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

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I am totally here for old-timey beach pyjamas. I love swingy pants. Swingy pants on the beach is perfection. I am also here for hostess pyjamas.

Maybe I’m just here for pyjamas. Everywhere. All the time. As a fashion statement.

I am pro-pyjamas. Are you, too?

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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.

The written side of Post Secret is an amazing project. People unburden themselves of secrets, and readers can sometimes silently nod, “me too.” But the flipside of the Post Secret is just as interesting—seeing what visual people paired with their secret.

A postcard garden starts on that side—show us a postcard from where you are; the message is almost optional. Or most seem to be a little snippet of life in that space. Each location is a flower in the garden. Weed-like messages are pruned and put on a compost heap.

I love this idea. I didn’t contribute the one from Maryland, though I smiled at all of the symbols on the postcard.

Josh and I went to Politics and Prose for the first time in 16 months. He picked up books at the store during the pandemic—you ordered and paid over the phone, and then they let you know when your order was ready and you drove up. But this was going inside and browsing for books. It felt so odd to be inside with other people, all looking at books, which is such a slow, lingering activity.

I went for one cookbook—the new Linda McCartney’s Family Kitchen—and ended up with a second one: Ultimate Veg by Jamie Oliver. I’m usually pretty wary of Jamie Oliver’s amounts because they’re off in his old recipes. But these recipes looked do-able at first glance.

I only like paper books for cookbooks. I can read fiction e-books, but I need a big book on the table if I’m cooking.

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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:

• “True First Day of Summer” (Finding a Different Path)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles has a raw post about her first thoughts when she learned about a distant cousin’s motherless baby. She writes: “For a moment, hearing about this baby who had just lost her mother, I yearned for that baby in a way that’s hard to articulate. Reality came crashing in moments later.” It’s not about a true plan but the thoughts that pop into your head when you spend so long trying to build your family.

The Road Less Travelled asks if we’ve turned into fireworks jerks. Uh… kind of? Like Loribeth, the only fireworks growing up were the big ones downtown and a smaller version in a city nearby. They are still banned in my county, so there shouldn’t be any fireworks going off except approved events. But we heard them all weekend. She writes: “This year, my country’s Indigenous peoples/First Nations requested that Canada Day celebrations be cancelled or scaled back, out of respect for the very recent discovery of hundreds of unmarked children’s graves found near former residential schools … But judging by the steady barrage of fireworks set off in my neighbourhood alone over the weekend — and reports of many others across the country — not too many people seemed to have received the message.” It’s a thought-provoking post.

Lastly, A Separate Life writes about losing a blogging friend. She captures those longtime relationships forged with people online (in this case, since 2007), following each other through multiple blog iterations and social platforms. It’s a bittersweet post that will make you think of your own friendships forged online.

The roundup to the Roundup: New cookbooks. 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 July 2 – July 9) 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’m on a Chincoteague listserv, and someone started a thread recently about being a kid and making friends with random other kids that are playing near you on the sand. The first person told a story about twins she befriended and the hermit crab they took care of together for the day. The twins took the hermit crab home, and they tearfully exchanged email addresses so they could keep in touch. And they did—for about one email exchange.

It sent me down a rabbit hole of finding beach “friends” on Facebook. I was successful with two, remembering their names because we exchanged years of letters back and forth (no email back then) that petered out by middle school. Though one lived about an hour away, and our parents allowed us to get together once. The other used to write me on stationary with bicycles, and his Facebook profile is all about biking.

I left both alone because I couldn’t imagine how to start that letter. “Hey, remember 30+ years ago on the beach how we built that sand castle?…” But it was nice to see that they still existed.

The twins and I still volunteer at an animal sanctuary. When we showed up for our shift, we were the only ones there and no one had left us a note with specific instructions. We figured we’d start mucking in the first enclosure and work our way across.

The twins were walking in front of me, and something started bleating at us the moment we walked into the main yard. I couldn’t see what they were looking at—only the general directions they were looking—so I called out, “Are those the porcupines? I’ve never heard them make a noise like that.”

And they turned around with their mouths open and said, “There are five goats here.” We were not expecting goats. We were not expecting completely adorable and tiny fainting goats. We reached through the fencing and rubbed their noses and let them lick our hands.

Later, after all of our mucking was done, the person in charge arrived, and she told us we could go into the enclosure. Do you know the pure love of being mobbed by five happy fainting goats? I picked one up like a dog and cuddled her in a chair. She just rested in my lap, looking up into my eyes. My heart exploded.

The lesson learned: Life is amazing, and you can never predict the twists and turns. You may think nothing can possibly exciting can happen today. And then you meet a goat.