Nothing profound, but I’ve been loving Zach King’s illusion videos.

Or this one:

Or this one:

Something fun for your weekend.

COVID cases are on the rise, which means it must be time to get rid of masks. Amirite? Especially in small, enclosed spaces such as cars and buses and planes. We can use those forms of transportation to get to other small, enclosed spaces, such as bars, where we can all hang out, maskless, and lament how COVID cases on the rise. Whatever should we do?

If Year 1 was scary and Year 2 was frustrated, Year 3 of the pandemic feels ridiculous. We know what works. We know what we need to do to keep cases down and continue with — for the most part — normal life. And yet we seem incapable of doing what we know works. We’re like toddlers screaming that we’re not tired while we have a meltdown and fall asleep on the floor.

Luckily, one-way masking still works, even if its effectiveness is reduced. I’m keeping my mask on — for myself, for the immunocompromised, for the people who can’t or are too young to get a vaccine.

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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.

Finding a Different Path makes a surprising connection with a student’s parent. It was a great conversation about infertility and adoption, and she ends with this thought: “It was a moment that left me feeling connected and understood. Our experiences were different, but with a thread of commonality.” Here is to the connections we make along the way.

A Separate Life muses on a line in Richard Osman’s book about how we once knew each other’s handwriting. Yes! It’s a strange thing to miss, but I knew all of my friends and family member’s handwriting. That number has shrunk considerably. There are still people whose handwriting I can identify, but for most of the people I interact with on a regular basis, I have no clue what their handwriting looks like.

Lastly, I held this over from the missing Roundup: Bereaved and Blessed breaks down 15 years of blogging with each year’s defining word. It’s an amazing look back at a writing life, and it would be fun to retroactively return to each year and figure out the overriding feeling of your own posts. Congratulations on reaching a huge blogging milestone.

The roundup to the Roundup: Thankful for masks. 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 8 – April 22) 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.

Carolyn Hax has a brilliant, wonderful column about how to tell someone infertile that you’re pregnant.

The advice: There is “a preference to respond to hard news privately on their own time. So, tell her this in writing — email, a letter slipped under her door if you live close by — and aim its arrival for the best time you can gauge.”

I would take it a step further and say that is good advice on how to tell anyone your good news outside your very immediate circle of people who will be connected to the child. The truth is that you don’t know what other people are going through, and almost everyone will appreciate being given time to process news vs. hearing it and needing you react in the moment. Some only need a second and will jump on a call to discuss upon receiving the note. Some need a few days.

Keep it simple. Keep it brief. Make an empathetic statement that sometimes even happy news can be hard for someone to hear. Make it clear that you don’t expect a reaction. Good advice that can apply to so many life situations where two people with differing situations meet.

I’ve been thinking about a recent post that I highlighted in a Roundup. The Uterus Monologues wrote about Mother’s Day looping back around, which it will do here in the US in a few weeks.

Though I was thinking about it because it’s Pesach. Our third pandemic Pesach, to be exact. The first one was tinged with anxiety, and I prepared a ridiculous meal because I thought that we needed to keep things normal. Better than normal. Look at how we were thriving in the face of uncertainty.

The second Pesach was all about pride. Look at me keeping things going while dealing with vaccine envy. But this third one is barely happening. I am burned out. I cannot make this special. Our seders were brief. Or meals were cobbled together.

Which makes me sad because we’re staring down the end of the twins at home. They may not be home for Pesach for the next few years. This is not the note I want to leave them with. But I also know I have limits, and I’ve reached mine this week.

But I was thinking about the post because the years go round but we are always different, which means the holidays are always different. The situation is always different, which means the holidays are always different. I mean, truly, every time we come to a holiday, we are a completely different person. Isn’t that bizarre to think about? How much we change, and how much that change impacts the way we interact with these stable dots on the calendar that we spin around?

This holiday, I’m not internally pretty. My mind is in too many places at once. My emotions are all over the place. The way I’m moving through the holiday is both a reflection of that and tinged with the fact that I am a different person than I was last year or the year before. The world will keep turning, marking where I am at this moment.

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

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I clearly missed the Roundup this week. I got behind on blog reading while on a trip because my phone was apparently eating data in enormous gulps. (As in, I would check email and eat up 100+ MB of data for a few emails.) So no feed reader for a few days. Cue sad trombone.

We dipped our toe into the travel-in-the-COVID-world pool, which was both strange and normal at the same time. We felt very comfortable wearing a mask everywhere and only doing takeaway from restaurants. It didn’t feel limiting at all to set our family limits and stick to them. I guess our limits didn’t limit us from doing what we needed to do to enjoy the trip.

I just used the world “limits” way too many times.

Anyway, I’m back. I’m off-schedule. I’m discombobulated. But I’m back and on wifi.

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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.