The video of the woman disappearing on live television?  She’s on the left side of the screen.  I must have watched it 50 times by now trying to figure it out.

View post on imgur.com

Where does she go? And if you watch everyone else, there is no skip in the feed.  Spooky.

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Have you heard of the brand Cotton On?  I think it’s Australian.  I can’t even remember how I heard about it this week, but it brought back memories of the brand Au Coton, which intense Googling has informed me is now defunct.  I am so sad for Generation Z and their lack of Au Coton memories.

Do you remember those clothes?  The oversized sweatshirts (damn, I wish sweatshirts that covered half your body were still in style) and the sweatpants you pegged and rolled up so they rested over your scrunch socks?  One of my happiest memories ever was the day my dad let my sister and I go shopping in Au Coton by ourselves.  The store was in Inner Harbour, and while I was a little nervous to make my own decisions because I was pretty crap at dressing myself, it was a heady rush to be around all of that sexy cotton.  Just yards and yards and yards of super soft sweat clothes.

I really miss Au Coton.  I get the sense that Cotton On is closer to being the Australian Old Navy than a reincarnation of 80s baggy clothing.  Anyone else with me?  Au Coton, great clothing store or greatest clothing store ever?

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Josh and I have been talking about Adam LaRoche and his decision to retire from baseball and leave $13 million on his contract rather than “dial back” having his 14 year old son come to his workplace.  LaRoche is a former National, now a White Sox.  But once you are one of my boys, you are always one of my boys.

I get that it sounds sensible in theory from the point of view of the Executive Vice President, Ken Williams.  For instance, a lawyer would not bring her child to work every single day.  If she did, she probably wouldn’t be very productive, and her child would probably be bored.

But this assumes that all jobs are alike.  And they’re not.  Some jobs lend themselves better to having kids at the workplace.  Baseball seems like one of those jobs.

I’m biased because I often bring the kids with me to work things.  I’ve even pulled them out of school if I’m going somewhere special so they can be in that space, too.  I think they get a lot out of the experience, and they learn from observation.  My kids are naturally pretty quiet in public, so it works out well.  If my kids acted differently in public, I would rethink taking them.

But I think my kids act the way they do BECAUSE we’ve always included them in adult experiences such a theater events or dinners with authors.  They’ve learned how to comport themselves through observation and stated expectations and the excitement of being included in the adult world.

If LaRoche’s son was not bothering anyone — and it has been stated that no one but management had a problem with the boy being there, and their problem came from the fact that they just didn’t think it was right for the child to spend so much time with his parent — then I don’t see the point in making a new rule.  It’s not Williams’s job to tell LaRoche how to parent, especially when LaRoche was upfront during contract negotiations on how he parents.

So, yeah, I totally respect LaRoche for saying family is more important than his job, and if he can’t be the dad he wants to be while being a baseball player, he just won’t be a baseball player.

I am in a bad mood after a baking disaster, and I’m taking a break to write this and think.  My two choices are to start over completely — I can see everything that was wrong with this recipe and can correct it with a second attempt — or to try to salvage what I have.  Currently I am leaning toward salvaging what I have because it took me hours to make, and re-making the cookies throws me off schedule.  Plus… you know… I hate waste.  But I’m really cranky about it.

I went with a recipe from the Kitchn.  The recipe was simple enough — a bar cookie — and the picture was beautiful.  With the exception of correcting an amount (I was fairly certain the author wanted me to put a teaspoon of vanilla into the cookie and not a tablespoon), I followed the recipe to a T.  My batch looked lovely… up until the point when I tried to cut it.  And then the various layers fell apart, and I was left with a crumbly mess on the cutting board.

Here’s the thing: A few times, I got my cookies to look like the picture.  And it made me realize that the author of that article probably made several batches to get that one perfect picture.  The rest of her cookies were probably also in pieces.  She just wasn’t showing me those.

