581st Friday Blog Roundup

I was a little shocked by the number of people who said they would let their friend order. Some people talked about receiving suggestions from friends or waitstaff.  Of course, I take suggestions all the time.  A waitress’s suggestion just led me to a delicious sandwich at a vegan restaurant, and my cousin told me to try her buffalo hot sauce cauliflower thing and I did and loved it.  So, sure, I can roll with suggestions.

What gave me pause was the idea of going to a restaurant, sitting there with the menu closed, and telling the other person, “Surprise me!”  You would have to be a fairly trusting person and an adventurous eater — both of which I am not.

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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:

• “Hello From the Other Side” (Awaiting Autumn)
• “MicroblogMondays: The Tetris Effect” (River Run Dry)
• “Withdrawing After Loss” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Your Life as a Video Game” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Katherine!

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ explains that there are many reasons to withdraw after a loss and that self-care is just as important as reaching out.  I love that this brief post points out the positive sides of cocooning and hopefully emerging stronger and calmer.  A small change in perspective makes all the difference.

Pages, Stages, and Rages has a note she wrote to her daughter’s former caregiver back in China that made me cry, especially this exchange: “…She saw a picture of you.  She stared at it for a while. and I asked her what she remembered.  ‘She smelled good.’ Our daughter said. ‘She was warm.’  I knew she was loved.”  Go read the whole letter.

Infertile Girl in a Fertile World has a post about a Facebook meme making the rounds.  She has been tagged and doesn’t want to participate; at least, not in the way the meme dictates.  She writes: “But being infertile is like walking through a door and locking it behind you. No matter the outcome, you can’t go backwards.”

Inconceivable! has a post about the monsters in our lives.  This post resonated with me because I spend a lot of time worrying, which makes the monsters much larger and scarier than they actually are.  She explains: “I’ve spent years ‘seeing’ monsters such as illness, job loss and unexpected tragedies, trying to dodge them, afraid of their presence in an outsize way, far beyond simply doing the best I can to plan and minimize the impact in real ways – then moving on.”  Me too.

Battlefish has a great post about matching the “me” on the inside to the “me” on the outside.  She dismisses the thought as silly, but it made complete sense to me: this idea that your inside being and your outside being may not match, visually.  I loved this post.  It’s for every punk rock girl sporting a sensible haircut.

Lastly, No Baby Ruth wrote a post I needed to read this week about the Tale of the Porcupine.  If you don’t know this parable, click over to read the post.  You’ll suddenly remember why you can’t cut yourself off from the rest of the world and why you sometimes may be pricked as you brush up against your fellow travelers.

The roundup to the Roundup: Tipping my hat to more adventurous eaters.  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 January 29th and February 5th) 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.