When the state of the world and the churning hate being pumped into the atmosphere are bringing you down, there is only one way to combat the negative: Purchase a copy of Steel Magnolias.

I talked the ChickieNob into watching it with me this week. She has grown up hearing me quote this movie all the time, so she sort of knew all the characters before it began. She loved it despite trying hard to hold the movie at arm’s length.

That movie (and the play, too) are sort of like Hallmark cards.  You know how most of the time, you just pick a card that feels pretty much on-target?  That’s other movies.  But Steel Magnolias is like finding the perfect card that says exactly what you’re trying to say but can’t put into words.

I love this movie so much.  I love its take on female friendships and mother-daughter relationships and the ways we grow and change.  I love that it can still make me cry, every single time.  I love that it says everything I want to say about the strength of women.

I’m keeping it on my phone for the time being.  Whenever the negativity starts bringing me down, I will queue it up and watch five minutes of M’Lynn and Ouiser and feel better about the world.

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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:

• “Privilege in the Infertility World” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Near Misses” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “Some Things That Bothered Me Lately” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Wild and Precious Life has a moving post about leaving her house and moving far away.  This is where she lived when her lost children were conceived, and where she lived when they died.  The space contains all those memories and serves as a tangible tie to S and G.  My throat tightened up reading the listing of memories.  She writes, “Where R and my sister and I laid in a jumble and passed out the day after my month in the hospital was over and our babies were really and forever gone.”

You must read A Woman My Age’s post about race and being a black woman.  “I’ve been raised to keep my mouth shut and avoid conflict.  Whether that’s because I’m female or because I’m a black female, it doesn’t matter.  Dress nice, speak nicely and keep money in your pocket or otherwise they will think you’re stealing.  That’s what my mother taught me.  And unconsciously, I’ve been training my son to do the same.”  It is such a powerful, powerful post.

Lastly, No Baby Ruth has a follow up after her MTHFR diagnosis.  While it’s good that she knows that she’s homozygous for C677T because it can affect more than fertility, she feels the weight of the diagnosis and wonders if she has it in her to continue on this family building path.  Again, for anyone who thinks getting a diagnosis makes things straightforward and simple, this post becomes a must-read so they can think again.

The roundup to the Roundup: Steel Magnolias is sometimes all you need.  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 22nd and July 29th) 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.

Truman has become obsessed with Critical Care, the Ensure-like nutrition supplement for guinea pigs.  The second he smells it, he starts wheeking and looking around frantically.  If he dribbles a drop, we need to pause while he licks it from the bedding (and then eats the piece of bedding for good measure).  His weight has mostly been holding, but since he has lost so much weight overall, I’ve been letting him have a few meals of Critical Care between his vegetables and pellets.

I get the Critical Care from the vet, but when we started to run low over the weekend, I called the pet store to see if they had it in stock.  They did, so we drove down to pick it up.

The moment I walked into the store, everything felt… wrong.  It’s usually pretty cramped, and there was suddenly room to maneuver around.  But I chalked it up to better display arrangements and went directly to the small mammal section.

The owner’s helper came over to talk about vitamin tablets and new treats, and she wistfully told me that the store would be closing this fall.  After 30+ years, the owner wanted to retire, and without a buyer stepping forward, it was time to close the store permanently.

I felt dizzy.  I still feel dizzy writing that.  I’ve been going to this pet store since I was 15.  The owner is my anchor.  She was the first person I called when Cozy’s eyes were coming out of his head.  The person I called after we had to put him to sleep.

The person I called to say Truman is sneezing, Truman has decided he doesn’t like his bedding, Truman isn’t wheeking.  She trims his nails, she cleans out his ears, she supplies me with new ideas for treats.  We clearly have a vet (or, really, at this point, two vets), but she has always been my source for information and reassurance.

Sure, I want her to retire and enjoy life.  She was beaming when she spoke about her retirement while we were checking out.  But… what about me?  Okay, I know, selfish.  But this is my blog and not her blog, so… what about me?

I am admittedly not good with change at all.  But she operates the only independent small mammal pet store in my area.  My only options now are big chain stores that usually don’t carry the high-end food  or Amazon.

But… it loses something, you know?  It’s the one errand the kids love to go on because while I’m shopping, they’re checking out all the guinea pigs and chinchillas and hamsters for sale.  The twins are nearing the age I was when I first started going there.  It feels like the end of an era, and I am so damn sad about it.

