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.

I entered a new decade. The last time it happened, I was yanked, kicking and screaming over the threshold. This time, the panic didn’t really begin until a few weeks beforehand, and it was more of a quiet panic. Like my body thought it was supposed to panic, so it stepped up and did its job, but it performed halfheartedly because it didn’t feel it deeply.

It is weird having a milestone birthday. There is nothing you can do with the day that is big enough, but you feel like you have to try.

We took the pressure off the day by planning something small for today and then scheduling a big trip later in the year. With two weeks of days on the trip, I figured I could choose one that seemed to be already going well and declare it my birthday day celebration.

So, I am eating cake and celebrating making it through another year and into a new decade. There’s a lot to celebrate.

Every morning this week, I woke up and immediately thought, “I only have X days until my birthday.” It would be fair to say that I have been highly aware of my birthday this year. It felt a little bit like when you know there is a spider in the room, and you’ve determined that you’re going to wait for someone else to take care of it, but you sort of can’t stop yourself from tracking the spider… it was that except in birthday form.

I saved an Anthony Horowitz book to read. There will definitely be French fries, amusement park rides, and wishes made.

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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:

• “#MicroblogMondays: Information Overload vs Creativity” (The Road Less Travelled)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Barreness gives an update on her parents. My heart hurt for her when I read this note about her mother: “I am often her therapist explaining how things are not ever going back to how they were and that this is the new normal. She asks again hours later, like I am that magical fridge that you open the door to and new things appear.” It is a really really really hard situation, and she could use a kind word. So please go over and let her know that she has people holding her up as she does this hard work.

Lastly, Scientist on the Roof has a post that felt very familiar, in that this is how I process stress, too. But I love this so much: “I keep telling myself – this is not like grad school. I can quit. I can look for another job … Or maybe I’ll just do the best I can and let things be what they will be.” It’s hard to get to that place of acceptance, so sending deep breaths.

The roundup to the Roundup: Birthday weekend. 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 24 – May 31) 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 read something recently that I feel so deeply to be true:

The secret to enjoying life online boils down to one simple piece of advice: Protect your peace. Mute words, block bad posters, unfollow the person you only met briefly years ago on a work trip. It’s an algorithmic world, and anything you let into your orbit is what Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter will use to inform what they funnel into your feeds.

I don’t think you need always to cut ties, but I’ve temporarily hidden people this year, and it has brought me a great deal of peace. On the other side, I have added things (people, words, images, videos) that spark joy, bringing greater enjoyment to my time online vs. just removing the drains.

But I think the larger thought in that quote is that you inadvertently tell the algorithm you want more of the thing bringing you stress when you leave the thing causing you stress in your feed. If you watch dozens of videos about X, you can’t blame the algorithm for thinking you want more of X, not realizing that X actually upsets you.

So watch carefully. Read thoughtfully. Unfollow when it needs to happen for your own peace of mind.