It has been a hard week. The twins returned to school. We returned to our normal schedules. But nothing felt normal.

It reminds me of COVID coverage — we know about the cases where people remain home and the cases where people die, and we reduce the issue to life or death. You are either alive, and that means you are fine, or you are dead, and that means you are not fine. And the news moves on to the next story.

But the reality is that 11% of adults and 10% of kids end up with long COVID. And the other 89 – 90% sometimes end up with lingering symptoms for weeks that are not counted as long COVID. My point: There is a range of ways how life continues after COVID or a school shooting that goes beyond the binary of fine and not fine.

I found myself unreasonably annoyed by mistakes in the coverage. It made me wonder how many articles I’ve read and thought I had a grasp on the situation, and the reality for the people in this situation was completely different.

It is impossible to bring it up — I mean, how do you drop the topic in someone’s lap when they call you to catch up, not knowing what’s going on? So I found myself not saying anything at all because I didn’t know how to find the words. At the same time, I was surprised by the lack of conversation and outreach from people who knew about the shooting.

I found I could not participate in the various meetings and events they set up for parents afterward. Josh watched them for both of us and reported that their old middle school principal — possibly one of the best humans in the world and definitely one of the top five educators in the world — attended to help the kids through the week. It made me (and the twins) feel so much better to know that he was involved.

But mostly I mentally checked out when I was not at work. I worried about the kids. I came up with zero answers on how to move forward out of the feelings. I wondered if maybe it was a good thing to stay behind and keep thinking about this. We should never normalize violence.

Thank you to everyone who reached out with a comment or email. It meant a lot, and I’m sorry that I didn’t have the energy to respond properly.

*******

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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

It’s Inconceivable has a post about self-isolating when you don’t have extended family nearby. She writes, “When you’re CNBC and don’t have any extended family around to help you have to prepare for all eventualities.” She goes through her story, but I also love this point: “The Gateway Women forums were a great source of comfort as well during all of this because there are many women there who get what it’s like to not have the family connections where people can step in and step up to help out.” Community matters — online community, too. Go read her whole story.

No Kidding in NZ also talks about widening her support network in light of COVID. She writes: “I felt very alone. My friends with grown kids in the city would probably call on them, or one of their many friends they made through their kids. Their priority would be their kids, their work, and not some lonely old couple out in the suburbs.” Except in thinking about this, she realized she does have people she can call for help. It’s an important mental exercise everyone should do.

Lastly, Scientist on the Roof made me smile thinking about my old Home Economics class. I sewed shorts, but I did not line up the pattern properly on the seams. They looked hideous. And cooking was nerve-wracking for a vegetarian. Thank you for this trip down memory lane, and I loved hearing about Home Ec in the USSR vs. Home Ec today.

The roundup to the Roundup: The aftermath. 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 January 21 – 28) 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.

After Sandy Hook, my friends put me down as their emergency contact. We figured that I lived closest to the school and worked from home. In the event of a true emergency, everyone was okay with me packing the car full of kids and getting them out of there. We talked out possible situations. We even had a rendezvous point set in Western Maryland in the event of a nuclear situation. We were prepared.

There was a shooting at the twins’ school this week. We got an email from the principal that there was a “medical emergency” that they were dealing with and the school was in lockdown. We texted the kids to find out more, and they let us know that the medical emergency was that a child was shot.

I got in the car and drove to the school. By the time we knew about the shooting, it had been a half hour since the child was found, and every road around the school was lined with police vehicles and helicopters were hovering overhead. I parked so I could see the front doors and waited for news. SWAT teams entered the building. Police officers closed off access to through traffic on the main road. The twins texted that they were sitting on the floor in the dark. It took about two hours from when lockdown began until the suspect was found. We found out later that the SWAT team entered a classroom and arrested the shooter in front of his stunned classmates.

And then it took several more hours before the kids were released. I sat in my car, turning the engine on and off to stay warm. A kind neighbor walked car to car with his elementary school-aged child, passing out bottles of water and granola bars to the waiting parents. I started sobbing because it was this enormous moment of kindness on such a scary day.

