697th Friday Blog Roundup

We are crawling towards the end of the school year.  I’m waiting for the twins to bring home their yearbooks so they can finally show me the people who appeared in this year’s stories.  It’s a strange thing — when they were little, I was in the school all the time, and I knew everyone in their grade.  Now it’s apparently “uncool” for your mother to hang out at the building.  So I know everyone from their elementary school and a handful of kids who have passed through our home.  But everyone else is like a book character in my head.

So I’m looking forward to finally having a face to put with the name for the recurring characters in the stories they tell me after school.

I liked The Atlantic’s article on signing yearbooks and how it has changed over the years.  My high school gave us insert pages that we could carry around instead of the book itself; both for easier transport AND to ensure that people didn’t scribbling over their picture.  This was brilliant except that I never took the sticky tab off the insert pages to put them in the book.  So the pages are somewhere in storage, and the books are unsigned on the shelf.

My favourite signing rhyme from childhood didn’t make the article: “Remember A, remember B, C that you remember me.”  I thought that was so freakin’ clever.  And “May your summer be long and useful, like a roll of toilet paper.”

We were such cards.

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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:

• “Smiling at the Tumbleweeds” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Lori and Northern Star!
• “So Then G-d Spaketh: ‘Let’s give the poor bitch bipolar too!’” (Edenland)
• “While You’re Alive” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Jess!
• “Saying ‘No’” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Something Out of Nothing had her baby.  It is a sweet post about the birth and becoming a family of four.  I loved it because I remember posts before he was conceived.  And now he’s here.  The story continues.

Countingpinklines has a post about her college reunion.  She is currently pregnant and cannot go, but she muses what she would have done if she was still waiting.  She writes, “For all that reunions can be fun, it can also be emotionally painful. Too many reminders of things not working out in life where you see everyone around present their perfect lives.”  I went to my high school 10th while we were doing treatments, and it was hard.

NotMyLinesYet has a post about an encounter with an oracle card deck.  You’ll have to click over and read the post to find out how the cards answered her question, but I love this line (and it will make sense after you read): “So here I sit, expecting miracles, no matter what’s in the cards for us.”

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix has a post about looking at pictures of other people’s kids.  She asks a lot of questions about how to protect her heart and honour where she is at this moment while also interacting with the world around her: “How do I interact in the world that’s full of fertile people? How do I participate in life with others when a lot of basic things are still so painful for me?”  There are no right or wrong answers, but all the questions in the post are good questions.

The roundup to the Roundup: Yearbook is coming.  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 1st and 8th) 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.