I am feeling like crap today from a shingles/pneumococcal vaccine combo (more on that when I can concentrate) — Freedom from preventable illness! Liberty from hospital stays! Happy 4th, everyone! — so I’ll keep this brief and remind you to check your vaccine schedule and see if you’re up to date.

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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.

And now the blogs…

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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.

Middle Girl captures life in a few brief sentences. She writes: “I am unable to report that I’ve worked on (or better yet, finished) the story of Janice* … On the flipside, I can report that I am still chug, chug, chugging along and still trying to tame my wild and woolly salt-and-pepper mane. Take gentle care, gentle folks.” It feels like poetry, and I agree with the first commenter on it not being a time for accomplishments.

Finally, A Half Baked Life returns with an update. Even though I just saw her in the face-to-face world, it made me smile to see her in my feed reader. It begins: “So my kid tells me I don’t post much any more. Which is true. But it also means he found my blog and read it, or at least part of it.” Gulp. But it’s all good. And you get a recipe, too.

The roundup to the Roundup: Stay healthy. 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 June 27 – July 4) 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.

There were so many great parts of this Substack, so read the whole thing, but the part that stuck with me came about halfway down the page.

She tackles the sentiment: “I wish I could do that.”

I hear myself constantly say it, and I hear others too—particularly when it comes to talking about languages … As though…learning Spanish were akin to wishing you had been born an armadillo. It’s actually something you can do!

But then she reveals the truth: “Often, what I realize, is that I don’t actually wish I could do that thing. Not really. The truth is: I don’t want to! And that’s fine!!!!”

I think we’re conditioned to think that we need to put into action the things we want (that can-do, make-it-happen attitude), but she encourages people to pause and think: (1) can you do something about it beyond wishing and (2) do you actually want to or are you okay not taking action? Or can you be involved in a passive way (e.g., watching movies in Spanish with subtitles to hear the language without committing the hours to learning it)?

I’m trying to catch myself when I use the term “wish” and say what I really mean.

Anil Dash usually makes me think, and his recent essay on Internet consent points out the lack of consent in the online world. You have the illusion of consent in the sense that pop-ups come on the screen and ask if you agree to cookies, but there are still thousands upon thousands of times when your data is compiled and used and sold without understanding that by using or buying or entering spaces, you’ve technically (but usually unknowingly) consented to this situation.

He points out that in the beginning,

It was so broadly understood that you would respect the visitors to your site that you didn’t even have to ask their permission because there would be a massive user uproar if you were to do something so hostile as to surveil them or track them.

And then, of course, everything changed. His example about how your data is tracked and sold feels even more absurd when you consider his example: It would be as if a restaurateur wrote down everything you said while you ate your meal and sold it to another store. It has nothing to do with the food. It has everything to do with using the consumer.

Go read the whole thing.

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

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There are so many lists of “good” advice out there, but not enough lists of bad advice. This list aims to correct that.

This one especially made me laugh: “Assume a new dopamine hit is a good indication of long-term joy.”

What was your favourite one (or piece of bad advice)?

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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.

This is a monthly series, published near the end of the month summarizing what I found, ate, watched, googled, and felt this month. New categories are added from time to time.

Books Added to My TBR (e.g., books I just learned about that I’m excited to read… maybe)

• Park Avenue (Renee Ahdieh)
• Direct Descendant (Tanya Huff)
• Make Me Famous (Maud Ventura)
• Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief (Benjamin Stevenson)
• Mansion Beach (Meg Mitchell Moore)
• A Family Matter (Claire Lynch)
• Thirst Trap (Grainne O’Hare)
• Bookish (Matthew Sweet)
• Misophonia (Dana Vowinckel)

Notable Meals (new recipes, old favourites, and restaurant items we ate this month)

• Pannenkoeken, which are Dutch pancakes. I served them with cherries and cream.
• Food and Wine’s ramen noodle salad.
• Tofu fajitas.

Television, Movies, and Music (watching and listening)

• Started Grosse Pointe Garden Society. Super fun, light-hearted mystery. I hope it gets a second season.
• Started The Residence. Love, love, love this. It’s like Knives Out in the White House.
• Watched all five episodes of Sirens. Perfect if you liked The Perfect Couple but snickered at it, too. Satire wrapped in Lilly Pulitzer.
• The new Sarah Silverman special, PostMortem. You’ll laugh, but it’s also a moving account of losing her parents and stepmother.
• The new Mike Birbiglia special, The Good Life. It was less cohesive than some of his other specials but had great stories.

Added To My Ongoing Mix Tape

• “Every Woman in the World” (Air Supply)
• “Mr Blue Sky” (Electric Light Orchestra)
• “Sit Down” (James)

Tabs I Left Open (things I Googled and left up on the screen)

• A Wikipedia page for Gotland, Sweden.
• An explanation for why you can’t say “rabbit” on the Isle of Portland.
• A web project collecting scans of my old high school’s literary magazine.

Micro-Joys

• The symphony community outreach staff gave me a birthday button.
• When we travel, we keep an audio journal each night, talking through all of our memories for the day. It often comes in handy when we’re trying to remember something, which in the case of this story was the graffiti that appeared on a building we passed on the train between London and Norwich. To find the passage, we had to listen to a bunch of other memories. I have these audio journals dating back about 12 years, and I always remember something new when we listen to them.
• I had a ladybird on the outside of my car for many days. The first day, I commented that there was a ladybird. The second day, I marveled that it was still there. By the third day, everyone else thought it was dead, but I still held out hope that it was sleeping. A week later, I had to admit that the ladybird probably would have needed food by this point if it was still alive. “It’s just like ladybird ladybird,” I told Josh. He didn’t know that children’s poem and didn’t believe it was real (once I said it aloud) until I showed it to him online.

Mood

• Feeling pretty fearful about the future, and that makes me feel jittery for a large portion of every day.

What about you? Let me know what you’re eating, seeing, listening to, googling, feeling this month.