We kind of forgot to watch the Olympics. We watched the opening ceremony, and then we had good intentions to watch events when we received alerts about medals or remarkable performances. But by evening, we’d forget again. And then we were listening to NPR in the car last weekend, and they mentioned the closing ceremony and I realized that we forgot the whole thing.

It’s not like we had something better going on. I think it just comes down to our attention being so fractured between the internet and all of the streaming services. Once upon a time, the only evening television would be the Olympics or a movie. Now, we are drowning in a sea of content, and we don’t know where to focus.

I’m sad that I missed it. I like skeleton and luge. I caught half of Nathan Chen’s winning routine on YouTube before I was interrupted. I’m sure I could Google and see some more. But… it feels like I not only missed this part of the zeitgeist, but that the zeitgeist itself sort of missed the Olympics, too.

Did you catch more than I did?

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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.

Grumpy Rumblings allows the person who leaves the most comments during the year to direct a donation. I love this because it feels like such an OG blogging moment — the sort of thing we used to do because our platforms could make a difference. I am grateful to bloggers who keep the spirit of the space.

Jewish IVF gives a pregnancy update, but includes a thought towards the end that I found so interesting. She writes, “Not getting my tubes tied just yet but along the lines of wanting the freedom to travel, I think part of me is wanting to dissociate from the ttc stage of life. I’ve prioritized family building for the vast majority of the past decade. It feels normal to want to clear some space for something new.” It not only makes total sense, but the action can give you true closure; something I’ve always found lacking on my journey because we stopped in the middle of things.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled writes about the idea of not being able to read while you’re in grief. This idea frightens me because reading is my self-care. She writes: “Coping with our own situation is taxing enough without taking on someone else’s, even when they’re just characters in a book.” So I definitely understood and anticipate I will one day be in a place where I can’t read. But it really freaks me out.

The roundup to the Roundup: I missed the Olympics. 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 February 18 – 25) 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.

Cup of Jo asked back in January, “What is your pro tip?” and people dropped over a thousand comments of life hacks.

Like this one:”I have a whiteboard on my fridge, but instead of writing what the meal plan for the week is (which I have written elsewhere), I write what I actually cooked for dinner each night as I’m putting leftovers in the fridge. Then I know what leftovers are no longer good.”

So smart. And this one we already do and have for years: “Travel with a plastic doorstop in your suitcase. Once in the room, wedge it under the door, making it impossible to open.”

And a perfect one: “Make a decision and then make it work.”

I am pulling out my top 10 from this list because there are too many good ideas to let float by. I’m capturing them in my bullet journal. What are your favourites?

I saw a bunch of people posting on Facebook about a “soup mother.” I assumed that it was a mother… who made soup? Which begged the question of why the soup maker needed her parental status in her name. But a quick Google session brought me here, to the idea of a soup mother.

It is sort of the soup equivalent to sourdough starter. Sort of. You take the remains of one soup and you add more ingredients to it to create the next soup. More like soup tag, maybe. Soup never goes to waste because one of the ingredients of your current soup is the leftovers of your last soup.

We did something similar with Stanley Tucci’s marinara sauce. We made it, and it was fine. But then his pasta e fagioli called for two cups of his marinara sauce. So we used the leftovers of the night before to make the soup, which was fantastic. In a true soup mother, we would take the pasta e fagioli and turn it into a vegetable soup by adding more stock and vegetables.

This appeals to my desire for zero waste, though I wonder how it works once you’ve added ingredients that don’t work in the direction you want to take the soup. Can you back yourself into a soup corner?

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

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As if you needed another reason to do Microblog Monday and write in your own space, I loved this article about the power of writing things down. When we give our thoughts a label — describe them and explain them — we make our thoughts manageable:

It is like when a doctor gives a diagnosis after hearing a list of symptoms; we give a label to describe a thought or a concept. And what happens to feelings that cannot be put into a label because they are too abstract? We use those categorical dimensions of positive or negative, self or others, past, present, or future, and so on, and it forces just anything to be labeled. It is a method for tricking the amorphous.

The diagnosis doesn’t remove any symptoms and it doesn’t solve the problem, but anyone who experiences unexplained infertility knows that a diagnosis (or label or name) makes a difference. It gives you a focus, a way forward.

Write it down. Get it out. Look at it on the screen. Release it.

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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.

I saw this super pretty way of capturing the year. (Or the month or, really, any time period. Don’t feel like you can’t start it today just because we’re in February.) You divide up a piece of fabric into 12 pie slices, and you embroider a tiny picture to remember the day. So, for instance, if you got coffee with a friend that day, you may embroider a tiny coffee mug. Or if you went on a trip, you may embroider a tiny landmark.

At the end of the year, you have a circle of fabric covered with tiny moments from your year, and you can frame it or turn it into a pillow, etc.

And then you start all over again.

I don’t embroider, but I loved the idea of doing the same concept with a doodle on a piece of paper. Make a tiny doodle to represent once moment in my day, and at the end of the time period, frame it.