Tomorrow is a Pyjamas Day.  Every once in a while, I write Pyjamas Day on the calendar, and that day is held as sacred.  Nothing can be scheduled on that day.  No one can visit.  The point is to sleep until you wake up and then lounge around the house all day doing pretty much nothing.

I put this Pyjamas Day on the calendar a few weeks ago, and events threatened to derail it at every turn.  People kept asking us to schedule things on that day, but I held firm.  No, I could not do anything on that day no matter how interesting or important.  Did they understand that I needed to spend 24 hours in a manky old University of Wisconsin sweatshirt and non-matching sweatpants?

So that’s what I’m doing starting at midnight tonight.  See you on the other side.

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Part of why I need a Pyjamas Day is that we’re attempting a bathroom renovation.  We had a slow leak that destroyed the tile, and in replacing the tile, we also sort of need to replace the vanity.  We’ve been putting this off for months… cough… years… because (1) I hate to decorate or make any sort of decision about my living space, (2) cost, and (3) a lack of desire to have the work take place and disrupt my life.

But we’re doing it.  We’re attempting to pull all the necessary pieces into place.  I told Josh that I wanted to go with a steampunk theme.  He informed me that he has no clue what this means.  “Like… aviator goggles over the toilet?”  No.  No, Josh.  What I mean is that I will find a bunch of things that remind me of Doctor Who, and we will pee next to a vanity with gear-shaped drawer pulls, lit by a fixture that has Edison bulbs encased in cages.  THAT is what I mean.

Wish us luck.

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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:

• “Seven Months” (With Every Heartbeat)
• “Three Steps to Banish Negative Thoughts” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “In the End” (The Road Less Travelled)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Searching for Our Silver Lining has a eulogy for a dog that contains a really profound thought: “It’s easy to eulogize those that fit into the ideal. The popular ones that check off all the right boxes, giving the imagine of a life out of a storybook … But the truth is we all have our flaws and faults; our skeletons we wish to hide from the world.”  It’s the story of loving and respecting a difficult dog.  And, damnit, she made me cry.

Lavender Luz has a post looking at whether something is good luck or bad luck using a story to illustrate the grey nature of everything.  We never know what our “bad luck” has saved us from, turning secretly into “good luck” in disguise.

With Every Heartbeat has a post about loneliness stemming from that moment when you realize that you are not happy whereas everyone else around you has found what they’re looking for in life.  She writes: “Their lives are working out as they’d planned, dreamed, hoped, worked so hard for and then there’s you and your broken life, unfolding as a nightmare, in tatters, despite everything.”  It is a post about wondering if you’ll ever smile fully again.

Days of Grace has a post about releasing herself from infertility.  She points to the moment, saying, “The end of infertility. It finally can’t hurt me anymore.”  I don’t know if I’ve hit that point yet — where it can’t hurt me anymore — but I love that idea of release.

Lastly, Look No Tubes has a post about going to her transfer alone.  I want people to read this post because it was so stressful, which may be an odd thing to say.  But what I mean is that it highlights the truth for anyone who has thought, “Oh, you can always do IVF.”  Sure, it is an option, but it isn’t easy.  People should know that before they suggest it.

The roundup to the Roundup: Pyjamas Day.  Steampunk bathroom.  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 17th and 24th) 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.

How much money do you think Planned Parenthood gets each year from the federal budget?

Write that number down because I think you’re going to be surprised by the actual answer.  The answer will probably either be higher or lower than your expectations.  I think your expectations say something about how you feel about Planned Parenthood; what you think its worth.

So… have your number written down?  Scroll a little bit for the answer.

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The answer is zero.  Planned Parenthood receives zero dollars from the federal budget.  You cannot “defund” Planned Parenthood because it is not funded in the first place.  It is not a line item in the budget.  It is not like the NEA which was appropriated almost $148 million in the 2016 budget.  It is not like Homeland Security which received about $41.2 billion in the 2016 budget.  Planned Parenthood is not in the budget.

Planned Parenthood is a clinic.  It takes a lot lower income patients because it was set up as a safety net in underserved or rural communities.  But it’s just that — a clinic.  No different from any other medical provider EXCEPT that unlike your private doctor or your local hospital, it has a reputation for providing abortions.  Your private doctor and your local hospital also likely provide abortions, but that is not how you think about your private doctor or local hospital.

Sit with that a minute: If you believe your doctor is “good” and Planned Parenthood is “bad” but both provide abortions, then this is really about economics and class.