After the store, we stopped off for water ice, and I think I freaked out the woman at the counter when I asked her if her store was considering shuttering, too.  If the owner was ever going to retire and shut down the store between now and the time that I die, I needed to know now.  She reassured me that he’s not considering closing the store any time soon.  (Soon?  Soon?  Did you hear me?  I need to know EVER.)

When friends or co-workers retire, I continue to keep in touch.  But I don’t have that sort of relationship with the store owner.  She is somewhere between a human-nequin and advice-giver; not quite friendly enough for me to suggest that we should grab lunch from time to time, but more than someone playing a nameless background role of Store Owner #5.  I am going to miss her tremendously.

Some people roll with change and love change and look forward to change and try to create change.  But I have kept the same haircut since childhood, shop at the same stores, eat the same foods.  Like Bilbo Baggins, I like my cozy, little life.

And just as I imagine Bilbo would respond if Gandalf suddenly announced that he was retiring from magic, I am sort of freaking out about losing our pet store.

If I ruled the world, good stores would never be allowed to close.

I make a printable television schedule every Olympics so my family can keep track of the events we don’t want to miss.  News sites create convoluted schedules that require a lot of clicking.  I need to see it all written out in a simple manner, so I create these printable television Olympic schedules for myself and put them online in case someone else wants it too.

After the 2012 Summer Olympics, someone contacted me and told me that a link to my printable schedule was being passed around the blind community because the format works well with a screen reader.  Which is just so damn cool.  I love the idea of the world coming together over these games.  So a special hello to anyone who is hearing this from a screen reader.

I’ll be keeping the printable schedule up-to-date in case anything changes.  I had to make it as a page, or every time I added to it, it would reset the permalink and you wouldn’t be able to find it again.

You can access the schedule here.  If you want to help spread word, you can post this link on Twitter or Facebook: https://www.stirrup-queens.com/summer-olympics-2016-schedule/.

Which event are you most excited to see in the 2016 Olympics?

I just started listening to Earwolf’s podcast, The Longest Shortest Time.  When they state they are a parenting podcast for everyone, they literally mean everyone, even people who aren’t parenting.  Which makes sense because we all have opinions or thoughts or ideas to contribute to conversations.

A case in point: I started with the April 20th episode featuring an interview with Terry Gross from NPR.  She does not have kids by choice, and she takes the episode to explain how she came to that decision, why she stuck to that decision, and whether she’d make that same decision again.  It was the most interesting thing I listened to all week.

(By the way, you can download and subscribe to the podcast, as I did, or you can listen to the episode online as well as read the transcript if you scroll down the page and click on podcast transcript.)

The thought that gave me chills (and made me wish my drive to camp pick up was a little bit longer so I could have marinated on this a bit longer):

I think the main thing we want as women is we want the choice. And the choice only has meaning if there is a choice. It’s great to be a parent when you’re not forced to be – when society isn’t demanding it, when they’re not making it an obligation. And in order to no longer be an obligation, I think some people had to choose to not have children and rewrite the rules a little bit.

Someone had to take the other option — to not have kids — to make the choice to have kids truly a choice.  I was thinking about it in terms of infertility.  We need people to choose all the options in order for there to truly be options.  We need people willing to build their families through treatments, donor gametes, surrogacy, or adoption in order to really be making a choice vs. fulfilling an obligation.  We need people to choose to resolve their infertility by being child-free after infertility.  Again, without some people choosing that option, the people who don’t choose that option aren’t really making a choice.  Does that make sense?

So, thank you, to everyone who has made every choice that has allowed me to also get to make a choice.  We don’t need to choose the same thing, but we do need to support each other’s choices because other people’s choices directly impact whether or not we have a choice.

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

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If you read my blog years ago, you might remember that the twins had outlined several ways a person could die back when they were first learning about death.  Those ways were not eating, not holding your mother’s hand while crossing the street and getting hit by a car, and turning 100.

Um… Microblog Mondays just turned 100, y’all.

But no worries, it’s not dropping over dead.  To ensure that, I already jotted down an idea for the 101st Microblog Monday.  So, yeah, that’s happening next week.  But 100 feels like such a big number.  How did it get so important?  I mean, why did we all declare that 100 would be a milestone, but 97 would not?

The point of Microblog Monday will also remain the same: To stop giving over your best thoughts to other social media outlets and instead record them on your blog, where you’ll be able to re-read them in years to come.

So go do that.  The best way to ensure that Microblog Monday is around 100 posts from now is to participate.  Make the commitment to write one small thing on your blog every Monday for the next 100 weeks.

Are you in?

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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.