Every year for many many many years, on March 9th, the ALI community has performed kind acts in honour of Thomas. Thomas’s mum wrote up a great description of the origin of the day. It’s a really amazing idea of helping a person continue to impact the world, and it’s super simple. You just do something kind in Thomas’s memory, making the world a tiny bit better than it was moments earlier.

They are encouraging people to keep their kind acts COVID-19-safe this year. I’m giving you a four-day heads up so you can put on your thinking cap this weekend. What is a small thing you can do on the 9th to put good in the world in Thomas’s memory?

Get thinking.

*******

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 in order 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. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Ghost Life” (Finding a Different Path)
• “My Account at the Emotional Bank” (Stirrup Queens) —thank you, Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Infertile Phoenix writes about being in limbo again. She pulls in her experience of infertility to get through the pandemic-induced limbo. She writes: “All this waiting… It’s just like… Well, you know. Having experience with something IS helpful. I’m thankful for that.” It is a temporary time period. Not a pleasant one, not one anyone wants to be in, but it helps to think about its temporary nature.

Infertility Honesty writes about her candle and flower ritual, explaining: “Mourning is defined as the outward expression of grief.  Everyone grieves, but not everyone mourns.” She contemplates how the ritual has changed over the years, especially this year when everything is so off-kilter. And I found the moment in the snow incredibly moving.

Risa Kerslake writes about her child’s second transferversary. She writes: “Two years ago she was placed inside me, along with the sibling we’ll never get to meet. Truthfully, I don’t think a lot about that day. It was traumatic. I mean, traumatic, but filled with so much hope at the same time.” Those last few sentences of the post made me feel weepy. Happy but also weepy.

Lastly, The Next 15000 Days has a (not really) silly story about a common myth: let’s call it the “prayed hard enough” myth. After a helpful webinar, she dives into a not-so-helpful book. It’s a tiny post, so you’ll have to click over to read it.

The roundup to the Roundup: Be kind on March 9th (and other days, too). 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 Feb 26 – March 5) 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.

One year ago, we knew about the coronavirus, but it wasn’t impacting day to day life in the US. My journal changed over slowly, then all at once.

I mentioned a doctor’s appointment at the end of February, but I didn’t note that I asked her if she thought the virus would spread in the US. I remember she looked at me strangely and said, “It’s not ‘if,’ it’s ‘when’.” I went home and told Josh that maybe we should be worried.

I mentioned a reproductive rights rally on March 4th outside the Capitol, but I don’t mention how I decided not to go down for it because there were grumbles that we shouldn’t gather in crowds.

I mentioned coffee on the 5th with a friend, and I know we spent most of the time talking about the virus.

On the 6th, we went to a school play, and I cringed when I heard people cough in the audience. But I didn’t mention that in my journal. On the 8th, we sat outside eating water ice, and a man walked behind me, coughing. I leaned forward and away, as if that would protect me.

The first mention of the virus is on the 11th. I entered a medical building, and there was a guard at the door. They announced a two-week school closure on the 12th, which is still in effect a year later. The grocery shelves were strangely empty on the 13th. The kids went to my parents’ house for the final time on the 14th. We made an isolation plan on the 15th. It’s a wall of updates, day after day after day.

It is surreal how COVID-19 went from background noise to central thought, and then, at some point, became a split in attention. My mind is always processing the pandemic; it’s impossible not to think about it when you need to navigate it. But my mind is also not processing the pandemic. Most of my daily journal notes are about other things; non-pandemic things. It is the unspoken companion to everything else I do, but it is no longer the only thing we talk about.

I don’t know how I feel about that.

All I know is that we’re turning into the year’s end of the pandemic. We’ll mark it here on the 12th with the closure of school; that was when things changed. And then a second year will begin.

I’m not quitting social media, though I use it probably less than most people I know. I was fascinated by the recent Guardian article about people who have closed up their social media accounts and left all platforms for good.

I know plenty of people who have left a platform, and even more who haven’t started on a platform in the first place. But no one who spends zero minutes online. Reading about the people in the article was interesting because it is so far outside my experience.

It made me think about the platforms I like—blogs and Facebook—and the platforms that don’t appeal, and why. Social media is still worth it for me; more positive than negative. It opened my world to stories and ideas I would have never encountered otherwise.

Clearly, if you’re reading this blog, you are using social media, even if you don’t write a blog yourself. So no one fits in the category of the people in the article. But I’m curious how other people processed those stories.

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

*******

I learned a new word thanks to the BBC: hiraeth. It is “a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost.” It’s a “blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing.”

Isn’t that a perfect word?

It’s that realization that a moment has passed, and you can never get back to it. Like college—you can revisit the location, and you can visit individual people from that time period, but you can’t get the moment back where you were that age in that space with those people.

*******

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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

I mentioned in the last book roundup how much I loved Finna by Nino Cipri. It’s about two employees working at a knock-off IKEA chain who enter a wormhole that opens up in one of the showcase rooms. Inside the Narnia-like space, they encounter (among other characters), the captain of a ship who explains why she loved traveling via wormholes.

I keep recommending this book for this passage on page 100:

“It showed me that there were infinite possibilities, at all times. After I made captain of the Anahita, I worried over every decision, doubted whether I was brave or smart or strong enough to pull my mission off and protect my crew. I could remind myself that somewhere in the multiverse of possibility, there existed a world where I was all of those things. Maybe it was the world that I already lived in.”

It becomes a choice. If in one of the infinite universes, you are enough; you achieve everything you hope for and all of your effort pays off, why not believe that it’s the universe you are living in. That it’s not one of the branching paths but instead the life in front of you.

I love that so much.