And that is the point of this rant.  As much as there are a lot of fantastic recipes on the Internet, there are also a lot of shitty, you-probably-shouldn’t-make-this recipes being churned out to fill site content.  This recipe should have been edited until the results were consistent.  Or the author should have been honest and explained that the reason you can only get 12 enormous bars out of a 9 x 9 pan is that if you try to cut the cookies any smaller, they’ll fall apart.

But moreover, what cooking sites need to realize is that they do not need to produce content at a frantic pace.  I would rather they take their time and put up one cookbook-worthy recipe per week than throw up 6 half-baked recipes in a single day.  In fact, I am suspicious of any cook or baker who posts too frequently because doing so means that they aren’t taking the time to truly test and perfect their recipes.

That’s the end of my rant.  I went through my feed reader this morning and unsubscribed from about 8 blogs that post unusable recipes, and added 2 that feel a lot like Cooks Illustrated in that they point out all the ways they have failed when making the current recipe.  I need more bloggers like that in my feed.

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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:

• “Helping Ourselves” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Our Wish has a post responding to a song her husband sent her, a sweet moment except that it contained a line that gave her pause.  They are doing a donor egg cycle, so she knows that her “beautiful baby” will not look just like her.  But it’s an interesting post about how her mindset has changed since they’ve made the decision to proceed with another woman’s eggs.  And I especially love this line: “It’s just our reality and my heart accepted it long before my brain did.”

Notes from the Ninth Circle points out that while some people want to banish the “shoulds,” there are actually a lot of places where “should” defines the moment.  She should have her baby with her.  She should be able to conceive again.  It’s a tiny post that makes you think.

Lastly, Infertilityhonesty has a post about a moment that came up in her yoga teacher training.  She explains: “There’s always that question, at least for big mouths like me, when embarking on new social situations, of how and when I’m going to initiate people into my reality.”  She comes out to her classmates about her loss and her grief, and as she says, “I get to be here, participating in life truthfully, just like everybody else.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Cranky with dishonest food photography.  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 11th and 18th) 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 was once sitting with a senior staffer at the White House before an event, and she admitted that despite seeing the President every day for her job, it still took her breath away every single time she saw him in the hallway or he walked into a meeting. She said the day that doesn’t happen is the day when you know there is something wrong with you. That it means you’re taking it for granted that you are in this amazing place with amazing people, taking part in making history.

I think about that every time I’m in the White House.

I do a self-check and make sure that I appreciate how lucky I am to be inside that building, interacting with the people who work within its walls.

I got to go to the White House for the Let’s Move event on Tuesday morning. It was a magical day. Hanging out with super smart women, listening to other super smart women speak: Seriously, so lucky.

Every single person speaking not only inspired me to make a big salad for dinner but to continue doing the work of making sure that healthy options are the easy, go-to options for the next generation. When you hear the statistics on kids and obesity, there isn’t another sane decision.  (1 in 3 kids!)

As Dominique Dawes pointed out, we don’t wait until kids are 13 to start teaching them to brush their teeth or wash their face, but for some reason, we think it’s okay to have kids eat overly processed junk food when they’re young and think that we can teach them differently when they’re older.

Probably my favourite part of the day was learning about FNV. Have you heard about this yet? It hasn’t officially been rolled out, but Partnership for a Healthier America put together a brand campaign for… fruits and veggies. Get it?  They’re combatting advertising for junk food on its own terms, making equally enticing, celebrity-hawked, a little cheeky ads for broccoli and carrots. My favourite so far has been for Wolverbean.

Okay, and my other favourite part of the day was the First Lady. She rocks so hard. I will forever be grateful that she took on healthy living and making sure that kids find the same message (instead of conflicting messages) in as many places as possible as her cause at the White House. Thank you for your work in getting better food in schools. Thank you for your work in getting rid of food deserts. Thank you for getting spaces built and programs in place that get kids moving. Thank you, FLOTUS. Please know how much your efforts are appreciated.

