I needed two business-y outfits (like nice enough to wear to an event but not over the line into wearable-for-a-daytime-wedding), so I grabbed ChickieNob, promising that it would take maybe an hour.  Tops.

I don’t go shopping.  I don’t enjoy shopping.  I don’t enjoy clothes unless they are a t-shirt, jeans, and my boots.  I especially don’t like dresses or skirts.  I dislike every part of the shopping experience, from picking out things to trying it on to deciding whether to purchase.

ChickieNob knows this and tried to make the outing efficient and fun.  She gathered up stuff for me to try on and then gave helpful commentary like, “Do you want to look as if you’re wearing a hospital gown?  No?  Then I probably would take off that top.”  She even took some photos of me while I was trying on outfits so she could test their “selfie-ability” (how they show up in selfie form) just in case I ever feel moved to take a selfie.  The girl is prepared.

At one point, I told her that I would release her to read a book and attempt to continue on my own because I felt awful about how I was using up her afternoon.  But she stuck with me because she told me (1) she doesn’t trust me to make good decisions, (2) she pities me and knows that I need more help than the average person to hold it together while shopping for an outfit, and (3) she is a good person.

She didn’t even laugh at me when I got a shirt on and then couldn’t get it off.

I love that girl.

I walked out with an awesome dress and matching cardigan plus a pair of dress pants and two tops.  And it only took us a little over four hours.  Like I said, four hours.  Tops.

Now I don’t need to go shopping for another five to eight years.  I like to wear the same thing every single time I have to dress up.  It makes things easy.

I owe that girl the Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Once More With Feeling” soundtrack for her extreme patience.

The Wolvog and his friend have been hanging out on a Minecraft server which is an exact replica of Disney World.  Exact replica, down to the ticket booths at the front of the park, the lines outside the rides, and the placement of every brick.  You can go on rides, meet characters, and wander through restaurants.  Oh — and it’s every park in Florida.

When he first mentioned it, the ChickieNob and I sort of squinted at him and said, “I don’t get it.”  So he got the computer and showed us, and suddenly an hour of our life was gone as we rode on the Haunted Mansion and went on the People Mover and flew above California on Soarin’.  (Thank you, Wolvog, for being very patient with us, especially when we both shouted out different rides and made you jump from park to park.)

As far as I know, it’s not an official Disney project; just a labour of love from hundreds of kids who go to the park, photograph every square inch, and then recreate it in Minecraft.

You need a Minecraft account in order to access it, and you can find it at MCMagic (Palace Network).

Happy visiting.

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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:

• “With the Words of a Love Song” (Glow in the Woods)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Washington Post has a beautiful piece about why we should talk about miscarriage.  Perhaps the most important point: “For a society that has no shortage of vocal citizens highly concerned about the fate of unborn children in general, there is surprisingly little compassion to go around for the loss of one unborn child in particular. We know how to criticize, but we don’t have a script for consoling.”  I loved this piece.

Res Cogitatae has a post that made me smile after reading all the doom and gloom in the rest of the Washington Post.  She talks about what happened when she met up with a stranger to pass along some baby things.  I hope it makes you smile, too.

With Every Heartbeat looks at the life she was supposed to have and holds it against the life she has.  She writes, “This life is nothing like the one we thought we’d have.  The life we, quite frankly, thought we deserved after so many long, difficult years.  Where is that life?  Reduced to ash, just like our daughter.”  It is such a raw, beautiful post.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a post about Ariel Levy’s book.  I wrote about her story after the New Yorker article, but I didn’t know that a memoir had been released a few weeks ago.  She writes, “Her story of how swiftly a carefully constructed life can fall completely apart is something those of us who have experienced traumatic loss will well relate to.”  I think I’m going to read this one.

The roundup to the Roundup: Virtually visit Disney.  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 March 24th and 31st) 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.

After losing our original tickets to the snowstorm, we tried again and were able to score 4 tickets to see Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors exhibit at the Hirshhorn yesterday.  I’ll admit that our earlier experience with the exhibit probably coloured how I felt about the exhibit.  But that’s art: you carry your baggage with you into every piece.

Was it worth it?  Yes.  I think.  Josh compared it to eating at a molecular gastronomy restaurant, which is more an experience than satiating your hunger.  This was definitely more an experience than a consumption of art.  There’s not a lot you can absorb in 20 seconds.  (Yes, you only get 20 seconds per room AND someone is outside with a stopwatch to make it fair.)  You’re thrown into the piece and then yanked out.

The kids LOVED it and were happy to stand patiently in each line.  There’s a lot to see while you’re in line, and we ended up chatting sometimes with the people around us.  (We spoke to a group of three that had gotten there at 7 am for 10 am stand-by tickets!)  And we definitely had a good time together; though how much of that was just hanging out with one another and how much of that was the art exhibit I have no clue.

Okay, I liked it.  I liked it very very much.

I took 281 images at the exhibit, but here are a few to give you a taste.

New York Magazine had an article about “prestigious” diseases, or the hierarchy of disease.  The author explains,

Physicians were asked to rate 38 categories of diseases on a prestige scale from 1 to 9, based on how they felt health professionals viewed the disease-category in question. In all three surveys, there was stability at the top: Leukemia, brain tumors, and myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) were the top three in all three surveys, though the order switched around. At the bottom were fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, and cirrhosis of the liver.

I’m not sure where infertility falls on the actual prestige list, but I’m going to guess that it falls close to the bottom.  The article goes on to summarize what gives a disease high prestige (at least, in Norway):

• “Non-self-inflicted, acute and lethal diseases with clear diagnostic signs, located in the upper part of the body, preferably the brain or the heart.”
• Diseases “associated with active, risky and high technology treatment leading to a speedy and effective recovery.”
• Diseases “associated with young patients, patients who accept the physician’s understanding of the disease, and whose treatment results do not involve disfigurement, helplessness or other heavy burdens.”

Infertility is not lethal and it involves organs in the lower half of the body.  It definitely can be treated with what I would consider high technology, though perhaps IVF is not as cool as robotic surgery.  And while infertility involves young patients in the sense that it is not a geriatric disease, I get a sense — based on my own experience — that people find family building a burden, whether that’s covering for them at work so they can get treatments or accommodating time off for maternity leave on the other end.

We want people to have babies, we just don’t want their babies to impact us in any way.  It goes hand-in-hand with the societal message of children are precious angels and disruptive brats at the very same time.  Infertility follows that duality of everyone should want a baby but no one’s attempt to have a baby should impact anyone else around them.

The most interesting thought in the article is that this idea of disease prestige impacts how doctors practice medicine.  How they may subconsciously make decisions on your treatment.  It’s not just what area of medicine draws the most people but how much energy doctors expend on what they perceive to be a simple case vs. a difficult case or a known fertility issue vs. an unknown fertility issue.

What do you think?  The article gave me a lot to chew on, especially the role the patient could (would? should?) play when suspecting this sort of prestige bias.

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 not a fan of decorating.  We are not tchotchke purchasers.  We do not like flourishes.  Instead of operating from a place of “that’s beautiful,” I come from a space of “that’s not ugly.”  I like things plain.  Plain, plain, plain, plain, plain.

I am not enjoying bathroom renovation decisions.

Some people love going to open houses to see how other people decorate their homes.  Or peruse home goods catalogues.  Or watch decorating shows on television.  I do not do any of these things.  If we had the money, I would pass off this decision-making process to a decorator.  I would tell him/her, “Aim for plain. Think boring and then take it one step beyond that.”

Do you like to decorate?

P.S. We are moving from the steampunk bathroom idea toward a more spa look.  The Edison lightbulbs hurt my eyes.

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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.