I am not a good photographer, and I don’t currently have a camera, but I love pictures, and I use my phone daily. I promised myself that I would learn some skills — how to better use the tool I have, how to frame the image, etc — between now and the end of summer. If you have advice (remember – I only have a phone as my camera), please pass it my way.

I’m starting with these 20 tips if you want to learn with me. I’ve set the video to start at the tips (about 11:15 minutes into it).

I went from making no plans to see the eclipse — despite everyone I know having solid plans to see the eclipse, so it wasn’t as if it wasn’t on my radar — to asking Josh if he could come home from work early because we really need to see this eclipse. This meant digging through the drawers to find our old eclipse glasses from 2017 and writing frantic texts to the kids about how they need to procure new eclipse glasses.

Ha — though with the 2017 eclipse, I talked about having seven years to do things better. Forgot that memo until this week.

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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.

Finding a Different Path writes about separate waiting rooms because it really is the best idea in the world. (Though, side note, I got tea on my computer for laughing during this line: “I guess because I didn’t ‘fess up to shaving my bellybutton? WTF.” If that doesn’t get you to click over, I don’t know what will.) She unpacks many different offices and finally ends up somewhere good. But it highlights what offices and doctors need to do differently and what they get right.

Lastly, A Blank New Page talks about a conversation with a 93-year-old woman who asks if she has children. The woman also did not have children and shares her feelings about it. She writes, “How calmly she asked me this question back then. How calm her own comment on it was. And how liberating it felt for me, how good, how accepted, understood and yes – how calm I felt.” Love this.

The roundup to the Roundup: Eclipse! 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 29 – April 5) 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.

Just because it is the oldest request in the world, and we have been talking about this on blogs for at least 18 years and on bulletin boards before that (so… no… People magazine. This isn’t an original idea), it’s still worth talking about: separate waiting rooms at the OB/GYN for pregnant vs. non-pregnant patients.

I was trying to come up with other situations where separating people would be compassionate (as opposed to the pediatrician’s office, which separates sick kids from wellness visits to lessen the spread of germs), where the reason for the visit would be common enough that many people would be impacted daily vs. an individual situation.

Would it be equally awful to be shunted to a different waiting room? To watch some people go into one room and feel even more left out, knowing that this is your waiting room for the time being, with the desire to be in the other waiting room? In protecting people’s feelings, would we inadvertently create different, equally terrible ones?

Those were my thoughts over the last 18 years of thinking about this.

Remember this post from back in January? I thought that idea was freakin’ brilliant.

But we were watching One Day, and Emma says the same thing when she is reading a page from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles :

“She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?”

The ChickieNob and I paused the show to look it up because I didn’t remember it in the book. (It turns out it is in there as a quote before a chapter.) But they made it a scene in the television show, so it stood out, whereas my eye passed over someone else’s words in the book. Was this brilliant idea from 1891 the first time it was said? Was it a copy then, too? Did my brain partially remember reading it, even though I sometimes skip over those quotes that begin chapters?

And did Dann McDorman, the author of West Heart Kill, know it had already been said? Did he read it himself or pick it up from a conversation with someone else? The transfer of ideas or the same thought popping up in two different worlds over a century apart?

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

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Every year elevates me to a new level of crankiness about April Fools Day. Yes, the fake pregnancy announcements were worse ten years ago when it was possible for the vast majority of my Facebook feed to possibly get pregnant, whereas by now, it sounds so far-fetched that I scroll on by without pause, but it doesn’t make the holiday any less annoying.

It’s hard enough to figure out reality without adding a fake holiday into the mix for the sole purpose of creating more confusion.

Bah humbug, or whatever the equivalent is for April Fools Day.

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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.