I am smitten with Rafaël Rozendaal’s Look at Something site.  You can click over and play with that.  Make sure you move your mouse all over the screen.

Everything Always Everywhere is also quite good.

Once upon a time I loved Do Nothing for Two Minutes, but it’s not like their old app where the picture moved.  I’m searching for an ocean scene, a website beach equivalent of the televised burning log for Christmas.

What are your favourite sites to stare at?

I’ve been glued all week to coverage for Hurricane Florence.  We planned to be in Chincoteague this weekend, but on Tuesday, they closed the town for visitors and started evacuations.  We moved our trip.  Then on Wednesday, the storm turned and there was a lot of conflicting information flying around online whether the evacuation was still in place or not for the town.  We’re keeping to the new plan.

At the current moment, DC is no longer in the path.  We’ll just get rain.  But my heart is in my throat thinking about the Carolinas.  Be safe.

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Speaking of heart in my throat moments, I saw that I had a bunch of unread posts in my blog reader.  So I clicked into the folder and realized they were all for MLO Knitting.  She died about five years ago.

They were spam posts; someone had clearly purchased her blog’s lapsed URL and was posting spam.  I sat with the thought for a long time, and then finally unsubscribed.  I logically knew there would never be another post, but I didn’t want to sever that last tie.  Is that silly?  To keep someone who is gone in your blog feed reader?  It made me sad to know that the blog isn’t there anymore.

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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:

• “Day 17 – Empowerment – Part 1” (Anne Heffron)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Don’t Count Your Eggs has a post about phantom pregnancies; those moments where we think we’re pregnant, even though our heart also knows that we’re not.  This resonated with me because after we stopped treatments, I had a few times where I purchased pregnancy tests, sure that we had gotten lucky.  But… no.  I also mentally knew that it wasn’t likely.  She describes it: “Some days the word embrace seems to fit. Others… I’m totally convinced I’m P, because perhaps there is something that just doesn’t feel finished to me.”  Yes.

An Engineer Becomes a Mom’s blog title repeated a few times in my life these past few weeks as I’ve pointed out in various places that a totally valid option for confronting systems or ideas that aren’t working is “burn it all down.”  She makes the most amazing life change, and it leads to her taking charge of her career.  She writes, “For now, I’m done with the ladder. I need time and space to figure out where I want to take my career. I need to branch out to trying different things.”  Love this post.

Lastly, Anabegins has a very honest post that resonated with me.  It’s about eating and exercise and all the feelings you get when you notice that you can’t do what others can do.  The paragraph that begins with this: “I was watching how the others were eating/drinking on this trip and they seemed to exert much more self-control” — that is me.  We all eat differently, we all different needs, but that paragraph had me nodding my head through the whole thing.

The roundup to the Roundup: Worried about the hurricane.  An unwanted unsubscribing.  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 September 7th and September 14th) 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 read a fascinating article about the coining of the term “stress,” and the regrets the scientist, Hans Selye, had in the misunderstanding of his work.  Through a combination of poor explanation of concepts and mistakes in translation, we now have this belief that we can avoid stress or combat stress or reduce stress.

The article states:

Meanwhile, in popular culture, stress quickly took on a negative connotation. The public’s understanding was that stress existed outside of ourselves and was to be avoided, which contradicted Selye’s position. He posited that stress was unavoidable, because it was literally a function of every adaptation to change. Even in our sleep, our heart still has to beat, we still need to breathe, our adrenal system is still responding to dreams, we’re still under stress, he told an interviewer for the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. “The opposite of stress is death,” he said.

In other words, the only way to avoid stress is to be dead.  We want stress because stress means that we’re living.  When you look at it that way, that stress is something within ourselves that we continually navigate (and that doing so is “living”), it becomes a relationship, albeit one built on “the gap between demand and capacity.”

I’ve been meaning to read Kelly McGonigal’s The Upside of Stress, and this article (which references her) nudged me to move it to the active to-read pile.  I love this idea: “Rather than bemoaning stress or avoiding it, or worse, feeling proud of having an abundance of it, perhaps the best advice now is that we ought be practicing methods for transforming it.”

I like that idea of transforming stress and using it as fuel rather than something that needs to be swept out the door like tracked in dirt.

What will you do with your stress?

“A tree falling in the forest” is a thought experiment that (almost?) everyone knows, but I had to look up the origins.  It was proposed by George Berkeley in 1710, and then repeated in various forms up to an exchange between Einstein and Bohr.  The general idea is the same: If you don’t observe something, did it happen?  If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  You can arguing multiple sides because it’s impossible to check without observation, which makes it such a juicy idea for the brain to consider.

Maybe that’s why my brain started chewing on it when Carolyn Hax brought it up as part of her answer.

The situation: an adult child doesn’t really want to talk anymore to his/her thoughtless parents.  The person asks: “Do I just ghost my own parents? Seems no matter what I do, they’ll think I’m awful and wrong.”

Hax replies:

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

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I am a super-user at my library, there several times per week.  We read a lot.  And usually the books are in great shape.  Checking them out from the library saves a lot of space on our bookshelves.

But.

I was on the waiting list for China Rich Girlfriend along with 477 other people.  It was finally my turn to get the book, and I picked up the copy from the hold shelf and brought it home.  Then I opened it.  There was food smeared across a bunch of the pages, and something that looked like the skin of peanuts in most of the seams.  I held the book over the rubbish bin and tried to clean it out as best I could as I vomited in my mouth.  Why would someone do this to a book?

I tried to read the copy, but the food stains were turning my stomach, and I felt like I had to wash my hands every time I read it.  So I purchased a copy (plus the next one in the trilogy).  It’s rare to get a book in this state, though it’s the second time it has happened to me this summer.

How are the books at your library?

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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.