I’ve been playing with Window Swap. It’s a site where people can upload the view from their window, and other people can look through it.

There aren’t that many on the site, so you end up running into the same ones again and again. If you want to submit one and give me more to look at, you can read the upload directions here.

Enjoy the view.

Remember how I told you I fixed the freezer? I may have spoken too soon. On Monday, the freezer started making an awful rattling sound whenever we opened the door. We Googled online, but we could only find sites talking about this sound happening when people closed the door.

So we took the panel off again (we’re now pros at this) and discovered that we never dealt with the chunks of ice that were on the panel itself. The fan could spin, but it rattled as it clunked against the ice. So we spent the evening directing a stream of hot air from a hair dryer at the back panel as it hovered over a bathtub to catch the dripping water.

It made us feel like adults.

I mean, in the sense that no one was coming to save us and we had to deal with the wonky freezer. We put everything back together and plugged it back in, and so far so good.

By the way—if you don’t have one—refrigerator thermometers will tell you before you lose everything in your refrigerator that you have problem. We only discovered this tool after we lost everything in the refrigerator. But at least we’re good to go from this point forward if the freezer ceases to work again.

Second time is a charm?

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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.

The Road Less Travelled covers Father’s Day amongst other topics. “Dh admitted last night that he sometimes gets jealous of BIL and his obvious pleasure in being a grandfather. BIL has a huge heart, and he’s always been very generous about including us in things and assuring us that we are an important part of the family.” But, of course, even the biggest hearted people sometimes don’t notice what they’re doing. The post captures the quietness of the weekend this year. (P.S. I’m a little jealous of the future haircut. We don’t have one on the horizon yet.)

Slaying, Blogging, Whatever is remembering her grandmother on what would have been her 100th birthday. She writes, “I know I am projecting. I know it is mere fantasy. But, that is what we do when we miss people’s presence in our lives.” So true.

Lastly, My Foxy Family is navigating a difficult relationship. She explains: “He asked me to tell him my thoughts, to be honest even if it’s hard for him to hear. But I don’t want to hurt him. And I’m still not sure if it is safe to be vulnerable when I’ve been burned too many times.” Parenting after infertility is not always the happily ever after. She writes on her sidebar: “Infertility turned my world upside down and led my sober husband back to drinking.” Sending peace of heart.

The roundup to the Roundup: Freezer fixed for real. (I think.) 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 June 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.

A post bubbled up this week from 2019 asking how well you’d fare in rebelling under an oppressive regime. The answer is—as you’ve probably guessed—depressing. It couches the question within the story of The Handmaid’s Tale. How many people would rise up and fight a corrupt system?

Few will fight Gilead after carefully weighing up the consequences – after all, the most likely outcome is failure and obliteration. What drives forward fights against an oppressive society is a rival vision – a vision of equality, liberty and justice, and a sense that these should be defended, whatever the consequences.

You need to read the whole article to understand why people may not be happy but still allow things to happen. The article also points out: “Hannah Arendt famously argued, the atrocities of the Holocaust were made possible by normal people, manipulated into conforming to a horribly abnormal set of behavioural norms.”

Food for thought.

Carolyn Hax has been on a roll, providing excellent advice left and right the last few weeks. I ended up bookmarking three posts in the same week. And this one gets to the heart of a common topic of conversation in our community: how much do we tell people our story and is it right/wrong to not educate the people around us about infertility, loss, adoption, donor gametes, and so on. (I’m leaving it as so-on because the list that we could create is long and varied. Please add your personal situation to that list.)

A question asker poses what is the difference between secrecy and privacy? Carolyn answers:

I see privacy as not sharing information with people that isn’t their business.

I see secrecy as not sharing information with people that is their business.

I also think it’s possible for something to fit the privacy definition and still be unhealthy — meaning, you share so little of yourself that you can’t form meaningful connections or you starve the ones you have.

Which gives you the frame. You can share with anyone; meaning, it is your right to tell your story to anyone and everyone you wish. But if you don’t wish to share your story with random stranger you begin speaking to in the grocery store, that is okay, too. That’s privacy.

I just really liked that distinction.

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

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We knew we weren’t going anywhere this summer, but last week, our airline finally canceled our flight, making things official. I had already dealt with the sadness, so I hopped directly to relieved. We’ll try again in the future.

In the meantime, articles about virtual travel keep popping up, but this has been the one that has interested me most. The woman at the heart of the story travels the world through Google Street View, taking screenshots of the sites. She does this because she has agoraphobia and can’t go out, but her method becomes an interesting alternative in this time period when we are all left between a rock and a hard place when it comes to leaving the house.

I tried it, going to places I know and places I don’t know. The images have gotten so much better since the last time I played with Google Earth. She writes:

It’s the opposite of how you normally travel. You don’t have any itinerary, you don’t have a planned holiday. You don’t know exactly where you’re going, you don’t know exactly where you’re going to land. So, many times I would jump in and go, “Oh my goodness, where am I?” and then do some research on the place. Then suddenly you know something about a place that you didn’t know anything about before. It kind of shakes up your idea of travel.

Try it. Start with a place you know, so you can have a sense of how well Google Earth captures it. And then go somewhere new. I’d love to hear where you go. I started in Chincoteague and then went to Corsica.

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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.