My birthday has been a little bit of a family joke. We always do something for it, but it’s rarely on my birthday because we generally have other commitments. The last few birthdays have been lost to Bat Mitzvahs, work galas, and college reunions. Instead, we choose a different weekend and go to the beach for the day.

But that’s not really possible. And it’s hard to get into the birthday spirit this year. Our country is heartbroken, scared, and enraged.

We started the birthday festivities over the weekend. None of the festivities feel really exciting so dropping them into various days means that we always have something small to look forward to. Maybe we’ll keep it going until the end of the week.

There has been “beach” time via a YouTube beach video. Yahtzee-without-complaining while gorging on cookies. Hanging out time with my guinea pig. A socially-distant visit with my parents outside their house.

A quiet and subdued entry into 46. Which is okay.

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

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It feels fitting that the 301st Microblog Monday would be about transitions. Not that it is experiencing a transition except for going from 300 to 301. I guess I’m stretching here.

But I bookmarked this ages ago and clicked the bookmark this weekend to remember what it was. Atlas Obscura set up a booth called the Plotz Plot in Arizona (which blew over by this point). They explain:

Visitors to the Plotz Plot will discover a small metal shed with a sign that reads: “For those experiencing a life transition: This is a place to leave behind a piece of your former self.”

I really love this idea of setting up a physical space where people can take a pilgrimage and shed an object to give themselves closure on one section of their life. To know that the object is sitting with dozens or hundreds of other objects that all meant something enormous to the people who owned them once upon a time.

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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.

At the beginning of the school year, I set two alarms on my phone. The first tells me the twins are at lunch and I can text them if I have something important to ask/relay. The second tells me they’re on their way home. I didn’t turn them off when the shelter-in-place order started. We now get a daily audio reminder about a lunch and trek home that isn’t happening.

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Disney World is reopening soon. It made me depressed to read about how the park experience would be different. They’re all good changes meant to keep people safe, but at the same time, I didn’t see how it would be enjoyable. Florida is hot in the summer. Being outside in Florida is uncomfortable at the best of times. Doing it while wearing a face mask for a day sounds exhausting. I also feel for the employees who need to be paid. I understand why they’re reopening and hoping people will come.

A person with a very different personality from mine could bring the fun even with the stress—but my personality is such that I need a long time experiencing modified day-to-day life before I can think about leaving my home base and seeking out fun experiences afar.

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I still cannot seem to do anything more than read books and watch familiar television shows. I get antsy with the thought of a movie. Antsy with podcasts, concerts, video games, or streaming events. I wanted to read JK Rowling’s new Ickabog book, but it’s really hard for me to summon the energy for something released in drips and drabs. The one exception is blog posts. But they’re all people I’ve been reading forever.

I’m aware that I’m in the minority with this. That most people are grateful for all the amazing distractions or artistic creations coming out of this period. I want to be in that category, but I’m not.

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As the world attempts to re-open, I love this idea of thinking of things in terms of having a contact budget. In other words, give yourself an amount of risk that takes into account what you must do (go to work, get food, etc) and once that is used up, you stay home. Some people should keep their contact spending to zero. Others can afford to spend minimally.

How much an interaction costs is measured with this: “Limit the number of people you interact with, keep the amount of time to a minimum, and to meet in outdoor settings when you can. That’s where the concept of ‘People, Time, Space and Place’ comes into play.”

So talking to one person for a short amount of time from six feet away while outside uses less of your budget than talking to one person for a short amount of time inside their house. And you go for the lowest “cost” version of the interaction you need, just as you would opt (usually) for the lowest cost version of an item you need. (Unless you are the sort who sees two identical products—one for $3 and one for $5 and says, “I’d like to pay $5, please!”)

I thought this was smart. I understand the analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s an easy explanation of risk assessment. I also thought this explanation of micromorts made things easier to understand, too.

Things just felt like a lot this week. I hit a pandemic wall. I had a doctor’s appointment in March rescheduled for early June. I called the office to see if my appointment was still on, feeling fairly certain that it would be canceled. But the woman who answered reassured me that the appointment was happening. I felt uncomfortable and made a gut decision to cancel the appointment for the time being even though they weren’t taking new appointments at this time.

When I went to tell Josh, he absentmindedly told me he would have kept the appointment. That the doctor’s office has protocols and it was probably safe. Which sent me into a half hour of sobbing because I couldn’t rebook the appointment. And it was such a small thing—just an annual visit. They will either start taking appointments soon or they won’t. It’s out of my hands.

Maybe that is it—I hit a wall because humans have a limit to how much they can be reminded that the world has always been out of our control.

I cried because I can’t seem to keep basil plants alive. I cried because I don’t know when I’m going to get to see my siblings again. And I cried because it is so hard out there. And then I went back to work and pretended everything was normal.

I couldn’t cry over the front page of the weekend New York Times showing a thousand people who died. I can only cry over the small things because if I let myself cry over the big things, it would be a deluge.

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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:

• “No Kidding 2020 Project: Day 15 – Admit” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

It’s Inconceivable has a post about COVID-19 through the lens of childless-not-by-choice. She makes so many great points about the language around COVID-19 (especially the “we’re all in this together” messaging). She writes, “There’s been much talk of loneliness and mental health for older people during lockdown – but no chat of the loneliness of those single, CNBC who have no family, male or female or those of us who are partnered, but don’t have children in this child-centric world. Why are these people forgotten, even when we aren’t in the throes of a global pandemic?” Read her whole bullet point list.

My Path to Mommyhood has a heartbreaking conversation with a student who asks if she will adopt her if she goes into a foster-to-adopt situation. It is an impossibly difficult conversation that guts her (and, in all honesty, made me cry reading it, too), leaving her “feeling so sad about a world where kids like her get stuck with shitty family situations, and people like us don’t get to be parents.”

Lastly, Slaying, Blogging, Whatever… turned 50 this week. It’s a huge milestone, and it’s falling during the pandemic. So if you could take two minutes out of your day and go pile on the birthday wishes, I would really appreciate it. Because 50 deserves a big celebration, even if it has to be partially online. (And a little late.)

The roundup to the Roundup: Little things broke me this week. 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 May 22 – 29) 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.

Face masks are required in my state in stores and on public transportation, especially for people working in a restaurant or store. But, of course, not everyone is following the rule. You can clearly see that the moment you leave your home, and people are publicly shaming establishments that don’t follow the rules on the local listservs and Facebook groups. I appreciate the places where employees are wearing masks and they are making all people visiting their establishment to wear a mask, too.

We decided to try doing carryout for my birthday next week at a local vegan restaurant. Because we do all the grocery shopping every other week, we needed to know our game plan before he went to the grocery store because my birthday would fall towards the end of the current shopping period. If we weren’t going to get carryout, we needed a Plan B.

So Josh called the restaurant to (1) find out if they were open, (2) how they were handling orders and carryout, and finished the call by asking (3) if they were wearing masks. The woman was audibly annoyed with the question and barked, “Of course!” Josh cringed as he set down the phone.

I feel weird asking. I feel weird not asking. It shouldn’t be a big deal. It should just be one more thing you check off the list—are you wearing a mask? I’m wearing a mask—and yet it feels like the most awkward question at the moment.

I’m going to keep asking it because I want to know a store or restaurant’s mask policy or shopping policies before one of us goes somewhere so we can weigh the risk. But I wish the question didn’t feel so charged.