625th Friday Blog Roundup

Truman went back to the vet this week.  I thought his eye looked a little strange when I gave him breakfast, but it was still dark in the room and I was barely awake, so I chalked it up to weird lighting and moved on.  Later in the day, there was a cricket in the house, and I think you are all aware of the loud screams that I emit when I see a cricket.  Afterwards, I went to (1) calm Truman and (2) calm myself by getting love from Truman when I saw that his eye was red.

Like weirdly red.

I waited about a half hour and then called the vet because as I waited, it looked like Truman’s eye was turning inside out.  I would post a picture, but it may make you throw up in your mouth.  They told me to bring him in, so we drove over while I sang Truman’s favourite song — “Strike the Bell” — over and over again.

She checked that it wasn’t a brain tumour and then determined that there was an injury to his eyeball.  About three days earlier, I had opened a new bag of hay, and Truman had been happily rubbing his face in it while chirping on about how good it tastes by wheeking non-stop.  In fact, I had moved him several times when he tried to sleep with his face in the hay bowl, something that confused him because was I aware that this bag of hay was particularly delicious?  It seems that Truman has poked himself in the eye with said hay.  Good going, sport.

We’re only a few days into the eyedrops, but his eye has mostly gone back to normal.  It’s still clouded over, but at least it doesn’t look like it’s turned inside out.  The injury is still there, which freaks me out because the next step would be taking him to a guinea pig ophthalmologist.

Has he learned not to rub his face in the hay bowl?  No.  He was doing it again within 24 hours of returning from the vet.  Because the hay is that freakin’ good.

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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:

• “It’s Not Just a Brick” (The Empty Cookie)
• “Dinner Parties” (Ms. Infertile)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Notes from the Ninth Circle has a post contemplating her worth.  She bleakly wonders, “I wonder sometimes if the reason why God won’t give us another baby is because I’m not worth enough because I don’t do enough, don’t do well enough, at taking care of the family that I do have and the child that He did give me already.”  Even when your brain rationally knows your worth, it’s hard to convince the heart to shut its mouth.  Thank you for writing this.

Birds, Bees, and Medicine is taking care of herself, and that means calling a therapist to check herself for depression.  It’s an important read; moreso because she is a therapist herself, and she points out the importance of having an outsider judge your mental state vs. relying on yourself.  Good advice for non-therapists to take to heart.  You wouldn’t self-diagnose cancer, right?  You would go to a doctor if you felt something abnormal and allow them to judge the facts.  The same goes for our brains.

The Empress and the Fool has a post about people who give her know-it-all advice on the babies she is gestating.  The reality is just as nothing can prepare you for some life events, no one can know how your parenting experience is going to go.  I love this: “I am under no delusions about the rigors of raising children, while I am simultaneously humbled by the recognition that this is something I will not concretely understand until I am inside the experience, but treatment and miscarriage are also exhausting, except they are of the soul-sucking sort and entirely bereft of the joys that make parenting gratifying.”

Lastly, POF and Now What? has a post about family myths, those stories we tell ourselves about how our life should look.  She counters the list with all the myths she has removed from her definition of self, and all the things she actually is accomplishing.  It’s a really important post, and I hope everyone pauses to make their own three lists.

The roundup to the Roundup: Truman’s eye injury.  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 December 9th and 16th) 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.