When I heard that Planned Parenthood was going to be defunded, I assumed that meant that Planned Parenthood would have their funding removed from the budget.  So colour me surprised when I found out that Planned Parenthood gets zero dollars in the budget.  Yes, my initial number was not the actual zero.

How is Planned Parenthood connected to taxpayer dollars?  The same way every private doctor or local hospital is connected to taxpayer dollars: Patients on Medicaid instead of private insurance.  In other words, a patient goes to Planned Parenthood OR a private doctor for a Pap smear.  In both cases, the office (Planned Parenthood or your private doctor) submits for reimbursement.  If the patient has Medicaid, the office submits to Medicaid.  If the patient has private insurance, the office submits to private insurance.  Medicaid or private insurance reimburses the doctor for payment not covered by the patient.  This is the way all insurance works, simplified.

(We don’t need to get into the fact that doctors ask for X amount and insurance companies give them Y amount.  Or fight the charge.  Or… you get the picture because you’ve dealt with insurance at some point.)

So Planned Parenthood gets reimbursed through Medicaid because a large percentage of their patients use Medicaid.  The government knows this.  They cannot tell a clinic or private doctor or hospital that is following the law that they can’t practice medicine but they can make laws that make it impossible for them to be reimbursed for services.

The CBO points out that there is really only one entity in the United States that fits the criteria for this part of the law, and that is Planned Parenthood:

For a one-year period following enactment, the legislation would prevent federal funds from being made available to an entity (including its affiliates, subsidiaries, successors, and clinics) if it is:

• A nonprofit organization described in section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and exempt from tax under section 501(a) of the code;
• An essential community provider that is primarily engaged in providing family planning and reproductive health services and related medical care;
• An entity that provides abortions—except in instances in which the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest or the woman’s life is in danger; and
• An entity that had expenditures under the Medicaid program that exceeded $350 million in fiscal year 2014.

CBO expects that, according to those criteria, only Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its affiliates and clinics would be affected. Most federal funds received by such entities come from payments for services provided to enrollees in states’ Medicaid programs.

Do you get it now?  The new health care bill states that if you are a nonprofit that provides reproductive health services AND provides abortions AND was reimbursed over $350 million in 2014 through Medicaid then you won’t be able to get reimbursed through Medicaid for the new budget year.

So think about whether there is anyone else out there that is a nonprofit (a community health clinic, let’s say) that also provides reproductive health services (okay, still with you) and also provides abortions (okay, they’re legal so that could happen, too) and also got back over $350 million in reimbursements in 2014.  Oh… wait… it won’t affect that community clinic because it’s small and only serves a few thousand people.

This health care bill is like looking at the person you don’t like and describing them, making sure to make your description super specific so no one else could possibly fit the same description.

It is completely reasonable if you want to vote with your wallet and not patron Planned Parenthood.  You do not have to go there in the same way that I do not have to shop at certain stores or eat at certain restaurants.  It’s a decision I make due to the policies of that business.  It is completely unreasonable to say that no one can patron Planned Parenthood (or a store or restaurant) because you do not like it.  As long as abortion is legal in the US, abortions will be performed.

Unless you are willing to also shut down all private doctors or hospitals that perform abortions, protesting Planned Parenthood is a protest against a clinic, not a service.  I don’t think lawmakers are willing to lose their private doctor or not have hospitals to go to in an emergency.  But they totally are willing to go against people who need Medicaid in order to make their point about abortion.

Because 79% of people who use Planned Parenthood have “incomes at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level.”  So make no mistake: this is using the most vulnerable in society to make a point about abortion.

If you feel okay with that, keep on keeping on in making America great again.  But if you look down at that slip of paper where you wrote that initial number and feel confused because the media led you to believe that Planned Parenthood is getting beaucoup bucks from the federal government and using it to give abortions (which they can’t due to the Hyde amendment), it may be time for you to get involved.

Call your representative. THE VOTE IS TODAY, but even if this bill doesn’t pass, we all know that lawmakers will try this again and again. So please let me know if you want to help Planned Parenthood, and I’ll add you to a listserve where you can learn how you can make a difference.

I read a great piece about the AOL chat rooms, which are technically still up and running though barely used these days.  It made me nostalgic, not for AOL chat rooms because I never had AOL, but chat rooms in general.

I used to do my homework in college while hanging out in a chat room and talking to other students around the world.  I had a standing date for many months with another student in Ballarat, but other people would join in the conversation; random strangers who dropped in and out.

Everyone was polite in my experience with chat rooms, but that could have just been because the Internet was so new and shiny.  It was so mind-blowing back then that no one wanted to crap on it.

