837th Friday Blog Roundup

Things you can buy for 99 cents:

1. A box of Crayola chalk
2. A Wet and Wild eyeshadow brush
3. The e-book version of Life from Scratch

(Side note: It is really really really difficult to find 99 cents items on Amazon.)

My first fiction book is on sale for the next few days for less than a cup of coffee. Pick up Life from Scratch for yourself. Or a friend. Or your neighbour. Or your cousin. Or a random person that you spotted in a recent Zoom meeting.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Infertile Phoenix has a post about changing her name after her divorce that was so thought-provoking. What happens if you change your name because you want to share a family name with your future children, but then you don’t have future children? I really loved hearing this perspective.

Finding a Different Path writes about a classroom conversation on The Giver. It’s not just the conversation on babies and the implications of this science fiction society. It’s her co-teacher driving home the myth that IVF works for everyone. She explains: “Normally I might have shared bits of my story with the students by now, but the weird schedule and the masks have kind of inhibited that personal connection.” So hopefully her students caught her correction because no person should be walking through this world thinking assisted reproduction is a given.

A Half-Baked Life has a post about scars; the ones you can see and the ones you can’t. This was a scarring year for many many many people. She explains, “Our scars make us who we are. They interrupt the flat expanse of grey with something else, reminders of something deeper, reminders that we are more than what we see on the surface.” Love that.

Lastly, there were a lot of posts about the last “normal” week before the pandemic. Res Cogitatae walks through the change over; from knowing about the virus to the pandemic starting to a year later. This spoke to me so much: “I don’t know where I would start the process of recovering. I don’t know what I would need to feel like I can start the process of recovering.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Life from Scratch is on sale. 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 12 – 19) 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.