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

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Until I read this New Yorker article, I hadn’t realized how much I missed eavesdropping and how it wasn’t present in my world for the last 16 months. The random things you overhear while you’re waiting somewhere or sitting too close to people in a restaurant or passing on the street.

As it says, “The best lines provide several little thrills at once: a sketch of character, a hint of story, the joy of feeling like you understand the rest. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, they’re obvious yet mysterious, conveying too much and too little in a single moment.”

More than seeing people or eating in restaurants, I miss coming home with little snippets, like the first date A Half Baked Life and I overheard between a man and his date, explaining how he shot himself in the foot (in the bathtub!) to collect insurance money but now he is missing a toe.

What are things you’ve overheard?

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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.

During young adulthood—college and beyond—we would trek down to the Capitol and stake out seats on the Capitol steps to watch the fireworks. Deeper in adulthood, newly married, we took over space on the Mall, wanting a little room to lie down and spread out.

Early in parenthood, we sat on a field and watched the fireworks over the trees with the other local families. We unfolded beach chairs and talked while the kids ran around or played on the nearby playground.

And then last year, everything was canceled and we stayed home.

And this year, everything was canceled again and we’re staying home.

Our celebration has gotten smaller and smaller over time until it is barely existent at all. Maybe we’ll watch a replay of fireworks on television.

What are your Fourth of July plans if you’re in (or from) the US?

Oh tampon manufacturer, do you not understand how little I want to find a new tampon this late in my menstrual cycle life? I have like… what? Maybe a handful of periods left. And you are going to make me read up on tampons and test out new products? At this stage of life? I am too old for new tampons.

I was given no warning. I went to buy tampons, and there were none of my tampons. I went to a second store and third store (okay, I sent Josh to a second store and a third store)—nothing. I finally Googled said tampons and stared at the search results in disbelief. I needed to complain about the situation in real time, and I clearly still need to talk about how annoyed I am to adjust to a new tampon this late in life.

But adjust I must.

Thanks for nothing, tampon manufacturer.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Uterus Monologues has a post on motherhood after miscarriage. Wow—this insight blew me away: “When you have a baby, people are drawn to you, everybody checks in, everyone has questions (Name? Weight? How was the birth?). Whereas when you lose a pregnancy people retreat.” Yes. I also love the do’s and don’ts at the end.

Jewish IVF is at the doctor for an endometrial biopsy when a woman enters the waiting room after an ultrasound. She writes: “I saw a lady coming out from the back with an ultrasound picture in her hand. The good kind. The 5-week bubble holding an infinite amount of joy. As she was shoving other things into her purse, waiting in line to make a follow up appointment, it waved around like a flag of hope.” It’s about the silent good thoughts we think for one another.

Guinea pig mothers have to stick together. I cannot resist linking to Lucifer the guinea pig. So cute, Slaying, Blogging, Whatever.

I was glad to have a heads up about the end of Us from The Road Less Travelled. I read the book, but I don’t remember everything. It’s a hard show to watch (and a hard book to read): baby loss, marriage difficulties, and how we change over time. It’s a little easier to watch with the warning as well as her unique insight into a particularly moving scene: “What I didn’t expect was bursting into sobs near the end, when Douglas, Connie and Albie embrace in a group hug in Albie’s college dorm room … but it also hit me (as it still does, from time to time) that it was one of those moments I’ve missed out on and will never experience with my own daughter.”

The roundup to the Roundup: New tampon blues. 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 June 25 – July 2) 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 had thought-provoking pregnancy loss advice this week. A woman wrote her after a miscarriage, stating that she is now in limbo. She didn’t tell people she was pregnant, and now she doesn’t want to start the conversation by talking about the loss. But she wants support.

Carolyn tells her:

Please think of your most supportive person or people beyond your partner, and tell — even if that person isn’t necessarily your closest person. You want someone who has crisis chops and knows how to be supportive, which may be a different skill set from the one your mom or best friend has. Invite people emotionally to help you through this, at a pace you feel you can manage.

So the thought-provoking part begins with your best comfort may not be the person you would identify as your best comforter before a crisis. People have different skills sets, and someone who is not particularly close to you may turn out to be the best support in the moment.

Carolyn also sends the woman to the online community. Sometimes strangers who have gone through something similar can be better listeners and question-askers than someone who knows you (but not the situation) well.

I was thinking about that idea of different comforting skill sets and how we automatically have a hole in helping people through pregnancy loss in many cultures because we keep it on the fringes of society vs. building ritual or conversation around it.

It goes back to what we were talking about a few weeks ago. If we taught pregnancy loss as part of sex ed, it would be commonplace knowledge. But it isn’t commonplace knowledge, and when we’re shamed by society NOT to tell people about a pregnancy until 12 weeks (because doing so may mean that you have to talk about pregnancy loss), we remove all possibility of people building the skill set. Unless they’ve been through it themselves or have high empathy.

Food for thought.

The twins went to the mall for the first time in over a year and a half. Probably two years. They needed clothes before the pandemic hit, but we didn’t run those errands because we thought we’d be home for two weeks and then go back to normal life. 16 months of pyjamas and camp t-shirts later, and it felt time to enter a store and purchase hard pants.

It was overwhelming to be around so many people. But 80% of people wore a mask. (Our area is high vaccine/high mask wearing.) The kids got some new clothes and feel ready to return to life in the outside world.

We had a repair person come into our house for the first time since March 2020. It was to fix the broken television signal. We’ve been fixing things ourselves using YouTube as our teacher, but this went beyond our skill set. It was weird to have someone in our house. I cleaned after he left, but then it broke again. I guess I’m going to be cleaning a second time. Or maybe not. It will be a game time decision, like so many things these days.

And we went inside my parents’ house. We saw them outside through the pandemic, but we moved inside this week. It took us a few minutes to remove our masks, but then we all hung out in the living room as if we were living in 2019. We sat around the dining room table, having a normal dinner. I felt like I was moving gingerly, like walking again on a healed foot. I needed to move carefully, almost like I was trying not to wake something. But there is nothing to wake up.

In many ways, it was less stressful to give things up in 2020 than it has been to add them back in 2021.