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

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I love this article from Tor.com about how we assume things about each other based on our favourite books. For instance, if I said my favourite books are Handmaid’s Tale, The Magicians, and Piranesi, you are going to assume certain things about me. Whereas if I said my favourite books are by Malcolm Gladwell, Jonah Lehrer, and Jon Ronson… well… you may think something else.

Maybe if I was more into music, it would happen with music. But instead, I connect with people over what we read.

But this is the part I love: “Why ask someone what their favorite book is? Because you want to know something about them, and the answer to that question is revealing. But it’s very easy to be wrong about what it reveals. And this brings me to something even the internet has yet to ruin for me: the pleasure of being wrong.”

So true. But… even knowing that… what are your favourite books?

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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.

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.

This is the final weekend before the twins return to school for the first time in 18 months. It’s with a lot of mixed emotions. They are excited to see friends, they are nervous about the workload, and they are terrified about how the pandemic stuff will play out.

Actually, all of us are terrified about the pandemic stuff. (Their friends are awesome, and the workload is what it is.) It feels like there is a lot of stuff still up in the air, so it’s a little nerve-wracking to send them to the building when we’re told they’re still working on a mask-off-lunch plan. We are lucky that our area has a high vaccination rate and requires masks, but I still want to know how they’re going to stop the spread if everyone is eating indoors.

It’s kind of amazing how school-from-home now feels normal and school-out-of-the-home feels really strange. I will cry on Monday because I always cry on the first day of school. (And sometimes on the second, but I usually pull my shit together by the third.) But I’m glad they’re getting back together with friends and teachers. Hoping it’s a good year.

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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 in order 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. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Why Is Big Media Asking Mothers to Speak for Childless Women?” (Yael Wolfe via Medium)
• “Is Taboo the Right Word Any More?” (The Uterus Monologues)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Family Building With a Twist returns with a bittersweet update post (To be fair, she warns you with the title.) about a very hard year; navigating the pandemic and losing her husband. She writes: “I try really, really hard to keep it all together, but I have also learned to let myself be vulnerable and to be seen as vulnerable.” Even if you see a person daily on Facebook, there is something different about a blog post. I’m glad she came back to talk.

Finding a Different Path has a book recommendation for anyone feeling burnout. Instead of describing the book, she pulls out some great quotes and allows the book to do the speaking. Such a great idea.

Lastly, I have The Uterus Monologue’s post about miscarriage for this week. I agree—speaking about miscarriage openly has always only been a first step. The subject is somewhere between hidden and commonplace; but her bigger question remains: “Perhaps what we need to ask ourselves isn’t so much why we aren’t talking about miscarriage, but why we aren’t listening.” Conversation has always been a place to establish this is a problem. Now we need to talk about what we’re going to do about it via science and policy.

The roundup to the Roundup: Back to school. 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 August 20 – August 27) 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.

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.