The Olympics start tonight.  I have big plans to spend the evening in my pyjamas in front of the television.  I love the parade of countries when the teams walk in, waving their flags.  And the lighting of the Olympic flame.  I’m just really excited about the broadcast.

But.

Is it my imagination, or could you see many more events during the primetime hours when we were kids?  I feel like almost every activity was televised in part during the evening vs. now where they show the most popular sports at night — swimming, gymnastics, track — and stick the less mainstream sports — fencing, rugby sevens, judo — on random stations during the day.  Because I distinctly remember seeing things like synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics when I was a kid, but sports like that aren’t hitting primetime coverage.

Am I right?

And are you watching, too?

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Uh… before you dive into posts… follow Persnickety Chickadee’s link and find out your magical job.  I got wandmaker!  A real, live wandmaker!  I’m magic!

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Different Shores has a post about people saying that being a mother is the best thing, usually a saying uttered by celebrities, as in, “My 55 Oscars are all meaningless next to my children.  Being a mother is the best thing in the world, and I would give up acting in a heartbeat.”  It’s not only an interesting post, but the comment section is jumping with conversation.  Go over and give your thoughts.

Bent Not Broken has a post about her husband connecting with another childless-after-infertility man.  She explains why this moment was important: “I found people I trusted and who I could share the good, the bad, and the ugly with.  Hubs never found that.”  It’s about those moments when you meet up with a “me, too” and it opens up something inside of you.

Lastly, a beautiful and moving post from Endlessness That You Fear about how her hands aren’t quite as full anymore after the loss of her son.  She writes, “So back then, my hands were full … Yesterday morning, someone held the front door of the daycare for me and said that I had my hands full. I just gave a half smile. They should have seen me before.”  Go over and give her support.

The roundup to the Roundup: Olympics starts tonight!  Woohoo!  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 July 29th and August 5th) 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.

It’s mid-week, and I’m still mentally turning over River Run Dry’s post from Monday, which means I should probably write about it and get it out of my brain.  Like Karen, I also don’t like to be in that uncomfortable place outside my comfort zone.  She explains,

I have a card that I taped to my office wall which reads: Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. I bought the card a while ago, when I was feeling uncomfortable about all the uncertainty I was feeling about work and this coming fall, because I liked the idea that there’s some good that comes from being uncomfortable.

The good from being uncomfortable.  Don’t we need that?  Because the alternative is that there is no benefit to being uncomfortable; that being outside your comfort zone or going through something difficult is a pointless aspect of life that we all must deal with from time to time, and it serves no purpose other than to fill the reality of chance.  Every life will be filled with easy and difficult moments.

Well, that isn’t a cheery thought, is it?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I am outside my comfort zone.  I’ve zig zagged off paths I want to be on for what amounts to poor reasoning upon reflection, and I’ve ended up outside my comfort zone.  Knowing that means I can move back into my comfort zone; I just needed to get to this place to realize where I want to be vs. where I’ve ended up.  But… returning to that quote, it means THIS is a better place because it’s where life begins.

This uncomfortable place that doesn’t really fit; that pinches and tugs at me.

If you asked me before I read that quote, I would say that the only benefit to being uncomfortable is that it gives you the motivation to change and move forward to get out of the uncomfortable place.  But that quote has been nagging me because it implies that we should always aim to operate outside of our comfort zone.  Even if we do our best work or our happiest work — our best or happiest living — inside our comfort zone.

Three out of the four of us in this house are in flux.  Josh is thankfully our anchor, happily in the zone at the moment.  But the kids are starting a new school and new routines in another month.  It makes me ill when I think too long and hard about it, so I’ve been ostriching this summer and pretending that the start of school is always going to be a month away.  I am in flux with projects and… life.  For lack of a better word, life, because it feels like too many things are all swirling around me, close enough to see but not slow enough to easily grab.

I’ve learned that I don’t like being out of my comfort zone.  I don’t thrive here.  I don’t hum.  Sure, it has helped me to take a step back so I can look at the big picture and think to myself, “Yes, I need to go here, here, and then here to get back to my comfort zone.”  But that, you see, is the goal.  To get back to my comfortable spot so I can do my best work, my happiest work, when it comes to writing.  I want to get back to cherishing and maintaining my friendships better.  I want to read more and better use the hours of my day.

So I keep turning over the quote.

I couldn’t get through Ghazala Khan’s gorgeous op-ed without crying. Then I couldn’t talk about it with Josh without crying. And then I went on Facebook and saw other people mentioning it, so I cried again.

You must read it.

There is a perfect paragraph in the center of the piece, one that puts into words that concept that we are never the same again after a loss:

Humayun is my middle son, and the others are doing so well, but every day I feel the pain of his loss. It has been 12 years, but you know hearts of pain can never heal as long as we live. Just talking about it is hard for me all the time. Every day, whenever I pray, I have to pray for him, and I cry. The place that emptied will always be empty.

The place that emptied will always be empty. It doesn’t get filled by something or someone else. It is just an empty space inside you for eternity.

Sitting for a moment with that very sad, but perfectly said, thought.

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

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Speaking of letters (uh… I spoke of letters about two weeks ago), I remember having a pen pal through my elementary school.  Everyone’s pen pal was from a different country (though everyone wrote in English, so even if your pen pal was living in a non-English speaking country, the letters were all written in English), and the letters were sent weekly to the school so you didn’t have to give out your home address.  My pen pal was an Australian girl my age.  We continued to write each other after that year, but it fizzled out a few months later.

When I got to college and discovered Usenet, it sort of scratched that pen pal itch because I was speaking with random people around the world.  One boy (from Ballarat) and I had a standing date every day to log in at the same time and find each other on the board and chat while we worked.  Blogs further removed the itch because it’s like having hundreds of pen pals at once.

But every once in a while, I sort of wish I had a letter writing pen pal again.  Not a friend that I speak to through other means, but someone on the other side of the world where we only communicate back and forth through letters.

I remember being so excited every time a letter arrived.  I guess I also wish that I had time built into my day to be a pen pal.  Not sure how sustainable it would be as an adult.

Did you have a pen pal growing up?  Did you ever get to meet?

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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 posts.

I know what you’re going to ask me: Did I stay up all night to start reading J.K. Rowling’s The Cursed Child. And the answer is no. My copy hasn’t arrived.

I wish Amazon had a section on their ordering page determining the level of your fandom and then delivering products from said fandom faster to those who score higher on the list. I think we’ve determined over the years that I have an unusual, extreme love of all things Harry Potter, so… you would think Amazon would have gotten that book over to me post haste.

If I had known that there would be this delay, I would have never ordered it from them.  I’ll know now for Harry Potter 9.

(There’s going to be a Harry Potter 9, right?)

The book should be here in the next few days, and once it arrives, we’ve decided to read the whole thing aloud. It isn’t fair for one person to get to jam the whole book into their eye sockets while the rest of the people in the house wait around for their time to consume it. Also the ChickieNob’s idea that we purchase 4 copies of the book (plus an extra for Truman since he loves books, too) wasn’t financially sound. So I’m going to do all the voices. I’m going to switch places in the room so they know which character is speaking. And I’m going to act the whole freakin’ thing out in our living room this week.

Part of me wants to spread it out and read it slowly, but I also don’t want to start hearing spoilers.  So I am going to read aloud the whole thing in marathon sessions, and then each of us can go back and read it to ourselves slowly.  It’s what must be done.

So, no, I haven’t started it yet.  But I will soon.  Excuse me, I need to go practice my Scorpius voice.

Oh, and happy birthday, Harry Potter!