Last thought from Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan as seen through the lens of infertility. The main character—Ava—teaches English in Hong Kong. The children are doing a unit on category nouns (vegetables) vs. exact nouns (broccoli), and they’re having problems filling out a worksheet. They are provided with category nouns and asked to fill in exact nouns.

The category noun is people, and the child asks what she should give as the exact nouns: sister or brother, teacher or doctor? The child points out that there are other related category nouns, such as family or profession. If she puts those exact nouns under “people,” what should she put under those other category nouns?

Ava realizes how difficult it is to describe a person without using how they earn money (or spend time) or their relationship to others (boyfriend, wife, mother, grandfather, friend).

She muses on the simplicity of the exact noun of apple vs. being someone’s nemesis as well as exact nouns that stand (albeit for a short period of time) on their own: adult, child, or teenager. On page 229 she writes:

An apple would still be a fruit if it didn’t have any others in its vicinity, but you couldn’t be someone’s nemesis without their hanging around to complete the definition … I still found it depressing that the way we specified ourselves—the way we made ourselves precise and interesting—was by pinpointing our developmental stage and likely distance from mortality. Fruit didn’t have that problem.

It’s a strange thought that you can be something (a mother) but if no one can see your child (miscarried), you can’t use the exact noun without explanation. Apples get to be apples whether they are rotted or ripe, chopped up or whole. They’re just an apple. But our exact noun can be taken away or never acknowledged by others at all.

This article on understanding the pandemic and surge capacity captured everything I’ve been feeling. The definition:

Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.

In other words, the energy we’re using to power ourselves is the type of energy that lends itself well to quick crises. But we’re using it to power ourselves long-term. Like six months and counting long-term. It’s hard to renew that kind of energy because there is no downtime or escape from the pandemic except to pretend that it doesn’t exist. (And we know how well that goes…)

The article has sound advice. While I’ve heard it all before, I think the opening did a lot to frame why the advice is important.

Are you taking care of yourself? And what does that even mean?

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

*******

Immediately after writing that last post about the staycation, I was moping on the sofa, playing solitaire, when I decided that I would officially lose it if I had to spend one more day staring at the stacks of paper on top of the file cabinet.

I dumped everything in the center of the floor and spent four hours sorting and shredding old papers dating back to when the twins were in elementary school. It felt so damn good. I mean, it didn’t feel good while I was doing it, but it felt good after the space was empty. I cleaned off the top of my desk for good measure.

And I still had time to sit outside and read in the afternoon. And pull together lunch and breakfast for the first three days of the week. Feeling productive turned the whole day around. I accomplished one big thing on the staycation, AND I read a bunch of books, too. So all is well that ends well.

I think I need to tackle a tiny space in the house every two weeks or so. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with the whole basement at once, but I can do a single corner of a room every few weeks and have the whole thing finished by winter. It’s hard to live with clutter when you can’t get breaks from your home.

*******

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.

It went about as well as you thought a staycation would go. We ended up taking care of things. The first day, I got three hours of alone time (the first since April!) and then discovered my car battery died and needed to be replaced. We discovered Josh’s phone wasn’t charging and needed to be replaced. I dropped an entire bowl of waffle batter on the floor, and it sprayed everywhere in the kitchen. I spent a lot of time desperate to tune out and read a book, but unable to find a silent spot. I checked in on work things every day. I cooked. I cleaned.

We also managed to get to the beach for the day. We peed as many times as we could before we left the house, drove to the nearest beach town, parked in a random lot and bypassed the boardwalk by walking through a neighbourhood. People kept their distance on the sand, leaving about 12 feet around each set of chairs. We wore our masks whenever we stood up to walk to the water’s edge. We had five hours on the sand.

It was lovely. And it was scary. I couldn’t fully enjoy it because I felt so overwhelmed being around people, even though everyone kept a respectful distance. (But what if they didn’t? I needed to be alert and watchful.) I kept waiting for something to go wrong. When it didn’t go wrong, I was relieved but also exhausted from worrying. It was a wonderful treat, and it was completely depressing at the same time.

I’m not sure it’s possible to take a true staycation right now; not if we’re cautious and therefore still need to take care of all the day-to-day things such as cooking. But it’s also because we’re at home, there’s no reason not to take care of things. Meaning, if we were away, we would have dealt with the dead battery or phone at another point. But we weren’t away, so we dealt with them in the moment.

I guess I’m ending the staycation feeling like it was a weekend more than it was a true break. Which is… fine. I mean, we’re enormously lucky to still be working, and I love what I do. Our kids are semi-self-sufficient. We’re healthy. Maybe it’s just a reminder that I need to do a better job setting firm limits and carving out downtime for myself. Or maybe I’m just better being ensconced in work than I am not doing things when I’m in the house.

We’re nearing six months into the pandemic, and it’s not going away any time soon. I either need to do better about holding time sacred, or I need to just admit that breaks aren’t completely helpful for me right now.

I ended up with a new phone in the middle of the pandemic. Josh needed a new phone—it wouldn’t charge or connect to the computer—but because my phone was over five years old (whereas his phone was only two), I took the new phone and he took my old phone to see how much more life we could squeak out of it while he waited to see if his old phone could be revived. We’re sort of all playing musical phones right now.

The Wolvog did the heavy lifting, setting up the phone so it looked exactly like my old one. He sat with me while I logged into all of the apps, patiently answering questions because everything felt unfamiliar even though things looked mostly the same. And then he wiped Charlie (fine, I only gave my phone a name about two hours before I handed it over to Josh, but it still counts) and uploaded Josh’s content onto the phone.

I love having more room. My old phone was almost full because I kept a lot of photos on it. The new phone feels like it has room to grow.

But it doesn’t feel familiar yet. We haven’t gotten to know each other. It’s funny to think of a phone like a friend.

*******

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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inconceivable captures that time between being “not really healed and not really acutely wounded any more” after a loss. I was struck by this thought: “It feels odd to cheer myself for things I do generally without any thinking at all.” But it is a big deal to take care of the day-to-day things after a loss. When almost all of your energy needs to go toward dealing with emotions, it is no small thing to borrow from that energy and put it towards running errands or exercising for ten minutes.

Much Ado About Nothing made me cry with her post about saying goodbye to a doctor, dying of COVID-19, and a hurt dog that she helped save. She writes, “Sometimes all the medical advances in the world can’t save a human, but a few people can come together and save a dog.” It’s really a gorgeous story of loss and love and life.

Lastly, Risa Kerslake writes about how the pandemic is affecting her child’s first birthday. It’s just a day; but when you’ve waited for your child for so long, no milestone day is just a day. She writes, “I know that a first birthday party has everything to do with me and literally nothing to do with a baby that will have no recollection of the banners, birthday cake, and coordinating plastic forks.” You can read the first part on her blog, and then follow the link to a second site.

The roundup to the Roundup: New phone. 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 14 – 21) 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.