stacking up and taking apart.

The second is a wooden puzzle with six circular pieces. You can hide a treat under the piece, and the pig has to remove the piece to find it.

We also bought him a new food dish because one of the things he loves to throw is his dry food dish. He flips it upside down immediately after I fill it, sending the food everywhere. He’s pretty good at snuffling around and eating the pieces off the ground, but it creates a mess, so we wanted to remove bowl privileges.

Unfortunately, the new bowl was terrifying. TERRIFYING. He cowered in the corner when I put it in his cage, shaking all over. Even after I removed it, it took him a good hour to return to normal.

The stacking cups last one hot second. I put a treat between each cup to teach him to stack and unstack them. He ate the top treat, then took the rest of the cups and threw the whole stack in the air. This released all of the treats at once, and we made the mistake of laughing when he did this. He ran around, collecting all of his treats.

But the wooden puzzle is a big hit. The first piece or two is difficult to get out, but once he creates some space, he removes them in order of most favourite snack to least favourite. He also cleans it up and puts the pieces back and removes them again, checking to see if something new appears. He can easily play with it for an hour without getting bored.

He’s ready for Guinea Pig Harvard.

We spent last weekend at the beach. We needed a break, but we also learned that the US Fish and Wildlife Service was dismantling the visitor’s center in January in preparation for the moving of the beach in 2027, and this would be the last time to see it. It was the site where the ChickieNob first decided that she needed a pet clam. And while we hadn’t been inside in many many many years, it was still sad to think about its demolition.

It was a little grey and misty on Saturday, and a small section of the building was already missing. But I was able to take a few pictures to remember the building. We found a park that allowed us to look out over the water once they close the current beach. And we ate a lot of ice cream, watched Taskmaster, and read books.

It was kind of perfect.

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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.

The Barreness asks the question many of us think when we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror. She captures well the emotions of the moment, too: “It is a strange time we are living in, and being here in the states makes it even more surreal by each hour. I am heartbroken and exhausted and constantly worried about something or another.” I absolutely loved this truth: “Fear presents itself differently in us all.” Sending a hug.

Swistle captures how I feel when the kids leave to go back to college. She writes, “Having all the kids home reminded me that my main job (taking care of all the kids), which has long-since stopped being a full-time position, is ever continuing to diminish—which makes me look around at what is left.” Change is hard.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ is back from an amazing trip, and she recounts how children mostly didn’t come up as a topic or consideration during their travel. She compares it with another blogger’s trip and wonders what factor made their two experiences so different.

The roundup to the Roundup: Goodbye, visitor’s center. 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 9 – 16) 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.