Another week and another vet visit for Beorn. This time he was having trouble walking on Monday morning. He stumbled around as if he were drunk when he moved at all. The vet took an x-ray but found nothing wrong. He was out of statis, and his stomach and intestines were filled with food. He was a little dehydrated but perked up when given water. He said his teeth looked good despite not coming together yet.

He came home and ate solid food for the first time in weeks — a blueberry — and he followed it up with a chunk of banana the next day. We spent the week working on water consumption because he wasn’t getting it from vegetables.

Poor little Beorn is pretty much the same, though drooling a bit less. Hoping he perks up this weekend because he normally loves Pesach cooking and getting all of the leftover parsley.

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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.

And now the blogs…

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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:

• Nothing… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

A lovely post from The Next 15,000 Days with pictures from a hike, complete with haiku. She explains: “It was a moment that felt just perfect—I was exactly where I wanted to be … It’s not the life I once planned, but over the years I’ve learned to love it just as it is.” It’s a beautiful poem and post.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled writes about an emotional weekend. She attended multiple memorial services as well as watched an event that was steeped in recent loss. While difficult to attend, these memorials were also moments of connection. As she wrote about the ride home: “In the car heading home, dh said, ‘I’m so glad we went.’ Me too. Life is short — way too short for some. 🙁 Treasure the people you love. Make the effort. You won’t regret it.” Sending another hug.

The roundup to the Roundup: Over a month of syringe feeding Beorn. 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 4 – April 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.

Morra Aarons-Mele is one of the smartest people I know, and I love her LinkedIn newsletter. She recently wrote about moving her mother into a memory care unit, and she outlined a hard choice model, pointing out the difference between four types of difficult choices.

Big decisions are not all alike.

I mean, we know this instinctively, but seeing it in the squares made me realize how often I brought the same decision-making anxiety to situations that fall in different categories, such as “big choice” and “hard choice.” And how they actually require different mental framing.

But what I loved was her acknowledgment that we can never know if the choices we make is the “right” choice because we never see the other option play out. Maybe even if things turn out well, the other option would have been better. Knowing that we can’t know can be terrifying OR it can be liberating. It’s not about getting everything right. It’s about making a choice and accepting the situation until the next decision comes along.

She writes,

I made the practical choice, which I hope is also the loving choice. The truth is we’ll never know, and that’s the reality of hard decisions. You just do the best you can with the information that you have at the time.

Go read her newsletter if you’re not already getting it.

You know I love games. This is really good game with sticking power. I’ve had it on my phone for a few weeks, and I play it daily.

368 Chickens is a puzzle game where you get two chickens each turn, and you have to place them on a board. Get three or more chickens of the same kind in a row, and it clears the squares and removes three (or more) from your chicken count. The idea is to get it down to zero chickens without filling the board.

A little like Tetris, but you have more time to think about where you are placing your chicken pair. My best game was 92 chickens, but I usually end the game with 250 chickens.

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

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It has been a draining three weeks. Four weeks? I can’t even remember when Beorn’s health woes began at this point. But it is tiring to be on high alert. That’s the real problem: Not the feeds or the medicine or the appointments.

My default is that things will go wrong. When the vet didn’t call when I expected him to after the procedure, I instantly went to believing there had to be a problem. If there wasn’t a problem, he would have called. It turned out that he started the procedure late because he wanted to give him more fluids. Simple explanation.

So I have spent the last four weeks (three weeks?) on high alert, feeling things before I need to feel them or, more often, feeling things that I don’t need to feel at all. For instance, worrying when there is nothing to worry about.

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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.

This is what I imagined in my head when the vet suggested that I feed Beorn baby food until he could eat on his own:

I’d come downstairs and scoop him into his feeding box. Then I’d pop open a jar of baby food and take out a tiny baby spoon. He would walk up and lick the baby food off the spoon, and I would coo at him, “Does baby love his green beans?” Then a bluebird would fly through my window, land on my shoulder, and sing a happy song.

This is what actually happened when I went to feed Beorn baby food:

Josh brought home five options and a pack of baby spoons. I placed Beorn in his feeding box. I scooped up the first bite of pureed carrots and held it out to him. He sniffed it once and then backed away into the corner. I brought the spoon close to his face, and he turned his head. Finally, I emptied the baby food into a syringe and squirted a few mL at a time into his mouth. Both of us were coated in pureed carrots within seconds.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Four times per day.