781st Friday Blog Roundup

The most exciting thing happened to me this week (I guess I lead a pretty unexciting life)–I won a Goodreads giveaway. I enter them regularly because Goodreads will send you a heads up if a book on your to-read list holds a giveaway. It’s two clicks to throw your name in the hat.

Despite entering regularly, I’d never won a giveaway. I didn’t know anyone who won a giveaway, which made me wonder if they actually chose winners and sent books.

But then magic happened. One morning this week, I woke up to an email telling me that I was a winner in the giveaway for Rhys Bowen’s Above the Bay of Angels, and my prize was waiting for me in my Kindle account. If I lived inside a movie, it would have been that part of the film where we all break into the same dance, tossing our devices in the air while we do back flips. And then catching them while sinking gracefully into the splits while consuming chapter three.

Or something like that.

Anyway, in case you were wondering (as I was), people do win the Goodreads giveaways. Which is 1000 kinds of awesome.

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Happy Valentine’s Day. Or, if you don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day (we are not Valentine’s Day people), happy Friday. Or happy February 14th. Or happy weekend. You choose.

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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:

• “Childless woman announces her life not filled with freedom, money, travel, never-ending ease” (Infertilityhonesty)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I usually don’t feature pieces from mainstream media here, but I liked that New York Times did a piece on the financial cost of treatments. Of course, there are so many hidden costs in there, such as therapy, lost wages from time taken off from work, gasoline to and from the clinic, but this is a great starting point for the general public to understand the astronomical costs (sometimes) associated with family building.

A Separate Life has a beautiful anniversary piece. This line is bittersweet: “When the babies didn’t come, amid some scary diagnoses and losses and difficult years, his hair went grey.” And this one made me smile: “They are old only in the length of time they’ve loved each other.”

Infertilityhonesty has a post fit for the Onion depicting the press conference she wishes she could hold. Laughed at this line: “Studies show awkward pauses are the number one occurrence resulting from childless not by choice people talking honestly about their lives.” This parody is brilliant–go read it.

Lastly, Inconceivable! has a moving post about the grief that comes after a decision and how so many other feelings about other things can get tied up with processing the end of family building.

The roundup to the Roundup: I’m a winner! Happy Valentine’s Day. 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 February 7 – 14) 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.