Yesterday morning, I came downstairs, singing Beorn’s good morning song. Yes, our pig gets a good morning song. I took away his sleeping space and set down his food bowl, as I do every morning, still singing the song, when he suddenly jumped forward, terrified, and hit the wall of his cage. I jumped back, terrified, and stopped singing.

Whenever I approached the cage, he would run frantically, bouncing off three walls, and scream.

I went to get Josh and thus began 12 hours of trying to calm down the pig. We missed services. We tried giving him his favourite foods. We tried taking away foods that seemed to make him more upset. We tried speaking to him in a quiet voice. We tried speaking to him in a normal voice. We tried to reason with him. We gave him back his sleeping space. He stood at attention for 12 hours, sniffing the air, his back hunched in fear, too afraid to move.

He was okay out of the cage, so we cleaned the cage. That helped in the sense that he would allow us to place things back in his cage, all cleaned. But he still seemed skittish. We gave him a bath, which helped more. He finally stopped freaking out and ate hay, watching us to see if we were judging him.

The most likely explanation is that guinea pigs will mark places they deem dangerous if they’re scared to let other pigs know that something scary is there. But it was like Beorn forgot HE was the pig who marked the space and spent the entire day worried about a danger that didn’t exist, which is super sad. But I’m glad he’s not running and screaming anymore.

He smells so good this morning because I used baby shampoo.

Last week, for several reasons, we decided to watch services online rather than go in-person for the holiday. There’s a moment in the service where they blow a horn called the shofar, and it’s a mitzvah — one of the commandments — to hear it.

As the rabbi talked about the shofar (they always give people time to get back into the sanctuary so they can hear it), a family of five deer stepped into our yard. They were eating the grass a few feet away from the window.

When the man blew the shofar, the deer looked up and stared in one direction, twisting their ears. Another blast from the shofar, and they looked in a different direction, twisting their ears again. Each time the shofar sounded, the deer looked around, trying to locate the sound.

I’m not sure if it meant anything, but it felt like a sign of something.

*******

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 beautiful post about staying in touch with people, and the difference between the letter-writing years and the instant communication made possible by the internet. She writes, “I think I’ve lived in the best of times. I had amazing formative experiences in independence. Then the internet arrived in my 30s, when I could and did easily adapt to these new technologies, using them daily for work. But I wasn’t reliant on them.”

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix has a thought that I sat with for a long time. She writes about attending weddings alone now vs. before infertility/divorce. She writes: “Interestingly, I don’t think divorce changed weddings too much for me. I loved being married. And I love being divorced … But still, my experience with marriage and divorce doesn’t change my feelings about weddings.” It made me think about attending baby-centered events without children. While I don’t think weddings have changed a lot for me — I like a wedding and don’t think about the baby stuff connected to weddings while I’m there — I feel differently about attending baby-centered events, such as showers, after infertility vs. before.

The roundup to the Roundup: Signs abound. 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 October 4 – 11) 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.

While we’ve encountered the lack of stamps on and off for the past few years, I just learned that the EU is phasing out passport stamps for travelers on November 10. This is a bummer because of the two ways I used my stamps.

One, trying to remember the dates we had been somewhere. This seems the most obvious use: Open the book, look at the stamp, and check the date.

Two, there is a point on every trip — usually early on — when I silently freak out and think I cannot possibly be this far away from home. When that happens, I usually flip through the passport book and note all of the other times I’ve freaked out but made it through this stage of the trip and been fine. From now on, especially once my passport renews, I’ll flip through blank pages and think… nothing. Because I will not see a visible reminder of where I was the last time I freaked out.

I’m sad they’re going away. Not everywhere, of course, but in many places, and I fear it’s the path forward for the future.

I read the most lovely, well-written, deeply honest personal essay about infertility recently, so I am setting it here in case you missed it, too.

It’s about stating where she is right now. She explains:

An actress friend of mine went public about her fertility issues ONLY AFTER becoming pregnant. Usually, when someone addresses infertility, there is a baby at the end of the struggle; a happy ending. But my story is different. My story is about not getting that proverbial ‘happy ending’ and navigating defeats without being defeated. Honoring that loss is part of life.

Go read it in full because the title is perfect.

Last year, we visited the kids four times: drop-off, mid-fall, mid-spring, and pack-up. It worked well, and we decided to do this again. Except this time, it worked better with my work schedule to go at the end of September. It wasn’t ideal — drop off at the beginning of September and visit at the end of September. It left us with a big gaping calendar hole between the end of September and Thanksgiving.

But what could we do? It also needed to work with work.

We had perfect weather for our trip. We went to an orchard and ate apple cider donuts. We helped them fill out their mail-in ballots over coffee. We went on a Trader Joe’s run, ate sushi, and visited a landmark that I thought I had never seen and then realized that I had been there years ago. Mostly, we just sat around and talked, and the Wolvog taught me how to play Balatro. It was a fantastic weekend.

But I ended up having the emptiness of drop-off twice. The first time when we actually dropped them off for the year and I had to return to the quiet house, and the second time when we returned from the visit last weekend to the long stretch until Thanksgiving.

We all agreed that we should push the visit to October next year to break things up, but it doesn’t change this year, dealing with the same emotions a second time.

P.S. No Microblog Monday tomorrow. See you on Tuesday.