557th Friday Blog Roundup

I love this story about the 13-year-old girl who did a balloon release on her father’s grave, drove 25 miles home, and found the balloon entwined in her fence.

I love the thought that we can still connect with people after they’re gone. I’m not willing to consider any other possible explanation in regards to this story.

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I also love that this Welsh town has appointed a town jester.  I love the three tasks he had to complete in order to get the job.  I want to live in a town that has a jester.

I served last year as a badchan — a jester for a Jewish wedding — and it was hard work.  I only got to be a jester for a single day, though I wonder if I had mad blindfolded dagger juggling skillz if I could have parlayed it into fulltime work.

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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:

• No posts from last week.  What did you read this week?

Okay, now my choices this week.

Persnickety Chickadee writes about all the ways we try to control a cycle despite knowing all the people who get pregnant while eating sushi and doing hot yoga.  I love her point that it’s a form of making a deal with the universe: “Those of us in the TTC circle of hell spend so much time being told what to do and what to avoid, to the extent that it shrivels up some of our life.  But how much of that is needed and how much of it is a form of bargaining?”  Go over and read the whole post.

Today’s the Day I Lose has a great post about coming in last in a race.  While it was about running, it made me think about family building where we use race terminology (“she lapped me”) to describe our feelings of being left behind.  So, yeah, I really loved the message in this post, especially point #10.

No Way to Say It has an impassioned post about Planned Parenthood that is a must-read, especially if you don’t know what percentage of federal dollars goes toward abortions.  A post that sets the record straight.

Lastly, Family Building with a Twist has a post about a friend who wrote a memoir.  It’s such an interesting (er… and nail biting) situation.  She writes: “I realize that she is telling her story, and in telling a story, you whittle and shape it into its tightest, most concise form. I can’t decide what bothers me more: will I be included? Did I make the cut? Did I matter at all in her story? Or will all of the peripheral details, people and ugliness be left out?”  She goes on to ask a lot of interesting questions about who owns a memory more, who gets to shape the way everyone else knows the memory.

The roundup to the Roundup: A message in a balloon.  Welsh town brings back the jester.  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 31st and August 7th) 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.