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I liked the article because it’s nice to think about little gardening grannies getting together online to talk about azaleas.  I still have a bunch of message boards I frequent around specific topics though it’s different to leave and read messages vs. talk back and forth with someone in real time.

The article made me sad, too, because it felt like walking through the crumbling remains of a once great empire:

There’s a post apocalyptic sense about AOL chatrooms. The abandoned entertainment rooms are about outdated TV shows, celebrities, and movies (think Desperate Housewives, Brangelina, and Twilight). Frequent, longtime users — it seems to mostly be the elderly — who log on to chat about gardening have increasingly been met with trolls who start arguments about President Donald Trump. And yes, there are people — unsure about Tinder — looking for love.

I guess Twitter is the equivalent of today’s chat room.  Or Facebook.  But it’s different because we can curate those feeds vs. expose ourselves to anyone and everyone who stumbles into the same space.  Sure, that is preferred considering how people treat others online, but we’ve lost something, too.

We used to meet new people all the time, and now we’re conversing in echo chambers, culling our friend lists so we don’t have to be annoyed by obnoxious statements.  We can silence people so they continue talking, thinking they’re engaging listeners without knowing that their words aren’t reaching an audience.

And then there are instant messaging apps, which give us conversation in real time with a few drawbacks.  Instead of getting to choose the hours when communication will take place — visiting the room and seeing whose schedule lines up with your own — you’re having people communicate with you when they want to communicate, dropping messages into Slack that pop up on your phone unless you turn off notifications.  In that way, it feels like the phone ringing in my house, letting me know someone else wants to talk, but it’s not necessarily when I have time to talk.

When I first entered the Internet, it made my world feel infinitely larger.  When I think about the Internet now, it feels a lot smaller.  I still meet new people all the time, but I mostly converse with the same people, day after day.  I can’t remember the last time I entered a virtual room, chatted with a bunch of people, and went our separate ways without the strings of a friend request or a follower notification.

Do you still frequent chat rooms?  Do you miss them, too?

Josh likes to tell people that I talk about waste in the same way that other people talk about murder.  I waste nothing.  I do not even waste the 30 seconds as a meal heats up in the microwave.  I use that time to put away measuring cups from the drying rack.  I do not waste food.  I don’t always eat it myself, but if you stare at Josh long enough, he will make a meal out of the remaining three bites from fifteen lingering Tupperware containers.  I don’t even waste receipts.  I use them as bookmarks.

So I just want to explain the eighty-five open bottles of dish soap, the thirty-one open bottles of shampoo, and the small army of almost-empty hair gel bottles parading across the front of our bathroom cabinet.

They’re all because I waste nothing.

Because I plan to cut open the top of the hair gel container and scoop out the last precious drop with the tip of my finger before I recycle the container.  But the scissors are downstairs and the hair gel container is upstairs.  So I place the almost-empty container in the cabinet and open a new bottle because my hand hurts from trying to squeeze something out of the almost-empty container.  And the next morning, I grab the new bottle because the scissors are still downstairs and therefore too far away if I want to cut open the old bottle.  The cycle continues.

The same thing happens with the dish soap.  When we get towards the bottom of a container, I generally flip it upside down so the contents gather in the top and come out easier.  But I can’t do that with the dish soap because the soap tends to leak out the top of the container.  So when it gets close to the end, I tell myself that I’m going to dedicate an evening to standing in the kitchen, holding the bottle upside down over the sponge so it fills with that soapy goodness.  But that doesn’t happen.  Opening a new bottle on the other hand, does.

Actually, it does happen — all the old stuff eventually gets used — but it’s not before I’ve amassed a giant collection of mostly used bottles.

I’ll admit it — it is really annoying to live with me.

(But I bake cookies.)

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

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I read an interesting thought from Abraham Twerski (The Enemy Within).  It was part of a larger commentary on self-love; not in the positive sense, but in the “putting yourself before others” sense:

The Rebbe of Kotzk noticed a young man thoroughly enjoying a dish of fish.  “Why are you eating fish?” the Rebbe asked.

The young man responded, “Why?  Because I love fish, that’s why.”

“So it was your love for the fish that caused you to take it from the water, kill it and cook it!  If you really loved the fish, you would have let it live.  Do not delude yourself, young man.  What you really love is yourself, and because the fish satisfies your palate, you eat it.”

A fitting thought considering the political climate where so many of us are the fish, and we’re being told that work is being done to make our lives better when we feel like we’re being devoured, all for someone else’s enjoyment.  It’s words not matching up with actions.

Chew on that.

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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.