Category — Microblog Mondays

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

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I have never watched a football game, and I don’t plan on starting, but I really like the name DC chose for the football team — the Commanders. It fits. I will likely call them the Commies. And like Josh, I will always think of Commander Salamander — a now-defunct DC institution of my childhood.

The naming sent us down a rabbit hole of Commander Salamander memories. The Manic Panic. The stud bracelets. The racks of leather pants. I miss that store so much.

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

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

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There’s a line in Shari Lapena’s book, Not a Happy Family, where a character comments, “What a good thing that we can’t see the future” (p. 111). She is remembering happier times from years earlier, and her comment is more about how those older days would have been tainted to know what was coming in the future.

But I can’t help to think of things I would have done if I had known the pandemic was going to stretch into a third year. I would have pulled the kids out of school to travel more. Maybe that’s it. We traveled a lot, but I would have traveled more if I knew I wasn’t going to travel at all for years.

Do you wish you had known about the pandemic years earlier? Would you have done anything differently?

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

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

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Prior to the pandemic, Stanley Tucci flew under my radar. I knew who he was — as in, if someone said his name, I could conjure up a mental image of his face — but I couldn’t name most of his films. But early in the pandemic, I read a great essay where he recounted a day in his life during lockdown. It was such a great moment of art making me feel less alone.

Later in the pandemic, we watched Searching for Italy and enjoyed dreaming about a time when we’d be able to travel again. And now, finally, the ChickieNob and I are listening to his new book, Taste, as we walk. His stories make us lose track of how long we’ve been exercising. He has been such a bright spot every time he loops back in front of us during the pandemic.

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

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

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Our school district set thresholds for when it would move to virtual school for two weeks. On the second day back, 59.8% of schools hit the threshold. But we didn’t enter virtual school. Instead, we entered a state of chaos, with thousands of people yelling at each other online and through virtual town meetings.

I sat through part of one of the town meetings, eating a bowl of Chex, when I realized that no one was responding to any of the speakers. I was literally just hearing people say the things they were already saying in all-caps on social media. And then the host would thank them for speaking and call on the next person.

I’m at a loss on how to move forward. And amid the explosion of text messages dissecting the latest school email, the ChickieNob said, “Did you hear about the new variant found in Cyprus?” My heart sounds really loud in my chest right now.

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

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

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I have been in a drugstore twice in the last few weeks, and in both cases, there was a stack of Binax at-home tests on display. Both times we considered getting them, and both times we left them there — once watching the display get cannibalized as we waited to pay for our items. It made me anxious not to get them.

Except that I couldn’t think of a good reason to get them. Even if we tested negative, we would still do everything the same, including never taking off our masks indoors or in crowds. I also knew that if we felt ill, we would want a PCR — not an at-home test. Plus, there was a decent chance that an at-home test would give a false negative (especially with omicron), providing no helpful information at all. It was better to leave the tests and invest the money in KN95s.

But it is HARD to walk away from tests, especially when you know they’re hard to find and you can’t double back to the store and pick them up if you change your mind.

Sentences I never predicted I would write back at the start of the pandemic.

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.