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

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I read about this project, the After Life Experience, and thought it was fascinating. You are tasked with coming up with a single memory to live inside forever. Even if you don’t want to contribute one, you can read/listen to the moments that other people chose.

It reminded me of seeing Tino Seghal’s These Associations. We took the twins when it was at the Tate Modern, and one of our first stories was so odd that they became obsessed with sticking around and getting another good one. As in we spent three hours at These Associations. But… the point is that it’s interesting to hear other people’s stories.

Take a listen to some of the stories if you have time on the After Life Experience. You can read without sound, or listen to the stories being read.

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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 like the Olympics as much as the next person, but I didn’t expect to feel quite so emotional when the games began. I barely registered that they were delayed last summer—too much was happening in the news cycle, and it wasn’t as if they had been on and stopped. They just didn’t start. But lots of things just didn’t start.

But when the music began to swell as the opening ceremony began, and I realized the enormity—of people finally realizing their dream to how much we’ve lost along the way, I burst into tears, sobbing through the montage of athletes training and home videos of their families cheering them on.

It has been such a hard year and a half, and right now doesn’t feel any different (to me) from last summer. Even with the vaccine, it still feels precarious, and I’m filled with worry. The opening ceremonies were about the world coming together… sort of… even though we’ve proven through our behaviour over the pandemic that the world isn’t all on the same side, working together to defeat this virus. So here we are.

I pulled myself together after a few minutes of sobbing and made it to the end of the 4.5 hour ceremony. I didn’t expect to feel so moved, so angry, and so hopeful all at the same time.

Auntie Day is this Sunday, July 25th. Savvy Auntie started the day years ago, and it’s always celebrated the fourth Sunday in July. Being an aunt is clearly 10,000 kinds of awesome, not least of which because you can send annoying toys and then not have to live in the home with the annoying toys. For the win!

If you were looking for a reason to have a fancy brunch this weekend, celebrating aunts (being one, having one, living with one, or simply loving the kindly old aunts that show up in British murder mysteries) sounds like the way to go.

Thank you, Savvy Auntie, for lifting up aunts.

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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 in order 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. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Everlasting Snowdrops” (Finding a Different Path)
• “Summer Blossoming” (Torthúil)
• “Best Books of June” (Stirrup Queens)—thank you, Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Anabegins has a rundown of her weekends, but it was a thought tucked towards the bottom that made me nod. She is looking forward to five days alone, and she contrasts that with G saying that he’s lonely when he has time alone. She writes, “We are different people clearly. I need a lot of time to myself. I have not been getting it. It has affected my mental health & my relationships. I need some absence to make my heart grow fonder.” It’s so important to know where you fall on that spectrum (I’m on the far end of needing lots of alone time) and giving yourself the type of time you need.

The Next 15,000 Days has a story from a workplace social event that she felt obligated to attend. As they are toasting the guest of honour, she thinks, “If they only knew, how hard it is to be an infertile woman in the fertile world. How hard it was to be a loving wife when my soul had been broken into million pieces.” Her final line of the post—so true.

Lastly, Finding a Different Path has a post about the stories that need to be told. On the importance of diverse books, she points out: “There are so many people who want to see stories that reflect their lives, or to peer through a window into a different existence, but they don’t seem to be listened to as much.” Who gets to tell the story? Who gets to drive the narrative? And when it comes to infertility, who gets to define success? It’s such an interesting read.

The roundup to the Roundup: Happy Auntie Day. 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 July 16 – July 23) 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.

With the exception of a few weeks here and there, the Friday Blog Roundup has officially been running without a break for fifteen years. So 15 years, about 780 posts (let’s round down because I’ve probably missed 10 over the years—so 770 posts), about 3080 of your posts highlighted.

3080 little paragraphs capturing what stayed with me after I stopped reading the post.

It is funny to see it change over the years—figuring out hyperlinks and then linking to the post instead of the main URL for the blog!—and sad to see people gone; either truly gone or stopping their blog.

Once upon a time, every single post was called Friday Blog Roundup. It took me a long time before I started numbering them so people could tell the posts apart, and even then, I messed up the numbering at some point over the years.

So happy anniversary, little Roundup. In two days, we begin your sweet 16.

If I’ve ever highlighted you, drop the post (if you remember one) in the comment section. If I haven’t highlighted you, drop your blog URL in the comment section so I can make sure to read it.

Electric Lit had a great piece on hoax diaries. According to the article, “a hoax diary [is] a work of fiction that is passed off as an authentic journal. Not to be confused with a memoir, a true hoax diary is somewhat rare—and their outcomes and reception are not always predictable.” Meaning, memoirs are sometimes fictionalized and challenged (cough, James Frey), but hoax diaries are “found” (though really created) works in diary form, pretending to be real journals.

Why make one? Because “there is a thrill, too, for readers to believe we have access to a once-private document, to pry into someone’s psyche.” Memoirs are written to be read. Diaries are not.

Though it made me wonder if they still hold the same weight after the advent of blogs. When so many people write out their diary online, is it as thrilling to find one offline? And to that end, there have been plenty of fake blogs over the years, though it feels like it has been a long time since I’ve seen one. But there were a handful in the early years of the ALI blogosphere—fake infertility or loss blogs. And perhaps there are still but I’m out of the loop.

Your thoughts?