857th Friday Blog Roundup

We celebrated Beorn’s first birthday last weekend. We gave him the whole weekend because it’s not every day that your best friend turns one. We kicked off the festivities with a croissants and coffee breakfast in his honour on Saturday morning, and ended the two-day party with a watermelon “cake” (chocolate chip cookies for the humans) and blowing out the candle. We made the wish on his behalf.

I think he had a good time. He definitely enjoyed the extra treats. He always gets all of the attention anyway, so it was hard for him to distinguish what was normal excessive attention and cooing and what was birthday excessive attention and cooing.

Look at that face!

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It’s Friday the 13th. I don’t know why I have a compulsion to always type that whenever the Roundup coincides with Friday the 13th. As you were.

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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.

Pocobrat has a short poem that I love. Time running away, indeed. Maybe I also connected with the meme embedded with it.

A Blank New Page has started a blog. She begins: “When we got married, my husband and I talked about the possibility of not being able to become a parent. What a weird and hypothetical thought.” And I love this phrasing: “facing a blank new page in my life … It scares me because I have to decide myself which way to go, what role I want to take in life, I have to define for myself what it means to be a woman.” Scary but also amazing. And I can’t wait to read this blog and see the page fill up.

Bereaved and Blessed writes about a family tradition of giving a painting to mark a moment. I think this is brilliant, especially as someone who does not like to receive actual flowers. She writes, “The Monet, along with two other fine art prints that my parents gave us, to celebrate Molly and Abby’s births, also have been a wonderful reminder of my Mom and Dad’s love and generosity.” But the best surprise is what happens when she shows up at her new job. Love this post.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix has a hard day around a lot of children at a work event, but she locates the source for the pain. She explains, “It’s not the kids. It’s never the kids. … It’s the moms. It’s my sadness that I never got to be a mom and never got to have mom friends. It’s the camaraderie that I will never share.” The post is deep insights from a hard day.

The roundup to the Roundup: Beorn’s birthday. Friday the 13th. 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 August 6 – August 13) 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.