Beorn stopped eating his vitamin this week, which is definitely one of his top five favourite things, along with timothy treats, apple slices, head rubs, and when the Wolvog tickles his armpit. Looking at that list, he had been off timothy treats for weeks, moving slowly with the apple slices, and not into moving around, much less popcorning after a tickle. So that left us with head rubs. He still asked for head rubs by leaning into my hand and nudging me.

He also wouldn’t eat a blueberry. That was the last straw. I called the guinea pig specialist, who agreed to see him that day. I jumped in the car to bring him over because I was desperate enough to leave him at the clinic – one of their policies, which makes me anxious. It was my last resort option.

Of course, when I got home, I discovered the stinker had eaten the blueberry without me noticing while I was on the phone.

The vet did not find anything obviously wrong with him. He let her examine his teeth — twice — and they looked normal to the eye. He didn’t have any lumps or impactions. He was clearly thinner. He had a heart murmur that may or may not be connected and some inflammation on his paws. But one big point was that my normal vet didn’t give me the correct amount of critical care he should have been receiving to keep his intestines moving. I was giving him less than half the daily amount.

So that’s what we’re trying now. An anti-inflammatory painkiller + the correct amount of critical care. Hoping this gets him back to normal because I could not concentrate without my baby in the house.

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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:

• Nothing… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Slaying, Blogging, Whatever writes about stress and worry. Namely, that dreamlike quality that hangs over unusually stressful times (9/11, the pandemic, etc), and how it normalizes after weeks or months. She fears the dreamlike stress state currently unfolding will one day become normal, which may be worse than the unreal state.

Lastly, The Barreness also writes about the situation unfolding in our country and at the local level. After a disheartening council meeting, she reflects: “To look for the good; I stood beside people I socialize with who were there to fight for more protections for people they don’t know, maybe know, and love. I took heart in that.” I too wish there was a superhero coming and agree that it’s up to us.

The roundup to the Roundup: Still waiting for Beorn to bounce back. 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 21 – 28) 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.

Beorn can differentiate Saturday from all other days of the week. On Saturdays, we have popcorn and apples for breakfast, and he gets apple slices off my plate. It’s the only day of the week when he calls out for us if we sleep in, and when we come down, he continuously wheeks for us to start apple time from the moment I pour my first coffee.

We would prefer not to eat popcorn or apples first thing in the morning, but there is only so long the pig can wait. And it’s super impressive that he doesn’t anticipate apples on Sunday mornings or any other day of the week. He only does this on Saturdays. Smart pig.

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I’ve never seen Paddington, but they were heavily promoting Paddington in Peru while we were in the UK this winter, and I decided that I wanted to see the first movie because everyone said it was wonderful.

I wrote myself a note. Then I forgot about it. Then I found the note and promptly returned to saying I wanted to watch Paddington. Then I forgot about it. Then I found the note…

I feel like this is the story of my life. Deciding I want to do X, writing it down, forgetting about it, finding the note, realizing I want to do X, forgetting about it, repeat, repeat, repeat.

I still haven’t seen Paddington.

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I wanted to go to the beach this weekend, but Josh had a work event and it made no sense to go away for a single night. I decided to stage my own beach vacation in the living room. I’m getting the snacks I like at the beach and placing a blanket on the floor and putting on the sound of waves and reading books.

Is it a beach vacation? No. I am not biking to the beach and smelling salty air and hearing real seabirds and watching the waves. But I’m getting close-ish to it. Sort of.

You know that I’m all about distracting myself with games, and this IS a game, but it’s also not really a distraction. You get to change one moment in history, and you can choose between two options. You then learn the cascading effect of that single change.

The first time I played it, I quickly jumped into the thousands with karma. I was helping the world! But just as quickly, my great changes — things I knew would be good — had unforeseen negative consequences. In time, I pretty much botched the whole thing.

The point, of course, is that it’s easy to play armchair historian and point out all the things you would do differently, but we often make those choices without thinking through the full impact of the decision. Even actions or inventions that are clearly “good” can end up having a negative impact on future generations.

Play it and see how you do.

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

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When I was little, I loved Pitfall deeply. Deeply enough to beg my mother to allow me to take a picture of my high score on the television screen and send it to Activision for a badge. While it took some coordination to play, it was all about memorizing the patterns to get all the treasures.

Someone made an online version, but while it made me so happy to see Pitfall Harry, it didn’t feel like the game anymore. I started running through the first screens, but the gold bar wasn’t where I expected it to be. And I couldn’t get keys on my computer to feel like the game controller. While it wasn’t quite as satisfying as my childhood memories of the game, I’m leaving this here in case anyone else wants to revisit Pitfall Harry.

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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.

I love those lists that people create of things you can do to stop yourself from spiraling into anxiety. None of them work for me, but I like to do them along with spiraling into anxiety because I think it makes the anxiety a little easier to manage.

The first is doing a brain dump of everything making me anxious, from the large amorphous things (country/world falling apart) to the more personalized real problems to the more personalized less real problems. For example, there are things I allow onto the list that aren’t really problems. I know they’re not problems, and the list knows they’re not problems. But I figure I’m the only person seeing the list, so I can write them down and take them out of my brain.

This task is helpful for two reasons. The first is that by taking these worries out of my brain, I can tell myself that I can forget about them for a few minutes because I will not forget the list. It’s written down. The second is that I can look back on past lists and see which fears came true and which ones did not.

There were 9 things on the list I wrote on January 3. 7 have been completely resolved. 1 is undecided but is leaning in a good direction. 1 is still happening, but I currently feel okay about it. That’s pretty good, right? A little over two months later, 78% of the things making my heart pound are behind me, and 100% are no longer a worry or making it onto a list in mid-March.

The other thing I’m going to do is try to clear my to-do list. It has become unmanageable, and we were only triaging the time-sensitive tasks. So now I throw a few items that I know we can tackle that week in an email for Josh and one for myself, and we leave it in our inbox and take care of one or two tasks per day. It feels good to get it back down to one page this month.

Maybe next month, we’ll be at a half page. Fingers crossed.