734th Friday Blog Roundup

Tomorrow is Random Act of Kindness Day for Thomas, a yearly event created by one of our own.  Kristin was a blogger for a long time in the ALI blogosphere.  Her son, Thomas, was born on March 9th and died on March 10th.  Every year, she asks people to do kindness in his name, filling the world with the goodness he would have contributed himself if he had lived.  I love this idea.

It doesn’t have to be big.  It can be as small as moving through your day thinking about ways you can make it a little bit better for the people around you.

As always, I’m looking to do good in Thomas’s name tomorrow.  Hope you’ll join along, too.

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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:

• “#MicroblogMondays – I’m a Writer” (An Engineer Becomes a Mom)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Dwelling in Possibility has a gorgeous, bittersweet post about loss.  She is remembering her child, who would have been 21 years old this week, and connecting that loss to the loss of her husband three years ago and sending her living children into the world.  She writes, “This year, though, feels loaded. When I realized the date, and how many years it has been, I started thinking about what it feels like to launch a child into the world … It will be quiet and lonely in this big house all alone. His father was supposed to be here to muffle some of that quiet. But he’s with Ari.”  It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.

I missed this post last week, but The Road Less Travelled had a post about finding her tribe with a listserv of other parents trying again after a loss and losing that tribe as the listserv shuts down.  Even if she hadn’t posted there in years, it was a big part of her life when she needed it most.  It’s a sweet goodbye to support that held her up during a hard time.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ has a post about divides in a larger community, using the divide that exists between people who refer to animals as a fur-baby and those who don’t to prove a point: “Perhaps we should be a wee bit careful when we try to speak for our group. We’re not all the same.”  It’s a great post about how ideas are not one-size-fits-all and that sometimes what we’re taking offense at may not have had offensive intentions behind the words.  It’s a thought-provoking post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Please be kind tomorrow.  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 March 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.