The ChickieNob loves to borrow my shoes.  We’re almost the same size, so she often comes along with me when I’m purchasing new shoes in order to give her opinion and steer purchases towards things she’ll want to take from my closet in the near future.  She also constantly checks on existing shoes to see if they fit better. (I’m a size larger.) One of those pairs of shoes are my knee-high boots.

The boots are the ones I wore to BlogHer for the Voices of the Year performance.  You can see the boots in the beginning of the video.

My sister convinced me to purchase them.  They were awesome boots.  I loved wearing them.

Loved being the operative term.

The ChickieNob asked if she could try on the boots.  “Of course,” I said.  She went to pull them off the shelf and commented that they felt “stuck.”  I wasn’t sure how the boots could be stuck, so I reached down and yanked them.  The leather adhered to the shelf, leaving a large hole in the side of the boot.  The leather was cracked in other places and peeling away.  All in all, it looked as if someone had poured acid over the boot.  (No one, by the way, poured acid over the boot.  I have no clue how this happened because nothing could have gotten onto the shelf.)

The ChickieNob was heartbroken, but we were running errands the next day.  I would get a new pair of knee-high boots.

I tried on a few pairs, settling on a relatively inexpensive one that resembled my original boots except that the toe is pointy instead of square.  The ChickieNob tried them on, too, and declared them excellent.  Mischief managed.

There was zero reason to keep the original, ripped up boots, but I found it very hard to say goodbye to them.  I took a photo so I could remember them, and then gently lowered them into the trash.  The Wolvog watched with amusement.  “Hard to let go?” he asked.

Yes, little man, it’s hard to let go because those shoes weren’t daily sneakers that you wear out and move on to the next pair.  They were lifetime shoes; shoes you purchase and make memories in over the years.  Those shoes have been to weddings and Bat Mitzvahs.  The White House and my friend’s house.  They’ve saved me on numerous occasions when I didn’t have time to shave my legs.  They were a great pair of boots, and I assumed they would be there forever.

Thank you, boots, for being so awesome for so long.

ABC News is airing an interview this Sunday (9 pm ET) between Robin Roberts and Michelle Obama where Obama talks about her miscarriage and using IVF to conceive Malia and Sasha.  It’s a topic she’s unpacking in her upcoming book, Becoming.

Reflecting on it now, Mrs. Obama says she wished she knew other women had experienced miscarriages as well — a lesson that would have helped lift the shame she associated with it.

“I felt like I failed because I didn’t know how common miscarriages were because we don’t talk about them,” Mrs. Obama explains in the ABC interview. “We sit in our own pain, thinking that somehow we’re broken.”

She’s hoping that by sharing her story, other women don’t feel that same isolation.

I love our former First Lady and the grace she shows as she educates and educates and educates.

Anyone else having trouble accessing my blog?  Though I guess if you can’t access it, you also wouldn’t see this.  One person told me: “Lately, your posts will show in my reader, but when I click on them to go to your blog, I get an error message about the server. I can go to other web sites, just not yours.”  Are you having the same issue, and if you are, could you screenshot it and let me know which browser you’re using?

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I tried to give myself a day or two to step back from the election results before I fully processed them.

I’m happy that Democrats took the House because it’s never healthy to have one political party controlling every branch of government.  We need checks and balances, and not an echo chamber of ideas.  Actually, the healthiest situation would be not having political parties at all and having people state their personal platform rather than conforming to a party line.  But… since that won’t happen, the next best thing is to have more than one political party in power.

There are some people who I would have loved to see win, but they didn’t.  Some people who didn’t win, and I was relieved.  A few moments of diversity.  A lot of frustration at voting conditions.  A sense that the chasms between us are getting wider.  Appreciation for the people who put in the time and effort to get voices heard.

Thank you.

So… I left the night feeling like expectations were met or exceeded.  Not happy that I had some of those expectations in the first place, but very little happened that surprised me; good or bad.

How about you?

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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:

• “Reading Diverse Books” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Mali and Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Magpie Musing has a post about a tiny plastic baby that lives in a jacket pocket.  She’s thinking about the things she carries (and her post made me look at the things I always have with me: phone, book, bullet journal, hand sanitizer, cinnamon mints) and she moves to the items that inexplicably have a certain space.  She writes, “It is a comfort to me that tiny plastic baby is still in the pocket and ever will be, even though I can’t remember where tiny plastic baby came from. But every time I wore that coat, or moved it to a new closet, I checked for tiny plastic baby, ‘ah yes, there she is.’ Carried.”  Not about infertility, but… well… it made me think.

