I have been on cicada watch. Every morning, I come down and feed Beorn and then go to the window to check the trees. The cicadas are starting to emerge in other towns nearby, but so far, I haven’t seen any crawl out of the ground. Just the holes they make before they emerge.

Sometimes I whisper to myself, “This is how they felt at Helm’s Deep right before the orcs breached the wall. When they knew that the battle was inevitable, and all they could do was steel themselves to battle Saruman’s beasts.”

Not that I’m dramatic or 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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

PocoBrat has a beautiful promise in a poem that is there for anyone who needs kind words right now. Plus, I love the idea of doing nice things for yourself. Just because.

Much Ado About Nothing has a post about the feelings that come out when her brain is exhausted. She writes, “Nothing fills a baby shaped hole.” So true.

Finding a Different Path is a birthday-celebrating inspiration, finding the joy in the day and none of the fears of aging. Go wish her a happy half-of-90.

Infertile Phoenix warns that we need to beware of energy-sucking vampires. She writes: “Guard your energy. Be aware of vampires. Your grief is yours, your journey is yours, and your recovery is yours. No one is entitled to the wisdom or rewards of your hard work.” It’s a story with a happy ending about boundaries.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a post about a new exhibit about Mary Lincoln. She explains: “A new exhibit at President Lincoln’s Cottage — a Washington, D.C., museum I had never heard of! — makes the case that Mary was not crazy — she was a bereaved mother. Moreover, the exhibit places the Lincolns’ grief ‘alongside the stories of modern-day bereaved parents and their kids, showing their similarities across time’.” I plan to go see the exhibit.

The roundup to the Roundup: The cicadas are almost here. 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 April 30 – May 7) 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.

It’s been shared in your feeds 3000 times by now, but on the off-off-off chance you missed it, Adam Grant has a great piece in the New York Times about the mood of the moment: languishing.

He explains: “As scientists and physicians work to treat and cure the physical symptoms of long-haul Covid, many people are struggling with the emotional long-haul of the pandemic. It hit some of us unprepared as the intense fear and grief of last year faded.”

In other words, the panic of the pandemic is over (in the sense that our nervous systems have adjusted to that threat), and now we’re dealing with the emotional aftermath of being on high-alert for so long. “It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.”

The power in the article is that he gives you steps to get out of the state of languishing; or, at the very least, to understand that naming it gives you power (somewhat) over it. It’s just a really great piece if you’re not feeling like your usual self and don’t really know why.

I read a really interesting piece, posted long ago, where a person created a hierarchy of self care. The base of the triangle were the most basic things that had to happen so the next level up could happen and so forth.

I tried to imagine what my own hierarchy would look like, and it made me wonder why I don’t prioritizing the lower base so the upper tiers can happen.

Because at the very bottom is sleep. I don’t get enough sleep. I don’t prioritize sleep. I don’t put down the book at the end of the night and turn off the lights. I’m much more likely to stay up and try to finish so I can start a new book tomorrow. So sleep—the base that needs to happen so I have the energy for the next tier.

On the same tier is alone time. It’s as important if not more important than sleep. I can’t function to do all the other things above it without alone time.

Next up is another two-fold tier: eating things I enjoy (that are healthful) and exercise (yoga and walking). If I’m eating a bunch of stuff I don’t enjoy, I’m in a miserable mood, and if I can’t exercise and close the rings on my watch, I feel anxious. So these two things need to happen daily.

Next up from that is meditation. It’s foundational. I meditate at least once a day. On hard days, I toss in a second or third session.

Next up from that cleaning. An odd one because I often don’t feel like cleaning, but organizing, cleaning, even showering, makes me feel 10 times better.

Next tier is time with others: Josh, the twins, Beorn, family, friends, etc. I save up energy with alone time and spend it on together time.

And the top point of the self care triangle is reading. And games. But mostly reading. Still, I like to be challenged by crossword puzzles or Sudoku or match-3 games, and I play them daily. That’s the time when I feel my best.

Games and Reading

Time with Others

Cleaning

Meditation

Eating Things I Enjoy and Exercise

Sleep and Alone Time

What does your triangle look like?

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

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I read about deep nostalgia pictures on My Heritage. They are animations of your old images, so you can see people in motion.  Perhaps you have an ancestor you never got to meet, or you don’t have video footage of someone who died when you were young. You can animate the image and get a sense of what they were like when they were alive.

Which sounded all kinds of amazing, and I have old photos that I would love to do this with. But I decided to start with a picture of myself to create a base. If the picture felt like a video of myself, I would upload some older images.

But it didn’t. It didn’t look or move like me at all. To be sure (since it can be hard to judge your own face), I asked Josh and he gave a hard no. It didn’t capture me. It felt like my features plastered over someone else’s features.

So a disappointment, but it would have been amazing if it worked.

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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.

I am not a kippah wearer (those small, round head coverings), but it’s common practice for some people who eat vegetarian or vegan in non-kosher establishments to take off their kippah while inside. The thought is that someone walking by the window could glance in and see someone with a kippah dining and think the place was kosher. And they may enter, order something, and break kashrut themselves. This way, no one gets confused or makes assumptions.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot when I read articles about how this is the most dangerous time during the pandemic. As the WashPo opinion piece states about people unvaccinated: “Now is the worst possible time to let down their guard. They should continue to wear their masks, keep their distance and avoid risky situations — even as they see their vaccinated brethren enjoying their newfound freedom.”

In other words, seeing other people doing something doesn’t mean it’s safe to do; and we have no way of knowing whether the other person we’re seeing doing these things is vaccinated or not. It is the opposite of the kippah-removing situation. It’s almost as if we need people to wear their “I got vaccinated” sticker permanently, so we can see behaviour and know they are doing it because all is kosher in their world.

Or to not assume anything. Our decision is to keep wearing masks indoors; even with other people who are vaccinated, basing the decision to remove our masks among the vaccinated on community levels vs. vaccination status. We’re looking at the vaccine more like a seatbelt and the pandemic like the weather.

To explain: When community spread is up, we can think of it like a bad storm. And when community spread is down, we can think of it like a light drizzle. In both cases, you have a danger of getting wet, though you’re more likely to get soaked in a downpour than a misting.

We wear our seat belt regardless of the weather and it’s great protection (even if it’s not 100% effective at saving your life), but when it’s raining hard with zero visibility, we wouldn’t go driving in a storm for fun. We may have no choice to go out in heavy rain (eg. work, school, or an appointment), but for all other times, just as we wouldn’t risk driving in a no-visibility downpour (whereas would take the risk going out in a drizzle), we wouldn’t take a risk with the pandemic and expect the vaccine to cover us. Especially with variants and the fact that the vaccine isn’t 100% coverage. Just like a seat belt.

We know many others aren’t making the same decision, and that’s fine for other people. I’m just explaining how we set our goal posts.

Luckily, community spread here is going down. We’re just waiting for it to drop below 5 per 100K to feel like the rain is entering the drizzle stage. So soon. But not yet.