892nd Friday Blog Roundup

I have already completed my arc from excited (a puzzle game!) to not excited (oh… this is feeling like work), so we’re not joining along. But in case YOU were looking for something to do because there are only so many Wordle spinoffs one can play daily, A.J. Jacobs has released a puzzle hunt.

Tell me if you try it. We got stuck on the passphrase and then distracted by more library holds coming in.

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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 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. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Telling an Infertile Person You’re Pregnant” (Finding a Different Path)
• “How To Tell Someone You’re Pregnant” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Mali!

Okay, now my choices this week.

This brings up one of my favorite things that happened once upon a time on blogs. One person would post something, and then response posts would pop up on other people’s blogs. And you could jump around the internet, reading different points of view. So on that note…

Finding a Different Path has a post about how to tell someone infertile you’re pregnant. She has examples of the best way and the worst way, pulling from the various ways she has been given news over the years. The “worst way” is… awful. Plus I love this advice: “Have a hypothetical conversation — ‘how would you want me to tell you my news?’ — ahead of time.”

Aaaaaand… No Kidding in NZ riffed on the same topic, but covering slightly different ground: the feelings that bubble up after the fact. She writes, “People who should know better judge us, even if we react perfectly decently. (See Jess’s post for an example of this.) We judge ourselves too, sometimes even more harshly.” And ooooof, her worst one is awful, too.

Kveller has a piece about how the mikveh fits in with infertility. This may be too niche a topic, but it resonated a lot with me. Infertility wasn’t my first time going to the mikveh, but it was definitely a point of return. And she describes it perfectly: it’s a resetting.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled reminds us in a roundup of news that it’s National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW). Which I had forgotten, even though I clearly haven’t forgotten infertility. This is the only mention I’ve seen of it this week. Which feels odd.

The roundup to the Roundup: Go hunt some puzzles. 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 April 22 – April 29) 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.