By the Brooke has a post about how the difficult time of day has moved from morning to night.  After her daughter died, it was morning, when her eyes opened and her brain remembered everything that had happened.  But now it is the worries that come in the evening hours, that look manageable by morning.  She explains, “I just needed to write out this reminder that no matter how terrible I feel at bedtime, life is generally more endurable in the morning.”  So true.

Lastly, RisaKerslake has a post about her new cycle.  She begins: “So I sat, peeing on yet another pregnancy stick, watching for that second line to appear, and giving yet another disappointed sigh when once again, only one line showed. Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. I was officially going insane.” They’re doing something different this time — endometrial receptivity array — and transferring two embryos.  Click over and read about it.

The roundup to the Roundup: Problems accessing this site?  Your thoughts on the midterms?  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 November 2nd and November 9th) 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 head-over-heels in love with dwarsliggers, and I’ve never even seen one.  They’re mini books that open like a calendar — the spine is the top of the book — but you read the text left-to-right (or right-to-left, if your language goes right-to-left).  So when you open it, the text is running horizontally the length of the book, rather than horizontally in a vertical setting.  They can fit a whole book on onion skin paper, and you have a tiny copy you can fit in your pocket.

Squee!

I’ve always wanted to write squee.

I know that I’m nearing the end of my mini book reading days.  I’m not quite ready for bifocals, though I do like to take off my glasses to read at night.  And I’m aware there are other ways to carry a book with you; I have dozens of books on my phone, for instance.  But I’m a paper sort of girl.  I like a physical book.  And this would allow me to slip it in a tiny purse or my pocket.

While they’re widely available in the Netherlands, The New York Times states that John Green’s books are going to be the first ones released in the US as a test case.  Which is unfortunate because I already own his books.  I’m not really seeking new copies of books I’ve already read and own.  Though I reserve the right to purchase one regardless if I see it in the bookstore and my heart starts pounding.

John Green says, “They’re objects that you almost can’t get until you’re touching them.”  Um, no, Mr. Green.  I get it, and I’m in love.  Sight unseen.

Yes or no to mini books?

You’re voting today, correct?  Because the importance of how we vote and the laws we create is contained below.

I saw two stories last week, both concerning pregnancy loss.  You may want to save this post for later if you’re not in a good place to speak about loss.  (But, please, go vote.)

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The first is a disturbing piece from the New York Times looking at miscarriages and stillbirth that occurred due to poor working conditions.  A woman at the top of the article clutches an empty receiving blanket:

One evening in January 2014, after eight hours of lifting, Erica Hayes ran to the bathroom. Blood drenched her jeans.  She was 23 and in the second trimester of her first pregnancy. She had spent much of the week hoisting the warehouse’s largest boxes from one conveyor belt to the next. Ever since she learned she was pregnant, she had been begging her supervisor to let her work with lighter boxes, she said in an interview. She said her boss repeatedly said no.

It’s a side of pregnancy discrimination that we usually don’t think about, one that hits close to home for our community.  The public gets angry about the fact that women are often passed over for promotions or lose their job due to pregnancy.  We’re less comfortable speaking about how the workplace can cause loss.  That the items around us may have contributed to someone else’s pregnancy loss.

It’s a sobering piece, especially when you consider our 40-year-old laws concerning employers and pregnancy:

Under federal law, companies don’t necessarily have to adjust pregnant women’s jobs, even when lighter work is available and their doctors send letters urging a reprieve.

And the fact that the company in the article is a contractor of Verizon.

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The other piece is more moving.  It weave a personal story of loss with historical tales of loss.  Nursing Clio explains how she felt after learning her baby had no heartbeat:

More than anything, I felt how I had lost a story of the future that I had built up in my mind … What has followed in the last two years has been even more difficult than I could have imagined and has required many alterations to our pregnancy story. The loss of the expected narrative and the discovery of new narratives is what I want to focus on here.

She uses her background as a professor of eighteenth century literature to try to make sense of what she lost.  Of how women have processed their losses over the ages, especially how male authors (vs. female authors) discuss loss and the concept of mourning pictures.

It’s an incredible piece weaving the personal with the academic.  And I found it hugging my heart after I read that first exposé on loss.