In the evening darkness, five hours after the lockdown began, four and a half hours after I parked in view of the school, the twins and a few of their friends made their way very slowly to my car. I had been in close contact with their parents — I was the emergency contact we designated all of those years ago, certain it would never happen to us. Never happen to our kids. But what if, right? What if it did? We should have a plan.

This week, we had to use the plan. I never really thought we’d have to use the plan, but like so many parents in America, we had to use the plan.

I want every gun manufacturer to have to sit in a cold car, shaking for four and a half hours. I want every person who puts up the plans for ghost guns on the internet to watch flashing police lights for four and half hours, unable to get to their loved ones. I want them to have to drive home four stunned teenagers. I want them to feel what I felt.

I want them to feel that fear and uncertainty. And sit with it. And own their part in the gun-violence-in-schools story.

Even though I skipped purchasing at-home tests multiple times, I knew I would have regrets if we didn’t fill out the government site and claim the four tests they’re sending out next month. We still won’t change our behaviour — we wouldn’t trust a negative test and remove our masks indoors. But if anyone starts to feel ill, it’s worth having confirmation without needing to leave the house.

This is not a topic I thought I would still be writing about two years later back in January 2020.

*******

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:

• “Choosing My Thoughts” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

PocoBrat sent me down a Googling rabbit hole with her post on Pongal. I didn’t know about this festival until this week. I loved learning something new. The fact that she references Klara and the Sun is a bonus.

From the sun to the moon…

Family Building with a Twist has a post about wolf moon, which is the first full moon of the year, but it’s really about the illuminating realizations about your life. She writes, “I feel like some parts of me have been frozen and frozen for a very long time. But they are thawing. And that’s horribly messy and confusing for someone like me who does prefer to feel in control and felt like she had a good understanding of herself.” Such a gorgeous way of describing it. And this: “what are warm tears but melted ice?”

Lastly, JewishIVF writes about that moment of shifting from needing support to giving support. She is answering questions for people looking to use her clinic. She explains: “At this point in my journey, where my role has shifted and life looks very different, I still feel connected to people who are struggling and want to offer any help I can.” She talks about how she walks that fine line, knowing how it feels to be asking the questions.

The roundup to the Roundup: Did you order your at-home test? 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 January 14 – 21) 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.

The Atlantic had an article that was passed around the Internet a few weeks ago about how it’s okay if you never get “baby fever.” The sub-headline: “A deep, sudden longing for babies is certainly real, but it’s not a prerequisite for having kids.”

And just in case you were wondering, infertility was mentioned as a possible cause of this feeling:

In fact, some researchers think baby fever is a reaction to infertility struggles, not a ubiquitous maternal urge … It’s a consequence of you wanting to have children and not being able to have them.

Okay.

But what wasn’t really discussed was the flip side: Your baby fever never breaks. You go through life with a scorching case of baby fever that burns long after the point that family building is on the table. I know I’m not the only person who feels this way — many others of you have written about it, too. If infertility was the cause, then family building should have been the cure. But… it wasn’t. I still have baby fever; I’ve just learned to live with it.

At the risk of sounding bananapants, I keep a record of every e-book I buy. The reason is that you don’t actually own your e-books in the same way that you own your paper books. You license them. Which means that a book that you “buy” with real money can be removed from your account without the money being returned. So I keep a record of the title and date of purchase.

On a colour-coded multi-tab spreadsheet. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that while I’m not subscription averse in the sense that I have a Washington Post subscription, this article about our rental future filled me with dread. I like things being simple. Without a lot of bells and whistles. To me, something easy is not connected to the internet or automated. I like holding onto things for a long time. This article made me very very tired.

Though, of course, the thing with predictions is they are just that: musings about a possible future. I’m sure my grandparents — who rented their telephone — couldn’t imagine this strange world where people not only owned their telephone but sometimes didn’t even have a landline because they only used their mobile device.

Going back to updating my book spreadsheet.