803rd Friday Blog Roundup

It’s the 14th anniversary of the Roundup. (Pssst—that’s the first post from 2006.) I’ve been writing it almost every Friday for 14 years—more than a quarter of my life.

It’s the longest running project on my blog, and since my blog started in the early days of blogging, it is in a tiny category of continual, long-running internet projects, such as Wordless Wednesdays and… um… everything else I just Googled is now defunct. So. Our tiny niche on the internet gets to claim one of the longest, ongoing, never-pausing projects. Go us.

But it’s also a tiny peek into what sticks and what doesn’t. IComLeavWe is defunct. The LFCA is defunct. MicroblogMondays is still going strong (but is much younger than the Roundup—only six years old or so).

Thank you to everyone who keeps writing their blog so I have something to read and posts to roundup every Friday.

*******

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.

*******

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:

• “Immer weniger” (Elaine ohne Kind)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Kveller has a post about how infertility prepared her for parenting during the pandemic. I’d argue that infertility prepares a person for the pandemic—full stop. You don’t need to be parenting to see how going through the stress of infertility helps you process the stress of the current world. She writes, “When I was going through infertility, I did not know what was going to happen. I didn’t know when my next appointment would be, if I could attend my friend’s birthday party, or even plan a vacation —and I certainly didn’t know when or if I would get pregnant! Turns out this experience prepared me for parenting in these uncertain times.” Me, too.

The Barreness got me with Nirvana—we are stupid and contagious right now. She meanders through a backyard visit with parents, protest signs, and life during COVID-19. This line is exactly how I feel as a fellow rule follower: “As a rule follower, I am saddened by nobody else doing the work.” Maybe it’s not actually nobody, but sometimes it feels like nobody.

JewishIVF has a similar sentiment with her post on choices with COVID-19. She writes, “I could do all these things if I chose to. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that it feels unsafe to make those choices … It must be nice to not live in a head-space of constant worry. Maybe that’s what I’m jealous of.” It made me think about how that was also a feeling with infertility. How would it feel to not exist in the head-space of constant worrying and just live normal family building? I was always jealous of that.

Lastly, Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles writes about grandmother’s last friend dying. Her grandmother died near the end of her friend group, and she writes, “There were 3, maybe 4 of her super-close contemporary friends still alive to mourn her, and now they are all gone.” Even without knowing her grandmother or her friends, it made me sad to think that a “whole generation of beloved matriarchs is gone.” Sending peace of heart.

The roundup to the Roundup: The 14th anniversary of the 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 July 17 – July 24) 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.