Have you played on Dollar Street?  It’s a website that imagines the world living on a single street, with poverty on one end of the block and wealth on the other end.  You can peek into the houses of the hundreds of people who currently live on the street.

Fair warning: you will go down a rabbit hole looking at other people’s pictures.  Things like power outlets and showers suddenly become fascinating as you move from house to house (which is technically sometimes country by country).  You learn a little bit about the family itself, their jobs, how they feel about their possessions or their home, their plans for the future.

It was created by Anna Rosling Rönnlund who was trying to crunch data and present it in ways that were understandable.  “Carefully selecting data to present it in colorful and moving charts made overall global trends and patterns easier to understand. But it did not make everyday life on different income levels understandable. Especially not in places far from home.”

She also explains how the monthly income numbers were calculated and converted into dollars for easy comparison.

The homes of people on one end of the block look nothing like the homes of people on the other end of the block, though it’s comforting to see that while water situations change drastically, dish soap is dish soap is dish soap wherever you go in the world.

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

*******

Today my 12th blogoversary intersects with the 200th #Microblog Monday.  I have been writing this blog for 12 years.  12 years!  200 of those posts have been Microblog Monday.  The other several thousand (because I write on average 5 posts per week, 52 weeks per year) have been random mishmash from my clotty uterus to the twins to my extreme love of quokkas to bothering Josh with my feelings at 11 pm.

About 1/4th of my life has been spent writing this site.  Isn’t that mind-blowing?  A quarter of my life.

I have no great wisdom to impart except write.  Keep at it.  The way you amass 12 years is showing up for 12 years.

Thank you for being here.

*******

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 really didn’t want to hear the BBC’s answer to their question —  does mindfulness really improve our health? — unless it was affirmative.  I’ve kinda sorta been trying different mindfulness exercises since January.  It’s a bummer to have someone pee in your Cheerios about something that is working for you.

The article makes a fair point — there hasn’t been enough (or long enough) research done even though anecdotal evidence looks interesting.  I’m all for more research.

This is what mindfulness does (for me): it reminds me to exist in the present.  Some of the things I do — such as now writing my worry list — helps me compartmentalize the past and future so they don’t cover up the present.  That’s all they are: fences.  And when I meditate before working, that’s a gate.  I open the door and step through it and spend at least five minutes in the present moment, fully focused on the present moment, which is longer than I spent on the present moment before I started keeping lists and deep breathing.

It has been interesting to learn about myself.  I think of myself as a nostalgic person, always trying to hold onto the past.  But I’ve noticed that I spend a lot more time worrying about the future.  Like deep into the future; not worrying about upcoming events but spending hours thinking about things ridiculously far off in the distance.  Like decades down the road.

It has been eye-opening to remind myself that the world decades down the road isn’t like the world I’m living in now.  There will be global changes, societal changes, and some of the things I worry about may be a moot point because those events won’t be taking place in the same world I’m living in now.

So I’m grateful for those fences and gates.

I am one Roundup away from my 700th Roundup.  It’s falling quite close to the anniversary of the very first Roundup, which was on July 21st.  I didn’t know how to hyperlink text back then.  It also seems like I didn’t know how to get the permalink for the post because I only included the main URL for the blog.  Oh weren’t we all so adorable back then?

Next week, I will write the normal 700th Roundup, but the week after that, I would like to celebrate by asking YOU to dive deep into your memory and come up with a post (or posts) that stuck with you.  You can go back as far as July 21, 2006.  You can nominate your own OR you can choose someone else’s post.  I’m giving you two weeks fair warning so you have no excuse.  Be ready to celebrate on July 6th.

And yes, I have a blog post chosen.  It is one that I have returned to read many times, and I think about all the time.  It is the best framing I’ve ever read.  It has changed my life; I hope it changes yours for the better, too.

So show up with your post and get ready to party.  Because… come on… 12 years of pretty much every single Friday?  That deserves a celebration with my favourite people.

*******

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.

*******

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… (dude, you guys better do better on July 6th — see above)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Wild and Precious Life has a post about how the separated families makes raw her own loss.  How she has to squelch that — this is about their situation — but also how it drives her because she knows what it feels like to live a nightmare.  It’s a beautiful, aching post about a truly awful situation.

Empty Arms, Broken Heart has a post about changing names now that the adoption is finalized.  The kids call all adults by their first name prefaced with Mr. or Ms. (As in, Ms. Melissa.)  And now it’s time (maybe?) to transition the kids to calling her parents something akin to Grandma or Grandpa.  And it begs another question: “I guess the biggest issue, regarding what my kids should call my parents, is really the very large elephant in the room, which is what do my parents call my kids?”  This post made me think about the complicated nature of names.

Lastly, Inexplicably Missing has a post about being in a waiting space.  She explains, “I promise I’m not stagnating. I just happen to be still. Hanging out. Watching. Waiting. Somewhat planning my next move. Somewhat not.”  Thinking and breathing are both good things.  Love this little post.

The roundup to the Roundup: July 6th — Roundup celebration (be there or be square).  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 15th and 22nd) 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.

NPR had a deep dive into parenting advice last month, covering not only what we do but what we don’t do.  Hint: other cultures deeply value people who aren’t the parent but play a critical role in the child’s life.  You can be infertile, therefore, and parent.

More on that in a second.

It begins with looking at parenting advice.  Most parenting advice — especially the stuff pertaining to raising babies — is opinion.  The stuff printed in books: opinion.  The stuff from experts: opinion.  So many of us get our knowledge about parenting from said books or the Internet, and it’s sometimes untested and not used in the rest of the non-Western world.

In many instances, what we think is “necessary” or “critical” for childhood is actually not present in any other cultures around the world or throughout time. “The list of differences is really, really long,” says Lancy… “There may be 40 to 50 things that we do that you don’t see in indigenous cultures.”

That, of course, is true of everything outside parenting, too; what is important to one culture is unimportant to another, hence why we have such a hard time successfully repeating another culture’s ideals, even when they’re spelled out to us in a how-to book in no uncertain terms.

I loved this article for the stuff that comes in closer to the end about alloparents.  Alloparents are all the adults who help out with the child — grandparents and aunts but also teachers and friends and neighbours.  Therefore, you are parenting, even if you are not the mother or father; playing a role in shaping that child.  The former teacher in me loved this idea.

In Western culture, we’ve created what NPR calls, “a mom stuck in a box, often alone, doing the job typically performed by a handful of people.”  We diminish the alloparents in the name of control, to be the leader in charge of shaping the child but if you take a step back and really look at it, we’re making this trade-off at our own expense.

I’ve written about this idea before, but I’ve never seen it summed up quite so well as this NPR post depicting WEIRD culture and the way we find the advice we hold onto so tightly.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the piece.