Pesach starts this weekend. I am having a very hard time finding the motivation to make the holiday special. Last year, I was willing to do anything to marry normal with novel. This year, I am walking around the house asking everyone if they truly need matzo ball soup (a four-hour process), or will we all be equally happy with crudite (four minutes to dump baby carrots on a plate)?

Nothing has changed, but I have no energy for anything extra. No patience for anything challenging. No desire to make things meaningful.

We’re going to do the seders because I’ve purchased the matzah. We’re doing a traditional meal on the first night (think: roasted chicken, potatoes, charred broccoli with lemon) and a French theme on the second night (think: salmon, asparagus, gratin dauphinois, chocolate macarons and pot de crème). Service organized and executed by Josh. Accompanying wheeks by Beorn.

It is really hard to be doing a second round of pandemic holidays.

*******

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.

*******

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:

• “Accurate Thinking” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled covers Childless Woodstock. (I love that!) She attended the online Childless Collective Summit, multiple days of programming, and she came away seeing the group as a “force to be reckoned with.” She writes: “The idea that there would be 2,700 of us gathered together (online, but hey, pandemic…), talking openly to each other about our childless-not-by-choice experiences, sharing hopes and fears and tears … absolutely, completely MINDBLOWING.” This post radiates energy, capturing the power of finding like-experienced people.

The Barreness also touched on the summit. She explains: “It was something I had wished for when I was at the start of my journey into finding who I am now.” I love a looping sentiment through this post: you figure your way out through things because “what else is there to do?” Taking that message to heart and remembering that sometimes resilience is just continuing to move forward.

FinallyMyLinesNow has a post about losing out on the tiny joys in a hard pregnancy. She is not sharing the fetal sex because of an incident after she lost her twins. She explains: “After we lost Alexis and Zoe, at some point during a conversation with my mom, she shared that ‘everything would turn out all right, because I had a dream of you holding a baby boy, so I know you’ll have a living baby.’ Let’s unpack that for a second. One, when you’ve lost two children, nothing ever in the world will make it ‘all right’.” Support should be supportive, and it hurts when something already hard becomes harder.

Lastly, Scientist on the Roof because… vultures! I wholeheartedly agree: “They are eerily quiet, there is occasional bickering, but overall, they give off a feeling of a good family dynamics, where everyone gets along. I don’t see bad omen any more – I see intelligence, curiosity, and playfulness.” My favourite birds.

The roundup to the Roundup: Pandemic Pesach, take two. 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 March 19 – 26) 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.

The pandemic isn’t over, but right now feels like a different stage from last fall, something liminal where I’m hopeful that I’ll have a vaccine by the end of summer and may feel comfortable taking baby steps back towards rejoining the world. I am not the sort who will go from home-for-over-a-year to dining-at-a-restaurant in one fell swoop.

Refinery29 had an article recently checking in on introverts. I have been told that the pandemic is easier for me because I don’t like the leave the house anyway. That is true—I mean, the not leaving my house part. But I do enjoy seeing friends and family. And, at the very least, I enjoy large doses of alone time, something I haven’t gotten in over a year.

I can go in the bedroom and close the door, but I am cognizant that there are still people around. I am someone whose favourite sound is silence, so this year has been both easy and hard. Easy because I recognize my privilege, and hard because everyone’s life changed. And change is hard.

I draw my energy from that alone time. It powers me through all social interactions, which are still happening under my definition of a social interaction. I may not be leaving the house, but I am having more Zoom calls or phone calls than ever. I spent this year talking to people more than usual, it just wasn’t face-to-face. My online book club went from every other week to every week. I added new friends, all met in virtual spaces, while keeping in closer contact than I ever have with others.

I thought the article was interesting because it talked about the ways people changed. And I definitely feel like a different person during this pandemic than I was beforehand. (Who was that woman who thought nothing of packing in with people on the Metro?) But I’m still an introvert. Like Cats, now and forever.

Are you still the same—introverted or extroverted—though the pandemic?

A friend reshared this old isolation well-being list on Facebook this week. Most are things that I’ve done the whole year. (Yay for drinking water!) But I loved two things on the list:

1. Do one thing you’ll be glad you did later
2. Do one thing just because you want to

I’ve seen the first one written in other ways on various life advice lists: Do one thing you’ll be happy you did ten years from now. That is a very tall order. I have zero clue what I’ll be happy I did ten minutes from now much less ten years from now. But there are plenty of small tasks that I put off daily because they’re annoying, and I know I would feel good at the end of the day if they were done.

And the second one also is a favourite inclusion on various life lists, though I really like that wording. I often get to the end of my day and feel like I spent 98% of it doing required tasks or things to make other people happy. That was the impulse for #15Best—to take 15 minutes per day for myself. But that time is feeling a little rote. I need more impulsive happy moments. Just because.

But the doing is actually the less interesting part to me. I wonder how I would feel if I kept a list daily of the thing I took care of or the thing I did just because to reflect on at the end of the month. Was cleaning the dead plant out of the flower pot worth it? (Yes, probably.) Am I still happy that I grabbed that handful of jelly beans just because? (Maybe less so in retrospect.)

I’m playing with that idea, mostly because I think humans are terrible at predicting what will make us feel satisfied in the future. Myself included.

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

*******

A testament to how much I love and miss my sister: I burst into tears and fogged up my glasses the moment she came outside and I saw her for the first time in over a year. She drove 8 hours to see my parents now that everyone in that equation is vaccinated. Except for me. Hence outside. And far apart. And it the rain.

I once had tickets to see Bob Dylan, and I gave them up because the forecast said it would probably drizzle. Drizzle! But before I went over to my parents’ porch, I saw they were predicting an inch of rain. Unlike Bob Dylan in a drizzle, my sister after over a year apart in a downpour sounded completely do-able.

My younger niece made me awesome stickers (with the cutest guinea pig design courtesy of her older sister). We took an 18-foot-apart selfie together. And we just talked for three hours. It was amazing and emotional, and I also cried on the drive home.

I have missed my sister so much, and I feel very lucky that I got to see her from far away.

*******

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’m reading a book—The Safe Place by Anna Downes—and I learned a new word: Querencia. It’s a term from bullfighting (I think?) that refers to the space in the ring where the bull goes to regroup and feel safe. A ring is a circle, and there is nothing special about any particular space. But the bull chooses a place where he feels safe—despite any tangible reason to feel safe—as a favoured spot. It’s where he draws his strength.

Beorn designated the corner closest to the basement door as his querencia. He naps there, sometimes with his eyes open, watching me, and other times resting and flicking his ears, listening for the twins to come upstairs. There is nothing different about that corner except that he chose it.

I realized how much my bed is an emotional querencia. I go there to think, regroup, relax in the evening. It would be more comfortable to read on the sofa, but I usually head up and make a little nest of glasses of water and books and notebooks around me on the bed. I’m aware this behaviour probably adds to my insomnia, but it’s where I recharge.

Where is your querencia?