723rd Friday Blog Roundup
I received the oddest SPAM call this week. Most of the time, SPAM calls shows up marked as SPAM. Sometimes, the number is not marked as such, but the call comes from a name of someone I don’t know so I don’t answer it. But this time, the phone rang and it showed the name and number of our local burrito place.
The first thing I thought was, “Oh, Josh must have gone to lunch with a co-worker and left something there.” So I picked up, and it immediately launched into one of those robot-spoken “you’ve been chosen” credit card spiels. Well played, SPAM caller, spoofing our burrito place phone number because you know I’ll pick up if tasty salsa is involved.
Things like that make me want to go telephone-free.
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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:
- “Thinking About Christmas” (The Road Less Travelled)
Okay, now my choices this week.
By the Brooke remembers her daughter on what should have been her eighth birthday. She muses about what life would be like and then writes, “Eight years is long enough that grief sits familiarly. The week leading up to her birthday wasn’t too bad this year–sometimes the days proceeding are harder than the actual day. This year that wasn’t so much the case.” It’s a moving post about how everyone in the family processes the day.
My Path to Mommyhood says goodbye to a house with a big, exciting move on the horizon. Moving means packing, and packing means letting go of things that they won’t bring with them to the new space, including books she collected for a different future. She writes, “But then there’s the sad ones. The ones that were clearly meant for a child who didn’t come. The ones that have nameplates from my shower with notes from the people who gifted them to us, addressed to our nonexistent baby, declaring love for this amorphous being in the ether who didn’t materialize, imagining storytimes snuggled up in a cozy blanket together that just will never be.” It’s a bittersweet post about the tangible reminders of change. It is so hard to let go of things again and again and again.
Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a really big blast from the past: TCOYF (for those of you who spent time on IVFC and remember that acronym. Wait — is IVFC still around?). I actually just found my copy a few months ago when we culled out books. Yes, yes, yes to this: “TCOYF was ‘the Bible’ of the subsequent pregnancy after loss e-mail group I joined that fall, where everyone was either pregnant after a loss, or desperately trying to be.” I can’t even tell you how many times we went on a trip and I packed my copy because I wanted to be able to consult the book at all times — even when we were doing treatments! It brings back a lot of memories.
The roundup to the Roundup: Very creative SPAM callers. 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 7th and December 14th) 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.
5 comments
Ugh, those SPAM callers suck. In my area they come up as a name and number of actual local people, but they are spam. Like, if you call the number back you get the actual person. This happens on my cell phone as well. I have called back numbers and the person tells me that I called THEM, and my phone has no record of it at all. They also SPAM call from numbers very similar to ours, so it will look like it belongs to one of us. Same with my husband’s work phone. Area code and first 5 digits will be the same, then a different last 2, so it would “appear” it was coming from same batch of company phone numbers, but it’s not, it’s junk. It really freaks me out that SPAM callers are able to do easiky manipulate the caller ID info. It’s definitely an invasion.
We don’t have a landline and our cells don’t not show names unless the caller is a contact…but these robocallers will spoof using a number with our prefix so it shows up as being from the city we live in…so whenever we see a number with our prefix we just don’t answer, then block…I always report to the DNC web site (plus robocalls are unlawful, I think federally but maybe just California). I also get robocalls on my (government) work number and I report those too, to what seems like a black hole…surprisingly I got a call back from the FTC earlier this year regarding one of them.
I got rid of my copy of TCOYF before we even did our DE IVF cycle. Its tips never helped me to conceive, though it reportedly did help 7 out of 8 of my FF “cycle buddies.” (One of them had two babies before I had our sons!)
Thanks to you & Mali for the double shout-out! 🙂
I thank the gods(desses) for caller ID… I’ve put our numbers on the do-not-call lists but we still get tons of marketing calls (on both our landline AND cellphones). We just don’t answer the phone if we don’t recognize the number… we figure anyone who really wants to talk to us will leave a message. 9.5 times out of 10, there’s no message. Still, it’s annoying to have to listen to the phone ring and then remember to check for messages later. :p
I used TCOYF after my first ectopic, and most of my ectopic website friends used it and FF. So much time poring over the temperature charts etc.