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

*******

Modern Mrs. Darcy posted about a store that is hiring a reader-in-residence and paying them in books and coffee. It’s a fun idea, but they could take it so much further.

The article doesn’t mention it, but I would look at what someone was reading and be inspired to try something. I often pick up books in a bookstore because I see many other people looking at them. If I knew the person reading in the chair was the reader-in-residence, I’d ask for a recommendation. I’d follow their GoodReads if we liked the same thing. It would bring me into the store to see what the person was reading. It’s brilliant, and it feels underutilized as a concept.

What do you think?

*******

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.

At some point, I dropped writing the 19 with COVID-19, but it has been about four years of masked living. This week, four years ago, there was a guard at the door of the medical facility when I went to get a mammogram. The twins’ school closed for two weeks, which stretched into about a year and a half. And the stores emptied out as cases started multiplying. By March 15th, we had created an isolation plan as a family. By March 18th, we were all at home for many, many, many months.

We started taking walks and talking to people from the bottom of their driveway. We FaceTimed with family. And we lamented about how hard it was to find soap. I dreamed about soap. I talked nonstop about soap.

We still mask. We still carry hand sanitizer in our pockets. We’ve had many vaccinations. But we travel again. We see friends. We go to parties and eat outdoors. It’s a good life; not as carefree as it was four years ago, but so much better than the beginning when I dreamed about soap.

Every year, on March 9, the ALI community comes together to perform random acts of kindness in Thomas’s name. I believe this is the 19th year. The action can be little or big. You can tell the person you did it for Thomas or quietly take action and whisper it to the universe when you’re alone. It’s really up to you.

And it’s incredible to think about how much good a person can still accomplish, even if they’re not here.

*******

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.

*******

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:

• “Repetition” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Dear John approaches the anniversary of her husband’s death with a letter explaining that she still misses him. She writes, “I don’t really know how people move on. I guess they’re more comfortable letting people into their lives, where I am somewhat more reserved.” And I found the Doritos moment touching, for lack of a better word.

Finding a Different Path has a story of technology to the rescue (computer) after technology failed her (car) when she was on her way to a book event. “I was so proud to be a part of it, and so bummed not to be there in person to chat with people after. But also so grateful that they were willing to zoom me in to share my fringe-y perspective on the need for reform in adoption.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Do a random act of kindness. 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 March 1 – 8) 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.

I have been to many, many, many, many, many museums, so I do not use the superlative “best” lightly, and I apply it to the museum as a whole. But the museum I believe all other museums should try to emulate is the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Not what you were expecting, right? But it really is. Not just because I entered with an unremarkable interest in Yiddish books, but I left telling Josh, “Let’s sign up for a Yiddish class.”

So, you enter the building and watch a brief video giving context for how the museum came about, which is an interesting story because of Aaron Lansky’s (the founder) passion. Then, you go on a “tour.” I’m putting quotes around it because it’s not really a tour, per se — it’s more like a walking, spoken table of contents for the museum. A guide takes you around and shows you what you’ll see in each section. It takes about 20 minutes. Then, the guide brings you back to the beginning, and you explore the museum like you would any other museum, except you now know the path you want to take through the museum (everyone in our group took a different path), and you understand what you’re seeing.

Isn’t that so smart?

Finally, small exhibits are off the main exhibit, such as continual video playing from their story collection project. And interactive exhibits help you understand how they sort books that reach the museum. And through it all, you start to understand the scope of this project that began in 1980 to save the written history of a language.

The most brilliant part is how they get volunteers. So you have this language that few people speak, and it’s not easy to pick up a book in this language and read enough to understand how to sort it. So they have a program where they teach college students Yiddish in the morning, and then you practice using the language to sort books in the afternoon.

I was blown away by the attention to every small detail in the museum, and I’m still thinking about our time there long after the fact. I feel so lucky that I got to see it in 1997 before it opened, and then 27 years later to see what it has become.

I found this a few months ago but forgot about it until I saw the bookmark. Each year, this essay collection posts 24 essays from 24 writers, each featuring something the writer thought about a lot that year. Current essays (from this last year) include loneliness, caregiving, and money. Each essay is personal, capturing an individual’s thoughts vs. trying to define the year.

But the period also seeps into the essay choices, like universal basic income features or how to chit-chat on video calls in 2020.

The collection is growing forward, so it will be fascinating for people hundreds of years from now. What a gift for the future.

Could you imagine if you could read the essays from the 1440s and see what people were thinking about during the invention of the printing press? Were they thinking about how movable type would change the world, or were their thoughts occupied by… mince pies? What else were people thinking about during major world events? Maybe what we thought people were thinking about wasn’t on their minds at all.