800th Friday Blog Roundup

Today is the 800th (really 700th—the numbering went off by 100 many years ago, and I never fixed it) Friday Blog Roundup. Which means there are 699 other posts on this blog that are all Friday Blog Roundups. I highlight—on average—four posts per Roundup, which means I’ve highlighted about 2,800 posts.

2,800 posts!

Let’s pretend that it takes eight minutes to read each post, re-read the post again before I write the Roundup, and write the paragraph. That’s 22,400 minutes or 373.3 hours. Which comes out to 15.5 days. Of course, that assumes that I do nothing else except read and write for 24 hours. But still. You get the point.

I have put a lot of my life into the Roundup.

Thank you for writing.

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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:

• “Adoption, Discomfort, Ethics” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “The Fine Line Between Adoption & Trafficking: Ashley Mitchell on the Paul Peterson Case” (Lavender Luz)
• “No Kidding 2020 Project: Day 20 – Celebrate” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Summer Without Summer” (Res Cogitatae)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ asks if there will be greater cultural acceptance of childlessness in the future. She goes through several possible scenarios, ranging from pessimistic to semi-optimistic. While she thinks that she ends on a down note, I actually think her fourth scenario is a hopeful one. She writes, “Maybe society will recognise the dangers of unmitigated population increases and realise the value of the childless population, and the contribution we make towards the next generations.” If we believe that it takes a village to raise a child, we need to acknowledge every contribution—the visible ones and the invisible ones. And yes, there is a very real contribution we make when we take care of the earth. So thank you. And thank you for making me think.

An Unexpected Family Outing has a post about helping someone who is grieving while maintaining social distancing. When her friend loses her mother, she thinks she doesn’t know how to help her. But she writes, “But, having been the aggrieved myself (my daughter was stillborn in 2016), I took a moment to think about all the ways I know to show up for someone after a loss. There was no need to play by a rule book. There’s no one way to grieve and, in turn, there is no one way to support those who are grieving.” She has pulled together a list to pass along what she knows.

Finally, I had Res Cogitatae’s post about summer for this week. She sums up so much of what we’re feeling in our house, too. It’s summer, but it doesn’t feel like summer because it contains none of the things we associate with summer. But she ends on a hopeful note: “We will have a different sort of summer. A slower, simpler summer. In the grand scheme of things, just like always, we will be fine. But I hope this will be our only stay-at-home-summer.” Me too.

The roundup to the Roundup: This is the 800th (really, 700th) Roundup. 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 26 – July 3) 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.