We are at the point in the pandemic where I spend inordinate amounts of time dissecting the words to children’s songs. A case in point: The camp song, “Sippin’ Cider.”

The cutest boy I ever saw
Was sippin’ ciiiiiiider through a straw

So we have a cute boy. He’s sipping cider. The singer of the song asks the boy if he’ll show them how to sip cider because this is apparently a very difficult task. And he shows them:

First cheek to cheek then jaw to jaw,
We sipped that cider through a straw

Okay, so they’re sipping cider, and we are to imagine their faces smushed together—cheek-to-cheek. Not facing each other, right? They are side-by-side, drinking what amounts to thick apple juice.

Once in a while, the straw would slip,
And we were sipping lip to lip

Not sure how the straw slips enough to drag their heads down, but we’re not told their bodies turn towards one another, correct? They were drinking cheek-to-cheek, and now their heads are lower to the glass, and they are drinking lip-to-lip.

Yet the very next lyrics imply that they are now drinking cider facing forward (when did they turn?), with their head near the glass, and this is the REASON THE TWO PEOPLE HAVE SEX.

That’s how I got my mother-in-law,
And 98 kids that call me ma

Wait. Let’s just pretend almost every single pregnancy is a quadruplet pregnancy, and there is one pregnancy per year. That means drinking cider next to this person caused them to have sex at least 25 times AND each one yielded a quadruplet pregnancy. This was followed by three pregnancy-free months and another pregnancy. Provided the person stopped having children at 42—a highly realistic age to not be able to conceive regularly anymore—they were 17 years old when they first started having four children at a time.

Who is parenting this teen who apparently does not know how to (1) sip cider OR (2) use protection?

Maybe I have too much time on my hands.

I’ve been skipping impeachment coverage because I don’t want to see violent footage from the Capitol. Life is stressful enough without having that footage in my brain. Instead, I catch up on the details via email alerts.

Which makes for a very quiet impeachment.

In general, the volume has gotten much quieter with Trump out of office and off social media platforms. Delightfully quieter. I don’t cringe every morning when I scroll through the news. But adding in the decision to not engage in 24/7 impeachment coverage brought down the volume an additional notch.

I get a three-day weekend, and I’m beyond excited with the idea of not. doing. anything.

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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:

• “Shared Experiences in Beauty and Grief” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “What’s Saving Me” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ draws a connection between the pandemic experience and infertility. The lack of control. The limbo state. The general exhaustion. Moreover, she talks about the non-infertile response, especially because New Zealand is not experiencing the pandemic in the same way as the rest of the world: “I’m not truly experiencing this pandemic, in the way that some people never experience infertility, or think about it only as a future but unlikely possibility. So I am having to learn something new – how to sit with you, to listen to your frustrations and fears without dismissing them.” Such an interesting take on being adjacent to the experience.

By the Brooke brings back her advice column to answer a person’s question about a terrible exchange with a neighbour about “lab babies.” (The neighbour’s term, by the way.) The answer includes: “Her opinion is likely never to change if she’s never asked to reflect on it.” The best part is that she walks you through a sample conversation with someone who is anti-IVF and how you may want to guide the talk. Hopefully, no one needs this post. But if you do, here it is.

Lastly, Res Cogitatae points out that we’re not all having the same pandemic. She writes, “Very quickly it became obvious that we were living through different pandemics, our experiences shaped by our geographical location, employment responsibilities, and, perhaps most of all, the composition of our households and the stage of life in which we found ourselves.” And maybe that is the hardest part about the pandemic, especially when we’re talking about the same area: that the choices we’re making or the circumstances we’re in are so vastly different.

The roundup to the Roundup: A quiet impeachment trial. 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 Feb 5 – Feb 12) 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.

Months ago, I thought COVID-19 was easier than infertility in the sense that everyone was going through it. There was no sense of otherness; no isolation from everyday experiences or navigation of triggers from an otherwise that you really really wanted.

The pandemic is clearly a lot more deadly than infertility and steeped in inequalities, but the coronavirus affects everyone. Therefore, everyone understands. We all know the people around us are impacted, too.

I take that thought back.

I fear I’m hitting a grief saturation as I process upsetting news after upsetting news. People’s parents die from COVID-19. I have seen announcement after announcement of major health issues. Job loss. There is no place to catch your breath. It is like walking down an unending receiving line of individuals, abiding with grief, acknowledging each loss.

When grief happens on the personal level, there are the people in the center of the grief, surrounded by people who are leaning in to abide and need support from people who are not grieving. The rings of the circle ripple outward, feeling gentler the farther you get from the center.

When grief happens on the community level, a large group of people are left reeling, but the same formation happens again: center, inner rings, outer rings—just on a larger scale. A community is in grief, and it is surrounded by a state or by a country or by the world.

But what do we do when grief is happening at the collective level? When the number of the people in the center outnumber perhaps the number of people available for the inner and outer rings? What do we do with grief that large?

It is very easy to play armchair problem-solver, especially in retrospect, but… I’m going to play armchair problem-solver because we have a current problem—vaccine rollout—that could have used a known system—grassroots organizing—and unfolded differently.

If you want, let’s say, a group of people to vote, you don’t throw up a website, tell people to register themselves, and hope for the best.

You organize at the hyperlocal level. Get all people in this neighbourhood registered. Do not trust that they will register themselves. Make it as easy as possible to get them into the system. The team leader of that neighbourhood effort is looped into a town leadership team, who is looped into a county leadership team, who is looped into a district leadership team, who is looped into a state leadership team. Hyperlocal ripples outward, encompassing a larger and larger area until everyone is included. We know this works because we use this system over and over and over again.

We had about nine months to prepare for the vaccine rollout. Since that was always the plan—build a vaccine—we could have assumed that it would happen and started building that grassroots system of getting people signed up for the vaccine before we ever had a vaccine. Last March, we could have been figuring out the leadership at all levels, and that leadership could have been people who were already in leadership positions. For instance, our county council could have been a great starting point for leading the county-wide leadership, and they would have had to get volunteers or employees (hey! There are a lot of people out of work who could have done this work) for the neighbourhood and town levels. Again, not difficult because we already have systems in place. Time-consuming or costly, perhaps. But not difficult.

Yet that’s not what happened. At all.

Our county rollout is a goat rodeo, and it’s not clear if/when they will ever get to my group. Or what I’m supposed to do once they get to my group. We have eight separate places to check for appointments.

There have been plenty of times when I’ve been confounded during the pandemic. People dead set against wearing masks—why? People ignoring the advice of experts—why? People going on vacation because they feel so stressed—having COVID-19 or knowing that you participated in a chain of events that harmed another person seems a lot more stressful. But the vaccine rollout has topped the list as the most confounding part of the pandemic.

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

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I recently started reading romance novels because I discovered I like happy endings. I like stress-free slides into happiness in the final pages. I just read a very funny book with a very wistful, somewhat sad-ish ending, and I sort of refused to believe the final page was the final page. There needed to be a second ending that was 100% happiness.

Which isn’t to say that I’m only reading happy books. I was just reading The Push. Not happy. But, yes, I really like happy endings.

But I also love this post asking if happiness (or the happy ending) is worth the risk (to honest reality). Life usually isn’t neat and tidy.

What do you think? Do you like happy endings? (Um… not those happy endings. I mean, the kind in books and movies.)

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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.