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 idea so much. Book fairies are people who finish a book and decide to pass it along. “They pop an official book fairy sticker on it, which reads ‘take this book, read it & leave it for the next person to enjoy’, and they might even add a ribbon to dress it up as a gift. When they’ve prepared their gift, they will hide it in public to be found…”

It’s kind of like a free little library, except you have this opportunity to leave a letter to the person who will find the book folded inside the pages. (I guess you could do that in a free little library, too.) To explain why you’re leaving it for them to find, or what you hope they get out of it. I don’t think I’d do this with a book I wanted to get rid of; who wants a gift like that? But I’d leave copies of The Phantom Tollbooth around town and hope it changes another person’s life.

What book would you leave to be found?

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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.

Advice on the internet is not created equally. There is sound advice, and there is crap advice, and the two exist side-by-side, forcing you to squint and decide. But this article is actually full of good advice that is straightforward to implement.

It is about clearing your brain.

Because, as she says: “You can clear your inbox… clear your schedule… clear your fridge (ew, what is that moldy science experiment anyway?). And you can clear mental space in your brain.”

When my brain feels full, it is never because it is brimming with wonderful things that I don’t want to forget. Instead, it is full of garbage that is drowning me. Knowing the thoughts are garbage thoughts that I should toss aside, I am grateful to come across advice on how to get said garbage thoughts out of my brain. At least temporarily.

And now I pass it along to you.

I am totally pro-Lilibet as a name. Have always found it sweet on Queen Elizabeth II, and I love that it has found a new home. At the same time, I would truly hate it if anyone honoured me by naming their child after any of my nicknames. I’m not sure why. Maybe because personal nicknames (as opposed to common nicknames, such as Bill for William) are often affectionate and tied intimately to a moment in time and story. It’s too close to wearing someone else’s clothes… for life.

So both love it and find it sweet and would never want someone to honour me in this manner.

So… um… hands-off my nicknames. Like Smelly Melly. That one is all mine.

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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.

No Kidding in NZ has a beautiful post about how we leave a mark on the world through our relationships. She writes, “It seems weird to say this, but I know my cousins will mourn me, as I will mourn them. Even if what they’re really mourning is the end of those happy days of our shared childhood. That will be enough for me, I think.” I don’t think that’s weird at all. I think it’s lovely.

Perhaps death was on a lot of people’s minds this week because Scientist on the Roof also wrote about what it means to be alive. She asks: “The real question is – am I going to live life as much as I can, do things, be ALIVE? Or am I going to be, like Backman puts it, in the death’s waiting room, always waiting, always fearful?” It’s a wonderful reminder to get out of the waiting room and acknowledge how lucky we are to exist.

Lastly, Finding a Different Path is defining “okay.” She is not in a good place, and she explains: “It reminds me of the days in the throes of infertility and adoption, where I wanted to look okay from the outside but my insides didn’t match at all. Which was exhausting, and lonely.” Wishing true okayness in the future.

The roundup to the Roundup: Lilibet. 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 4 – June 11) 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.

We got to the beach for the day.

The cicada noise stopped when we crossed over the Bay Bridge. On one side, the cicadas were clocking in at 97 decibels, the volume of a jackhammer. On the other side, there was nothing except the soft wind rushing past the open window. Yes, I needed to open the window to check because it felt like we had stepped from a black-and-white film into technicolour.

But that isn’t the math problem.

This is the math problem. 42.1% of the US population has been fully vaccinated. 51.6% of the population is partially vaccinated. We were specifically in Delaware. In Delaware, 44.5% of the population is fully vaccinated, and 55.6% has received at least one dose. This is how that looks in the tracker.

44.5% is the smaller portion inside 55.6% showing the fully vaccinated population. The light grey part of the bar shows the completely unvaccinated. The ICU in the county in Delaware we were in is at 62% capacity, and they’re averaging 14 new cases per day.

There are signs going into town asking people to mask up if they’re unvaccinated. About 5% of the people we saw were wearing masks, which includes my family. The four of us are fully vaccinated, but we still wear a mask when we go indoors because (1) it is easy to do, (2) it makes people comfortable, (3) there are a lot of unvaccinated people out there, and (4) there are a lot of people who cannot be vaccinated yet due to age.

So we should have seen about 55.5% of people wearing a mask because they’re not fully vaccinated. Yet we saw maybe 5% wearing a mask (I’m being generous with that number), and only three dining establishments with staff wearing masks. (Thank you, Thrashers.) At least four of the masked people (that would be us) were fully vaccinated, which means the total number of unvaccinated people wearing masks is lower.

So either everyone unvaccinated is staying home. Or… and I know you’re going to be shocked by this… people who are unvaccinated are not wearing masks because there is no way to tell who is vaccinated and who is not vaccinated unless you ask to see a vaccination card.

Getting vaccines into bodies is clearly a goal, but at the most basic level, we know that wearing masks and washing hands helps prevent the spread of not only COVID-19 but many other diseases. Cases are finally going in the right direction, and I have a feeling we won’t see the true impact of the lack of masks until the fall because people are spending so much time outside. But we’ve seen this situation before… last summer.

Literally.

No, I’m sorry, it was actually lower on this day last summer, pre-vaccine.

So that’s the math problem. How do you make the two sides of the equation balance?

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

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Back in college, there was a daytrip that I never got to go on to a place called the House on the Rock. I didn’t have a car, so it’s remarkable that I managed somehow to get to the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum (twice!). But I never got to House on the Rock, and people would talk about it all the time.

It felt like all the cool kids got to go. And I was not one of the cool kids.

And then I forgot about it, entirely, until I read that Atlas Obscura article and all of the feelings came flooding back. How was I so close yet so far? Why couldn’t one of the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum trips be turned into a House on the Rock trip?

It’s kind of funny to still feel the same away about it when I literally forgot about its existence for the last 20+ years.

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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.