Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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This is such a smart idea: a savings group. Because different people will have different budgets or salaries, a savings club is a group you enter with your friends so you can do things together. Everyone can join in on the vacation or participate in a social activity.

“Forming gyemoim groups can help friends or families split travel costs equally so everyone can participate, regardless of his or her personal budget.”

The idea is that everyone contributes the same club dues, and when you have a big enough pot, you decide together how to spend it. Isn’t that a cool practice?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Last year, we got a membership to the aquarium because I thought it would make me happy to be back in a space where I took the kids a lot when they were little. That turned out to be a massive mistake. It made me sad to be there but also sad to not use the membership. So Josh and I would go and be sad there, among the fish.

It really wasn’t good.

But we decided not to renew the membership for the time being until I could find happiness in those old spaces, so we went to say goodbye to the animals this month. We walked to each tank, and I told the electric eel and the puffins and the clownfish that we would see them again one day. We said goodbye to the sloth in the rainforest room (whom I’ve privately named Abigail), and she came down low that night so we could fully see her in the trees.

But most of all, I said goodbye to the porcupine fish, who is my favourite fish. The one they have at the aquarium feels larger than most, and ChickieNob and I call him our chonky fish. We spent a lot of time trying to coax him into a space where we could see him, but for the first time ever, he hid behind a barrier and kept peeking out at us. We like to think that he was sad to say goodbye, too. He was really the only reason I wanted to keep coming back.

Goodbye, fish. Hopefully, we will see you again in the future. (Especially you, chonky fish.)

There may be an impulse to turn “Childless Cat Ladies” into the “Binders Full of Women” of this election, but I thought this take in WashPo (gift link) summed up why we shouldn’t keep repeating a repulsive message we don’t want to be reinforced in people’s heads:

Blackstone adds that her reaction has nothing to do with Vance’s or Harris’s politics: “I don’t make judgments on people’s political decisions, as far as who I’m going to vote for, or who they’re going to vote for,” she says. “But the family system is changing, and to make a comment like that … it’s just not helpful to society. We don’t need people to say, like, ‘You aren’t qualified to be president because you don’t have children.’ I want bonus parents to be respected as a parental figure.”

Years from now, people will hopefully forget Vance’s name and he will go down as the VP candidate from the losing party in the election, but what I don’t want to have happen is have his hateful thoughts lingering in people’s heads. Every human has a direct stake in the country’s future. Don’t forget that at the polls.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Scientist on the Roof has a post about that feeling you get when too many stressful things are happening at once, all depending your energy. She admits: “I was unable to sleep last night – just thinking, thinking, thinking about all the things that I am responsible for, all the tasks I need to be on top of. I was just lying awake and feeling like everything was spinning out of control.” Sending peace of heart.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ has a post about the concept of “happily ever after” as it exists in romance books. She points out the thing people like about romance books is that the ending must contain a happily ever after moment, but that moment is usually summed up as a traditional marriage and kids. She writes: “Happily Ever After. It looks different for everyone. It’s about time society figured that out.” Three cheers to that.

The roundup to the Roundup: All of us have a stake in the future. 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 19 – 26) 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.

The Paris Olympics begins this Friday. It snuck up on me this time. I don’t think we’ll watch in real time because I’ve never grown accustomed to watching events in the middle of the day. I’ve always been a recap-in-the-evening sort of person.

We will definitely watch women’s gymnastics to see the team, especially Simone Biles. And I’m deeply interested in women’s swimming this year because 15% of the team comes from the same school near me. (Classes of 2015, 2020, and 2023, so not there at the same time.) And, of course, we’ll prioritize the opening ceremony on July 26.

What are you watching? What is your favourite sport? What can you not miss, and what are you okay if you never see?

Wikipedia has a list of the bestselling books according to the New York Times, broken down by year, reaching back to 1931. This means you can look up the bestselling book from your birth week.

Mine was Watership Down by Richard Adams, and… I haven’t read it. I cringe because it seems like the sort of thing I should have read by this point (isn’t it often assigned at school?). I also haven’t read the books from Josh or the twins’ birthdays. Or my parents’ birthdays. Or my sister’s or brother’s birthdays.

Have you read the book that was the number one bestseller from your birthday?