The day ended in the White House garden, squatting in the aisles, photographing kale and lettuce. And yes, I took a moment to check in and make sure that I appreciated where I was and what I was doing. I did. I appreciate it so much.

A few more pictures from the day:

Can you find the Arnebya?  It was so good to get to sit with her vs just talk via email.

Flowers under Nancy Reagan’s portrait

The magnolia trees were in bloom.  It was so pretty.

The White House garden makes you want a big salad.

Squinting on the White House lawn.  Is that the… sun?

Thank you, BlogHer and SheKnows (especially Jenny Lauck), for making this day possible.

I got archery certified this past weekend.  It involved an 8 hour course where I learned things like bow safety and correcting a student’s stance and bow safety.  And did I mention bow safety?  There was a lot of talk of bow safety.

I got certified because our Girl Scout troop did some fancy pants math and realized that it was less expensive to have an adult get trained and lead the activity than it would be to hire someone every time we wanted to do archery.  So off I went to learn about bow safety and more bow safety.  And then I took a hands on test, a teaching test, and a written test, and went home a newly-certified archery instructor.

But this is the thing.  Prior to this point, I had not given a lot of thought to archery.  I did it at camp and enjoyed it, but I’ve never felt a desire to pick up a bow again.  But the moment I picked up that orange compound genesis bow that fit in my hand as if it was made for my palm… I fell in love.

Like deeply in love.  Like I could have stood there in the field shooting arrows all afternoon.

Which sort of bothered me because as I was sliding my arrows out of the target, pretending that I was Legolas about to fight the orcs, I asked myself what was different between a bow and a gun?  Clearly they’re both weapons.  Clearly they’re both potentially lethal.  Maybe all I was doing was shooting at a paper target, but there are others who use the bow and arrow to go hunting.  So it’s a tool that is meant to kill other things.

And yet in my brain, I saw them as different or I wouldn’t have gone and taken the course.

I don’t know.  I’m still chewing on this.  I’m going to teach the girls archery. (As well as bow safety!  Always bow safety!)  But it does make me think.

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

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Tomorrow is the Ides of March.  We’re supposed to beware of it.  It was actually the Roman new year, which means that today would be the Feast of Anna Perenna.  It was a big celebration to mark the end of the year.

In addition to the usual festive food and alcohol, the day was marked by Mamuralia, a ritual that involved dressing up an elderly man in animal skins and then beating him while he ran out of town (provided that he was able to make it out of town while people beat him senselessly and that he didn’t die from the stench of wearing the skin of an animal over his body).  He was to represent the old year, driving it away to make room for the new one.

Are accounts of this ritual accurate?  I’m not sure I want to know.  I just love the fact that it could possibly be true.

So, in honour of the Roman new year, what would you figuratively get rid of today to leave in the old year, and what do you want to do differently in the new?

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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.

1.	Tas IVFer	13.	Isabelle	25.	Just Heather
2.	Anks	14.	Baby Blue Sunday	26.	Rain
3.	Middle Girl	15.	Failing at Haiku	27.	Stephanie (Travelcraft Journal)
4.	One and Done?	16.	Upside of IF	28.	Living with Baby Loss
5.	Jessica	17.	good families do	29.	Journeywoman
6.	* Our Wish*	18.	Traci York, Writer	30.	Mali (No Kidding)
7.	Lori Lavender Luz	19.	illustr8d	31.	Mali (A Separate Life)
8.	Cyn K	20.	Kimberly @ Infertility Unfiltered	32.	Kechara
9.	Parul | Happiness & Food	21.	Kim	33.	Deboshree
10.	Infertile Girl	22.	Inconceivable!	34.	Mary Francis
11.	Lori@ Laughing IS Conceivable	23.	Apluseffort	35.	Vaibhav | Thorough and Unkempt
12.	Loribeth (The Road Less Travelled)	24.	Shail