705th Friday Blog Roundup

I clean when I’m anxious.  Everyone knows that when you’re losing your mind about global warming, the next best thing to fixing that situation is having a neat desk.

I spent one night this week removing books from my MTBR list.  That’s my Maybe To Be Read list.  All books that end up TBR (to actually be read) pass through this list.  It’s like the Ellis Island for books.  I hear about a book I want to read, I download the sample from iBooks, and then I read the sample and if it’s good enough, I buy the book (or reserve it at the library) and it goes on the TBR list.

I ended up removing over 120 books from the list because iBooks had become so cluttered that I couldn’t easily find the full books among the book samples.  I wrote the removed titles in my bullet journal because these books had been in a limbo state between getting approved and getting purchased, but I doubt I’ll ever return to them.

I left about 16 samples on the list to either purchase or check out from the library.  A much more manageable amount.

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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:

• “A Different Mindset” (Inconceivable!)
• “Stolen Bases” (NotMyLinesYet)
• “Recital” (Once a Family of Four)
• “Prayers for Charlotte” (Carolina Charm)
• “Tired (Literally) of Sharing My Story” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

This week marked 20 years since The Road Less Travelled’s daughter, Katie, died.  She writes, “I wish things were different. I wish she was here. She’d be all grown up now, a young adult, likely at university, maybe with a boyfriend. (I was 20 when I first met her father, after all…) I wonder what she’d look like, and who she’d look like, and how she’d be like me and how she’d be like her dad.”  It is an aching post of what ifs and memories and thank yous.

Jewish IVF writes on the eve of her next IVF cycle.  The first cycle is hard because you don’t know what to expect.  But the 8th IVF cycle is hard because you do know what to expect.  She writes, “It hit me like a ton of bricks last night and now I’m terrified of another failure. The thought that we did all that we did to get to this point, and made all those changes in hopes for a better outcome, only to be dealt the same story is terrifying.”  Sending so many good thoughts for this cycle.

Lastly, By the Brooke has a post about Harry Potter that made my heart hurt (in a good way because it also made my brain think).  She explains: “It was a tragedy, to be certain, but it was one that made narrative sense. This was the way things worked. No one was writing a story about a wizard baby who died and how his parents had to limp along and figure out how and why to go on living without him.”  Wow.  What would the series be like if it was his mother avenging her son’s death?  His father grieving his son?  And maybe a bookend to Lori’s post above: “So I mourned Harry Potter and the lost opportunity to share those books–and every book I’d loved–with my daughter.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Cleaned up the Maybe To Be Read list.  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 August 3rd and 10th) 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.