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

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A line in Austin Kleon’s newsletter spoke to me deeply because I’m halfway through a new writing project: “I am deep into writing at the moment and I keep repeating to myself: ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now. It just needs to exist’.”

It led to a great quote from Bird by Bird, which I haven’t read in many years and probably should again.

It’s a good reminder that things are rarely great on the first try and that you should never compare your first attempt to someone’s fully edited finished product. This is true for all things in life.

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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 connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Ron Charles has the most brilliant weekly book newsletter – if you don’t already read it, you may want to sign up. Not only do you get book recommendations, but he also dives deep into certain books/ideas.

His newsletter from a week or two ago blew my mind with the concept of the informational corpses we leave behind.

“When we encounter the dead through their left-behind data,” Öhman writes, “we are not merely facing a symbolic mask but a lifetime of data, an informational corpse.” More than 2 billion people are expected to die in the next 30 years. Eventually, the deceased will outnumber the living on Facebook.

Whoa. Isn’t that a thought that gives you pause? I don’t unfriend people after they die, so I have accounts in my feed for people who are no longer here, and no one has done anything with their accounts. I still get reminders to wish them a happy birthday or memories to look back on.

But this writing — this blog — will one day become part of my informational corpse. Everything I leave behind digitally will be part of me because it’s part of my mind and personality; someone will have to decide whether to preserve it or allow it to fade away.

Ron Charles always makes me think.

The birthday celebration continues this weekend. It felt like too much pressure to put all my big feelings on a single day, so we spread the celebration over multiple days. Actually, if I’m being honest, it’s multiple months. But it’s a big birthday. It has been so nice to have it spread out, I think I’ll do this every year.

This weekend, we’ll do the cake (a nutella cake!) and dinner.

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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 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. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Scientist on the Roof asks a question within her update: “What do you miss the most from your childhood home?” Most of the things I love my parents still have and use, but I miss my grandmother’s thimbles. We used them as fancy metal drinking cups for Barbie and Andy Gibb. Tell her what you miss.

The Road Less Travelled also made me nostalgic with her post about her happy place. It reminded me of the first time I went into Borders. It was the largest bookstore I had ever entered, and it didn’t matter that other bookstores contained all of the books I wanted. More books equaled more exciting.

Lastly, Dear John updates her late husband on home improvement projects, but it’s the ending about the trip that stuck with me. She writes, “I wish you were here to do the driving – you were always more confident, even if you had no idea where you were going. I’ll have to manage. But it would be easier if you were here to do it for me.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Birthday celebration continues. 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 31 – June 7) 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’m in a travel-related Facebook group, and someone posted that their child noted the location of webcams trained on a street or inside a building before they left, told their parent when they would be at that location, and then went and “checked in” by waving at the webcam. So, if their parent went on the webcam at the same time, they got to see them and know they were okay. It’s how they’re traveling with limited data and still able to communicate that they’ve reached their next location. In the post I saw, the boy stood, waving at the camera in front of Abbey Road in London.

I thought it was a fun idea for anyone to do with people back home. You can use Earth Cam to find webcams in your location. Aren’t humans clever?

To start this post, I checked the last time I did this type of post, and could not stop laughing at how much that Melissa still didn’t know what coming down the lane.

The last time I wrote a mental sampler post, the pandemic was a little under a year old. That Melissa didn’t realize that this Melissa would still be living an upside down life.

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Thank you for the birthday wishes on here and on social media. It is emotional to have people pop up and acknowledge your life. Because that’s sort of what saying “happy birthday” is, right? It’s someone saying, “Hey, you were born. And I’m happy about that.”

The festivities started over a week ago with cake, ice cream, and a paper crown made by my nieces and nephews. And we’re keeping the celebration going through next winter because big birthdays should be celebrated in a big way.

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We watched the movie Freud’s Last Session, based on the stage production and currently up on Netflix. It imagines a conversation three weeks before Freud’s death between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis.

Midway through the movie, we realized everyone kept referring to C.S. Lewis — Clive Staples Lewis — as “Jack.” We paused to Google it and learned that C.S. Lewis went by Jack for most of his life.

When his dog Jacksie was fatally struck by a horse-drawn carriage, the four-year-old Lewis adopted the name Jacksie. At first, he would answer to no other name, but later accepted Jack, the name by which he was known to friends and family for the rest of his life.

File this under something I learned this year.

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My friend plays Connections in his head, determines all the groupings, and then tries to begin with the purple one. This is the opposite of how I play, which is more of a nail-biting approach of elimination when I allow the purple category to fall into place by default. I am so impressed with people’s brains.