957th Friday Blog Roundup

Mali challenged me in the comments to kick off our nightly conversations with the twins with boring stories, and that is exactly what we’re doing. While I don’t think any have been as impressive as the rubbish bin story, this one got them to roll their eyes.

Josh ordered a medication refill. When it arrived, I picked up the bottle and said, “There are not 90 pills in this bottle.” I just had a feeling. So we counted them. Twice. And there were 89 pills in the bottle.

And that was our evening.

*******

If you live in the US, FEMA is conducting a test of the alert system on October 4 at 2:20 pm ET. It will be very loud — devices will all go off simultaneously with the message. Just putting this out there so no one is surprised. I put a five-minute warning in my calendar so I don’t startle.

*******

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.

*******

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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

A Separate Life has a post about quokkas. Do you really need to know more than that to click over? There are pictures of Perth. And did I mention quokkas? Because quokkas.

Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles has a tiny post that summed up exactly what I’m feeling. She writes, “Everyday we release our loves out into the uncontrolled world and hope they come back to us undamaged. Maybe not unaltered entirely, but essentially okay. It’s a hard thing.” I love this comparison to uncontrolled copies.

Dear John tells her late husband about their teenager’s request to bring her boyfriend to the cemetery. (Okay, I laughed at this: “She texted me ‘Can I go see dad with (boyfriend) for my birthday?’ I replied, ‘At the cemetery?’ She responded, ‘No – at the Ouija board. Of course, at the cemetery.’ I have taught the sarcasm well…“) These quiet letters always make me slow down and feel deeply.

Finally, The Road Less Travelled writes about how the pandemic impacted our sense of time; namely, the missing years. Initially, I didn’t think deeply about what I was missing because I was just trying to stay alive. But more than three years on and still masking, I am acutely aware of the can’ts, along with gratitude for the cans. Figuring out how to travel while masked felt like a win. Missing out on dining with people still feels like a loss.

The roundup to the Roundup: More boring stories. Alert on October 4, 2023. 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 22 – August 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.