852nd Friday Blog Roundup

Josh and I went to Politics and Prose for the first time in 16 months. He picked up books at the store during the pandemic—you ordered and paid over the phone, and then they let you know when your order was ready and you drove up. But this was going inside and browsing for books. It felt so odd to be inside with other people, all looking at books, which is such a slow, lingering activity.

I went for one cookbook—the new Linda McCartney’s Family Kitchen—and ended up with a second one: Ultimate Veg by Jamie Oliver. I’m usually pretty wary of Jamie Oliver’s amounts because they’re off in his old recipes. But these recipes looked do-able at first glance.

I only like paper books for cookbooks. I can read fiction e-books, but I need a big book on the table if I’m cooking.

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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:

• “True First Day of Summer” (Finding a Different Path)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles has a raw post about her first thoughts when she learned about a distant cousin’s motherless baby. She writes: “For a moment, hearing about this baby who had just lost her mother, I yearned for that baby in a way that’s hard to articulate. Reality came crashing in moments later.” It’s not about a true plan but the thoughts that pop into your head when you spend so long trying to build your family.

The Road Less Travelled asks if we’ve turned into fireworks jerks. Uh… kind of? Like Loribeth, the only fireworks growing up were the big ones downtown and a smaller version in a city nearby. They are still banned in my county, so there shouldn’t be any fireworks going off except approved events. But we heard them all weekend. She writes: “This year, my country’s Indigenous peoples/First Nations requested that Canada Day celebrations be cancelled or scaled back, out of respect for the very recent discovery of hundreds of unmarked children’s graves found near former residential schools … But judging by the steady barrage of fireworks set off in my neighbourhood alone over the weekend — and reports of many others across the country — not too many people seemed to have received the message.” It’s a thought-provoking post.

Lastly, A Separate Life writes about losing a blogging friend. She captures those longtime relationships forged with people online (in this case, since 2007), following each other through multiple blog iterations and social platforms. It’s a bittersweet post that will make you think of your own friendships forged online.

The roundup to the Roundup: New cookbooks. 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 2 – July 9) 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.