Category — Uncategorized

We have been more cautious than most, but we decided this summer to take a pandemic vacation. Feeling comfortable meant setting up boundaries beforehand over what we would and wouldn’t do; how far we would go; when we would pull the plug.

We’ve been using X per 100K numbers as a personal cutoff (5 or under = enter a family member’s home without a mask, 5 – 10 = enter a family member’s home with all of us masked, more than 10 = only socialize outside) so we applied this to our vacation plan. If the place we wanted to go had a number under 30 per 100K, we’d go on the trip. If it went above 30 before the 72-hour cancellation period, we’d cancel. If it hovering in the range after the cancellation period passed… well… we would cross that bridge if it came to that.

[Side note: We chose 30 because it was in the middle of the CDC’s moderate range. We were willing to go above 10 (the start of the moderate range) because we weren’t socializing inside. Or socializing at all. We only spoke to a handful of people while we were there, and it was quick, masked transactions. We would have chosen different numbers if we were socializing with people outside our home as part of the trip.]

So we watched the numbers at the beach and decided to take the plunge. We’d mask in the hotel from door to room (a policy of the hotel for everyone), bring our own food for breakfast and lunch, and do takeaway for dinner. We’d spend all day outside at the beach, far away from other families because the beach is pretty empty for high-season East Coast beaches.

And for the most part, it felt totally normal. We rode bikes in the nature reserve, sustained mosquito bites, ate potato chips on the sand. We made up stories about a group of people nearby decorated with an odd assortment of tattoos (a thigh-sized prawn with a human face, wearing a fedora). We optimistically purchased a year-pass for the nature reserve deciding that even if we didn’t use it again, we’d be okay with the money spent.

And in other ways, it felt totally abnormal. There were shortages everywhere. It was hard to get a diet Coke. The bicycle rental place was void of bikes. We had to slip on masks to walk from the car to our room. But none of that really mattered because we made it to the beach.

And we had tiny moments of happiness. The guy who works at the hotel who immediately recognized me even with my face half-covered and sunglasses. (“I could never forget your face!”) The restaurant owner who returned to the kitchen to make us takeaway after he had stopped taking orders for the night because he knew how much the meal meant to the ChickieNob. The local ice cream place deep-freezing an order to take on the road so we could carry the beach home. The Wolvog scouting out the bike path and ensuring my afternoon was grasshopper-free on the nature reserve.

The ChickieNob and I are still doing virtual walks every afternoon, and we’ve watched the videos start to include masked people over the year and a half. In some places, we’ll pass a handful of masked people and dozens upon dozens bare-faced. But the day after we got back from the beach, we walked in Kyoto. Every person in the video except one was wearing a mask. The point: It’s possible to continue living life if we make concessions and do so keeping other people in mind.

Our plan is to keep going through the fall and winter, using our number cutoff as a guide. It feels nice to be back at the beach.

Apparently, there are a lot of people out there like me because I also just found an ode to open tabs. I leave tabs open on every browser.

The worst is my phone. When I hit 99 open tabs, I have to close down some of the collection, choosing between the things I write down in my bullet journal and close or leave open indefinitely. Some tabs have been open for 5+ years. But all tabs tell an intimate story of what was occupying my mind during a moment in time.

The time I became obsessed with Rex Whistler (that tab is still open), or wanted to learn Ogham, or needed to know the best beaches on the east coast for collecting sea glass. There are menus from restaurants and shoes I thought about buying but didn’t and so many different COVID-19 sites that compile daily stats.

I try to do a better job in limiting the number of tabs I leave open indefinitely on the computer browser. Every few months, I bookmark my tabs and close them. It feels so good to have a mostly empty (I only have 7 tabs open right now) browser. But it creeps back up after a day or two.

[Whispers]: I collect screenshots, too. Like this author, I am a digital hoarder.

Upon first glance, no one can tell what I collect … My hoard instead is digital: I collect screenshots. My screenshots folder on my phone is overspilling, out of sight only by the grace of technology, organized in a neat grid of squares that sit three across.

I also screenshot text exchanges I want to keep forever, memes from Facebook that made me laugh, search results I want to remember in the future, one million screenshots of key moments in video games. My photos help me remember moments I experienced but screenshots help me remember what occupied my thoughts. She writes,

So much of our digital world feels ephemeral by nature, passing by us at warp speed, but screenshots are like little fossils preserved in amber that allow us to slow down and capture pieces of our online lives. And if memories are what make us human, then our screenshots tell a story about who we are in the digital age.

Screenshots are also more intimate than photos, as she points out, because they’re often not things we share with others. We take screenshots for ourselves. (Or to prove a point down the road.)

The only thing more telling than my screenshots are my open tabs, or the ones I finally closed after bookmarking in a folder called Tabs that I May Have Had Open for Months.

Long before I found blogs or IVFC (which appears to be gone) or Resolve, I hung out on the Babycenter bulletin boards. So this essay about the boards hit close to home, especially passages like this:

On BabyCenter, women like me who didn’t feel the need to move on, get over, or forget about their pregnancy losses find a refuge. I continued wasting money on stacks of pregnancy tests that would end up in the trash — only to be fished out 30 minutes later for just one more look at that line — but at least I no longer felt isolated.

I remember those boards were the only thing getting me through my day. I went to those women for advice about injections, questions about my chart, commiseration when there was a workplace baby shower that I didn’t want to attend. Unlike the author, I never got to a dark place with the boards and only found support and empathy.

I connected the most with two other women and we formed a separate email group (which was easier to check during my lunch hour), which meant that I slowly pulled away from the boards. That email group continued for another year beyond the boards before it fizzled out and I found blogs, IVFC, and Resolve. I’m still in touch with some of the women from that Resolve board. One I found again through my blog, so it all comes full circle.

Can online bulletin boards become a dark place? Sure, just as any space can become a dark, unhealthy space. But they made me feel connection to something when I felt so isolated in my day to day world.

I love the phrase “time millionaires.” Unlike money, everyone gets the same amount of time in each day, but people use their time in a way that makes them feel as if they have more time or less time.

Laura Vanderkam gives three ways to increase the amount of time you feel you have (since you can’t actually add extra minutes onto the clock).

Rethinking time by the week instead of by the day (the same advice they give about looking at your overall nutrition) makes you feel differently about how much you’re getting done. Building backup slots into your schedule means that every priority gets done. And investing time in rewarding things (relationships) makes us feel better about spending time and may even save us time in the future.

I thought she had great advice in this post.