I finally updated my phone from iOS9. I was still able to use 32-bit games because I decided not to update my software last year so I could continue to play those games that didn’t update to 64-bit.

And then one by one, the rest of my apps stopped working. The first to go was Starbucks. It wouldn’t work with anything under iOS10. Fine. I wouldn’t drink coffee. Then LinkedIn went. Fine. I didn’t need to see shared articles. Twitter went and I couldn’t download new apps that I wanted to try because they wouldn’t work with my phone. But I still didn’t update it.

The straw that broke the camel’s back? MailChimp. When MailChimp stopped working last week, I took a deep breath and said goodbye to my games. I could live without coffee. I could live without cool meditation apps. But I couldn’t live without the ability to check MailChimp from bed or on the go.

I really dislike the new operating system, but MailChimp is functioning once again. And I miss those old games. Damn those developers for not updating them to 64-bit. I’m looking at you, Activision. You’ve lost my app-purchasing trust.

I am so excited for the Downton Abbey movie. We’re currently only in season five, but we’re furiously working our way through the remaining episodes so we’ll be ready to go to the theater on September 20th when it opens.

We came to Downton Abbey late in the game–we often wait until shows have ended before we begin watching them–but we are so in love with the family and staff. ChickieNob and I are awful about reading spoilers before episodes, so we mostly know everything that will happen in the series. I will be very sad when we finish the last episode, though we’ve already planned to try Victoria again. We couldn’t get into it when we tried the first episode because we associated Jenna Coleman with Doctor Who. But maybe enough time has passed that we’ll be able to see her in something else.

Who else is excited for the Downton Abbey movie?

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Measure of Love is still on sale for a few more days for only 99 cents. It’s the same price on every e-book platform. So… grab a copy for the beach? For a friend? For someone who wants to hear about the olden days of blogging?

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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 writes about the series finale of The Big Bang Theory, where a child-free-by-choice character is suddenly happily pregnant. I don’t know much about the show, but this would have made me cringe, too: “Perhaps this abrupt shift in character development wouldn’t have been quite so eyebrow-raising/infuriating if Penny wasn’t the show’s SECOND child-free-by-choice female character to wind up pregnant.” Loribeth makes me want to stand up and cheer with her final paragraph. Click over and cheer, too.

It’s Inconceivable asks how people answer when they get asked whether they have children. She explains, “Obviously, I have no (living) children, but it doesn’t mean I want to necessarily explain my whole childless existence to someone casually inquiring, or being more probing, or fishing for information.” She explains how she decides how to address it. Great post for anyone grappling with how much to reveal.

Lastly, Life Without Baby has a post wishing that one person had “acknowledged that my inability to have a child was an enormous loss for me and that I needed to grieve that loss, as if my children had existed.” In other words, we express condolences over a death, but we rarely express condolences or see infertility as a loss, too. She breaks down the hierarchy of loss, pointing out, “people have no idea how to react when they can’t see the thing that was lost.” It’s an excerpt from her book, Life Without Baby, so you can get a taste for what you’ll find in the pages.

The roundup to the Roundup: So excited for Downton Abbey. Measure of Love is still on sale. 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 May 17th and 24th) 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 found out about a book — Words on the Threshold — which led me to an old Atlantic article about last words. A daughter started writing down all the things her father was saying at the end of his life, and the experience led her to look at “the linguistic patterns in 2,000 utterances from 181 dying people, including her father.” What do people say when they don’t have a lot of time left to speak? Who asks questions, who makes requests, who uses many words, and who uses few.

Or this thought:

We have a rich picture of the beginnings of language, thanks to decades of scientific research with children, infants, and even babies in the womb. But if you wanted to know how language ends in the dying, there’s next to nothing to look up, only firsthand knowledge gained painfully.

It’s not as if anyone guides the dying towards their last words in the same way we guide babies to speak their first words. And it’s also not about the literal final word; it’s the final words, the last thoughts conveyed, sometimes over days. What are the most important points to get across when you have limited time?

I don’t have answers. I thought about it while reading the article; what would I say — beyond I love you to the people I love — if I only had a few hours left. And I couldn’t come up with anything. Though that’s the point: that it’s not like the movies where someone summons their most profound thoughts right before their dying breath. It’s not something we can imagine until we’re in the moment.

It makes my throat feel tight to think about it.

One of my biggest sources of anxiety is forgetting things. It’s why I carry my bullet journal around the house. I write down everything. Everything. From things I need to do to quotes from books to memories from childhood (that must have come into my mind for some important reason).

Recent entries: A quote from A Case for Jamie by Brittany Cavallaro, a statement about how much I love it when Linus’s ears flicker while he sleeps, a reminder to check the miles on my car, and a single word: colophon.

I’m so scared that if I don’t take a moment to write something down that I’ll spend double that time feeling bothered that I’m forgetting something. So I take minutes out of my day to jot down the name of a resort in the Maldives (Soneva Jani), a phrase I heard in a Downton Abbey episode (“All Sir Garnet”), and create a reminder to purchase a gift for a friend.

It makes me feel like everything is neatly in place inside my mind.

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The New York Times points out that there are many brain training options out there for remembering things — from chunking to memory palaces — but few active methods for trying to forget things. Mitigate the stress thinking about an event makes us feel — absolutely. But actively forgetting that said event ever happened — not so much.

The New York Times writes, “To intentionally forget is to remember differently, on purpose. Importantly, for scientists and therapists, intentional forgetting also may be an ability that can be practiced and deliberately strengthened.” They explain the forgetting strategies along with forgetting benefits.

I sat with the article for a while because forgetting brings me so much anxiety; even forgetting unpleasant things. I’m fascinated by memory exercises and party tricks like remembering the first 100 digits of pi, and I never thought about how we don’t have corresponding exercises for forgetting. Forgetting is just something that happens, something we need to fight against. Except that sometimes we remember things we don’t really want to remember.

Food for thought.

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

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I don’t drink. I have, on average, one drink every year or two, so bars are kind of lost on me. Which isn’t a big deal now, but was a big deal when I was in my twenties and most of my friends wanted to get together at a bar. I love this idea of alcohol-free bars. It’s everything you expect in a bar, except with fancy mocktails instead of cocktails. And it’s not that you are not drinking. It’s that everyone around you is not drinking, too. You’re all there for the mocktails or alcohol-free beer.

Why? “In cities like New York and London, where bars often function as second living rooms for apartment dwellers with little space, an alcohol-free nightlife option can appeal to people who, for whatever reason, would prefer not to drink.”

I checked and we don’t have one in DC yet; at least not one that functions like Getaway in the article.

But I would totally go and have a date night at an alcohol-free bar. Would you?

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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.