815th Friday Blog Roundup

As Beorn grows more comfortable, he reveals more of his personality. He is a calm, cautious pig, currently about the size of a stick of butter. He likes to sit in my lap—he sometimes sits there for hours while I work—but when he’s done, he walks off and goes back into his cage without a goodbye.

He knows vegetables go in his purple bowl, so he checks it every few minutes to see if I placed something inside. (I didn’t.) But he won’t try a new vegetable unless he first sits on my lap and I rub it against his mouth for about 30 seconds to prove that it’s edible. He also refuses to eat a vegetable if he hasn’t encountered it in a day or two. So, for instance, we did this dance with romaine hearts, then he ate them with gusto, and two days later, we needed to do it again because he wasn’t quite sure the leaves of romaine in his food bowl were actually “food.” But once we reassured him that they were food, he once again ate them with gusto.

If the twins come upstairs on a break from their school day, he works himself into a frenzy, popcorning around his cage with 180 degree hops. He doesn’t wheek a lot yet, and while he enjoys his vitamin tablets, he doesn’t beg for them.

As much as I miss Linus, he was not a chill pig. I would have never allowed him to walk off my lap, over the arm of the sofa, and let himself back in the cage because there was a 100% chance that he would pause and chew a hole in the sofa on the way to his food bowl. He would have never sat on my lap through a meeting, choosing instead to climb all over my keyboard and beg for cookies. He was well behaved in the sense that I could leave his cage open, tell him not to exit it, walk out of the room for ten minutes, and he would be sitting inside (next to the door), waiting my return. But he wasn’t join-me-for-a-meeting material. He was more of a let’s-play-after-my-work-is-done kind of pig. There’s a reason we always called him Puppy. He was a tiny pig who thought he was a tiny dog.

I miss wrestling with my loud, silly Linus, but it’s nice to get to know someone new. Especially a chill pig like Beorn.

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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:

• “Does the Grief Stay with You?” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

There were a lot of posts on the theme of optimism/hope and pessimism this week. No Kidding in NZ has a post about feeling hope, even when she’s being realistic about the chances or mourning the loss of a different choice. She makes a fair point: “There’s no point in being pessimistic. We’ve lost the life we wanted. But there’s no point in letting pessimism steal the wonder and joy of the life that is waiting for us.” Different doesn’t equal bad, and hope can make the unknown a little easier.

My Path to Mommyhood also comments on the idea of hope and compares it to a spice. “Too much and it’s overpowering, too little and nothing tastes good. Finding that just-right balance can be tricky.” And managing hope is easier in some places more than others.

Finally, FinallyMyLinesNow is a woman with a similar heart (and we have a lot of jokes in this house over the word “yet”) whose mind wonders when the bad news will arrive. This is how I think: “I really do feel like I’m just waiting for the bad news. Maybe it didn’t come today. Maybe it won’t come before retrieval. It’s coming, though.” At the same time, hoping her bad news doesn’t arrive.

The roundup to the Roundup: Beorn continues to settle in. 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 October 9 – October 16) 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.