All I wanted was to read once a week next to a body of water. Preferably the ocean, but that’s over two hours away, so a river or a lake. A county park I had never been to fit the bill, at least, according to pictures on Instagram. I told Josh I had found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

“I want to get super involved in helping out with this park. I want to join the board of directors today. I want to fund-raise for this magical space. And when I die, I want a bench with my name put up so people can sit on it and remember me.”

“Do you want to… you know… see the place before you decide all of that?” Josh asked.

So we jumped immediately into the car and drove the half hour to the park. My first reaction was to burst into tears. “This is exactly how I imagined it would be. It is the most wonderful place on earth.” That was my reaction seeing a sliver of fake lake from the car window.

Wait for it.

Listen, it was nice. I mean, yes, the water was brown because this is Maryland, and all of our lakes are artificial. (Did you know that? Maryland has zero natural lakes. And it had almost no movement. Sound traveled in a bizarre way in the area, so all you could hear were people’s loud conversations or children shouting and no nature sounds. Little by little, I grew less enamored. Not fully unenamored but not cry-happy-tears-in-the-car enamored.

The following weekend, we returned in the car, armed with a list of five spots and a picnic lunch. The first place we went was… kind of perfect. It was under twenty minutes from our home. It was a swiftly running river, so you had all the nature sounds and few people around. It was a quick walk from the parking lot, and bathrooms were nearby. (Though there was a cricket in the one I used. Cue a terrified face.) We lazed about in the sun, eating potato chips, but I felt nervous about emotionally committing to the stretch of river I renamed the Brambles because I didn’t like its actual name.

After a few hours, we decided to try out the other places to confirm that we had chosen the best spot on the first try. (Well, second try. But the first try that day.) The second spot was wonderfully creepy, with trees growing out of the center of the river. You could park the car and face the water. So it was a nice second choice, but not somewhere you’d want to sit outside because it was the kind of place where you’d be lost in a book and suddenly notice a snake wrapped around your ankle. Maybe a little too rustic.

The third place was a short visit because it was once again stagnant water, but this time, there was also a flock of turkey vultures eating something that looked like it had the head of a wolf and the body of a snake. It smelled horrific, and I wouldn’t read next to a wolf-snake hybrid.

The fourth place was also stagnant water and super crowded. We struck the fifth place from the list because it had too much working against it.

We returned to the Brambles a few days later and had dinner beside the water. It was grey and moody and a little cold, but the rushing water was loud and clear, and it mostly fulfilled what I needed it to do: connect me with nature, give me a place close-by to read, and make me feel like I’d gone somewhere other than my kitchen table or living room sofa.

After giving my heart over so quickly to the first park and having it broken in under an hour, I’m being a little more cautious with the Brambles. I’m waiting to see how it holds up when more people are around in the summer or whether the river harbours a mosquito infestation. In other words, I’m waiting for the Brambles to mess up and prove my pessimistic side right. But until then, it keeps proving it wrong.

At the start of spring break, I made the Wolvog’s favourite salmon dish, and at the end of spring break, I made the ChickieNob’s favourite pasta. We sat down to eat, and Josh took the new pepper grinder, gave it a few twists over his plate, and the top flew off, showering his meal, the table, and a portion of the kitchen floor in peppercorns.

Faulty pepper mills happen. It was annoying, but I didn’t feel the need to talk about it. We cleaned the kitchen, dumped the pasta, and sent a note to the manufacturer (who shall not be named) to inform them about the defective pepper grinder. They wrote back that they would send us a coupon so we could replace the pepper. Excellent.

Three weeks later, the coupon arrived. It came with a warning that we needed to use it immediately because they would not reissue it once it expired in a few weeks. The amount on the coupon was less than the cost of a new pepper grinder. In other words, to replace our pepper grinder, we needed to pay them — not the full amount we spent the first time, but pay them for a portion of the replacement. So we got to pay them to replace our new pepper grinder with an even newer one, AND we got to eat the cost of the meal we had to toss because it was covered in a solid ounce of peppercorns.

And now it became all I could talk about, clearly, since I am telling you, too.

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

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I’ve been loving Deez Links’s hate reads. I don’t agree with all of them, and most I don’t have a strong opinion about, but this one I am firmly in agreement about: If you are the person who takes the group picture (or even a picture of a solitary person), send the picture. Do not say, “I just took the best photo,” and then not send the photo. Send the freakin’ photo.

I could not breathe reading this line because I was laughing so hard: “It feels humiliating to ask my friend to send them to me, to cop to an unspoken vulnerability (“I’d like to look at myself in case I look hot”) the same way buying a toilet plunger at 2 a.m. at the bodega alludes to urgent, obvious disaster.”

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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.

Four years ago, at the start of the pandemic, our big Pesach crew reduced down to the four of us around our kitchen table. Even without the pandemic, our table would be smaller because it was the first Pesach after my cousin moved to another state, taking her family of four with her. But we hadn’t expected to spend the last few years with just the four of us singing “Dayenu.” We thought things would change and shift and grow. But that isn’t what happened.

And that is life.

This year, we are a seder for two. The kids may FaceTime in for dessert, but they have their own seders with their friends this year. And, yes, we could have made different choices with the holiday, but we didn’t. We chose this, so I’m in a place of acceptance and sadness.

I am in a place where I accept that I made this choice, and I am sad that I had this completely awesome experience for the last 19 years, and now my kids are far away, so I don’t have it anymore.

My holiday experience is not something I want to fix; I just want to be able to talk about being sad with other people responding, “I’m sorry you’re sad. Hope next year is better,” instead of making suggestions we’ve already considered and rejected because we like them less than the one we chose. I think it’s just very hard for people to hear how you feel without having the impulse to say, “Have you considered this?” Humans are fixers.

But that’s where I am: cooking for a seder for two, feeling lucky that it’s not a seder for one, and sad that it’s not a seder for four or more.

We filled up on pizza and pasta this week, which feels like a cheat. We’re essentially trying to make ourselves sick of things so we won’t miss them when we can’t eat them during Pesach. Which feels like a loophole, right? It’s like if you gorged on chocolate until you felt queasy at the sight of it and then said, “I’m giving up chocolate for Lent.”

I may be overthinking this.

In any case, I only have a few days left with bread, so that’s all I’m eating until the first seder starts on Monday.

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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.

A Separate Life made me think deeply about autumn. Or, really, think deeply about spring because she is coming out of the season we’re entering. She writes, “It’s the season when we look at projects we wanted to do, and see them unfinished, or worse, even unstarted!” Reading this before summer begins (for me) means that I can go in with open eyes, trying to remember this valuable lesson from autumn, which sounds lovely in New Zealand.

Lastly, Bereaved and Blessed has a post on Molly’s 16th birthday/anniversary of her death. She explains the benefit of re-reading these old posts and remembering what she has been through. “When navigating difficult and uncertain times, I often think I’ve never felt like this before, it is so hard. However, in reality every age and stage of life is filled with challenges that can feel almost insurmountable while we are living through them.” Again, a bittersweet life lesson that I’m grateful she has put back into my head with this reminder.

The roundup to the Roundup: Trying to make myself not miss pasta. 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 12 – 19) 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.