Google introduced AR animals. When you Google the animal from the Google app on your phone, it gives you the option to see it in 3D. Once you click on that, you see a 3D version of the animal moving around on a blank, white background. It asks if you want to see the animal in AR, and if you click “yes” and give it access to just about everything on your phone, it will allow you to see a quokka hopping around your living room.

I went from being so-beyond-excited-I-cannot-stand-it to being super disappointed once I learned the only way you can get this to work is to give it access to your microphone (why?), camera (that makes sense), and camera roll (why?). Which I’m not going to do.

But if you have the Google app and have given it access to everything on your phone, you can have a virtual koala friend hang out next to you while you watch television.

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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:

• None… sniff…

Okay, now my choices this week.

Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles begs the people of the world to know their audience. A case in point: She doesn’t need to see pictures of new babies or hear people go on about how thrilled they are not to have babies anymore. No one knows what another person is going through, but there are certain topics that perhaps should only be discussed if you are certain about the other person’s situation.

Kveller asks us to remember infertile people during Chanukkah. The author writes: “But once I started trying to conceive — and subsequently endured three years of miscarriages and expensive fertility treatments — the holidays transformed from a period of celebration into a time to hide. I wanted to avoid people asking me what was going on (nothing! I was either trying to get pregnant or getting over a lost pregnancy), to steer clear of other pregnant women (I was jealous!), and to dodge triggering sights (basically everything).” You don’t need to be Jewish to get a lot out of this post.

My Path to Mommyhood talks about joyscrolling—the opposite of doomscrolling. It’s a website. And it’s relaxing fun. (Except when you think about the fact that you can’t go to Iceland right now.)

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ takes apart the word “failure.” She points out the need to separate the individual from the situation. “And that’s because we personalise it. It failed – the medical technology, or the adoption process, or broader society failed. It doesn’t mean that I am a failure. It might be my body that technology couldn’t help, but I personally am NOT a failure. And neither are you.” It’s a beautiful ode to resilience.

The roundup to the Roundup: Virtual animal friends. 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 December 11 – 18) 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.

I am going to be 17,000 days old tomorrow on December 17.

I had never thought about enormous calculations of time like this until Lori mentioned her milestone number a few months back, I put my date in an age calculator and discovered that I was rounding on 17,000 days.

It is weird to think about 17,000 days. Days sometimes feel interchangeable. What did I do yesterday? The same thing I will likely do today and tomorrow. But I have had almost 17,000 of them, and very few have been during a pandemic, working this job, living in this home, married to this man, with these twins. So… no… upon reflection, they’re not interchangeable at all.

Birthdays are nice, but those milestones feel so tiny against a number like 17,000.

As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she read that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better about doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from November.

The Silver Arrow (Lev Grossman): I loved this book so much that I immediately bought a copy for the Wolvog and ChickieNob and another for my niece. It was NOT what I expected, and I’m really sorry that I didn’t get to it sooner. In my defense, while I love riding in trains, I did not want to read a book about trains. But… this book isn’t about trains. And it’s ten kinds of awesome. And all of us had the same reaction to the same moment in the book. If you have a child in your life OR an adult with a mushy heart, get them this book.

Last Tang Standing (Lauren Ho): This book was so much fun. It’s very much like Crazy Rich Asians with people who are more on the normal end of rich (vs. the obscene end) and very funny. It feels a lot like an updated Bridget Jones’s Diary. I had fun reading it. We need more books that simply make us happy.

Crooked House (Agatha Christie): This was not my favourite Christie mystery, but it’s a totally solid book. I wasn’t impressed with it, but I realized I was being unfair just because it didn’t blow me away like ABC Murders or Murder on the Orient Express. I wanted to read it before I watched the television adaptation. It’s funny how I hold her books to a different standard because I read so many surprising ones in a row. So it’s a three star for Christie but a four star for every other mystery writer.

Anxious People (Fredrik Backman): This just squeaked onto the list. I liked this book, but I didn’t love this book. It was zany. And quirky. And a little too much, even for the mushy-hearted. It was like being trapped at Wes Anderson’s party, talking to Aaron Sorkin (it is very very very repetitive AND the people spend a lot of time holding conversations that keep looping back to points made… and those conversations don’t move the story forward) and Zooey Deschanel. It was the kind of book where you expected someone to pull out a little ukulele. Just because. But here’s the thing about Wes Anderson, Aaron Sorkin, and Zooey Deschanel. They all sometimes drop interesting moments into your brain. So I put this book on the list because there were a bunch of moments I underlined, even while sighing at others.

What did you read last month?

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 a different way to do gratitude. Instead of noting what you’re grateful for, which can sometimes feel like a statement of the obvious, think of one positive aspect of your life (such as a loved one, job, home, friend) and then mentally subtract it. What would your life be like without that loved one, job, home, friend? How would its absence change your health or day-to-day life? What are the ripple effects of not having this aspect of your life?

That is appreciation.

Realizing that there is always an otherwise, but you’re not living that otherwise. You’re living this life.

I thought that was an interesting way of looking at things.

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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 was gifted a TisBest Charity Gift Card. It works like any other gift card, and you spend it at one (or several) of the 1.5 million charities listed in their database.

My card was for $100, and we could give it all to one organization or split it between two to three organizations. My first instinct was to make another donation to a place where we had already donated this winter, but Josh pointed out that we had 1.5 million options. It was a pretty heady experience.

We started listing causes that make us who we are. What was important to us? LGBTQ rights, anti-racism work, animal conservation, environmental protection, food security, clean water… the list grew longer and longer, especially once we started diving into TisBest’s curated lists by topic.

The hardest part of this gift was narrowing down the list to three charities because there were so many good places on the list. And not immediately having a “but we forgot about!” moment the minute we hit submit on our choices. Of course, there is always next time.

I had never heard of this before receiving one, so I’m passing along the idea if people are looking for an off-the-beaten-path gift. It was a lot of fun to play philanthropist for the day.