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

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Immediately after writing that last post about the staycation, I was moping on the sofa, playing solitaire, when I decided that I would officially lose it if I had to spend one more day staring at the stacks of paper on top of the file cabinet.

I dumped everything in the center of the floor and spent four hours sorting and shredding old papers dating back to when the twins were in elementary school. It felt so damn good. I mean, it didn’t feel good while I was doing it, but it felt good after the space was empty. I cleaned off the top of my desk for good measure.

And I still had time to sit outside and read in the afternoon. And pull together lunch and breakfast for the first three days of the week. Feeling productive turned the whole day around. I accomplished one big thing on the staycation, AND I read a bunch of books, too. So all is well that ends well.

I think I need to tackle a tiny space in the house every two weeks or so. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with the whole basement at once, but I can do a single corner of a room every few weeks and have the whole thing finished by winter. It’s hard to live with clutter when you can’t get breaks from your home.

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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.

It went about as well as you thought a staycation would go. We ended up taking care of things. The first day, I got three hours of alone time (the first since April!) and then discovered my car battery died and needed to be replaced. We discovered Josh’s phone wasn’t charging and needed to be replaced. I dropped an entire bowl of waffle batter on the floor, and it sprayed everywhere in the kitchen. I spent a lot of time desperate to tune out and read a book, but unable to find a silent spot. I checked in on work things every day. I cooked. I cleaned.

We also managed to get to the beach for the day. We peed as many times as we could before we left the house, drove to the nearest beach town, parked in a random lot and bypassed the boardwalk by walking through a neighbourhood. People kept their distance on the sand, leaving about 12 feet around each set of chairs. We wore our masks whenever we stood up to walk to the water’s edge. We had five hours on the sand.

It was lovely. And it was scary. I couldn’t fully enjoy it because I felt so overwhelmed being around people, even though everyone kept a respectful distance. (But what if they didn’t? I needed to be alert and watchful.) I kept waiting for something to go wrong. When it didn’t go wrong, I was relieved but also exhausted from worrying. It was a wonderful treat, and it was completely depressing at the same time.

I’m not sure it’s possible to take a true staycation right now; not if we’re cautious and therefore still need to take care of all the day-to-day things such as cooking. But it’s also because we’re at home, there’s no reason not to take care of things. Meaning, if we were away, we would have dealt with the dead battery or phone at another point. But we weren’t away, so we dealt with them in the moment.

I guess I’m ending the staycation feeling like it was a weekend more than it was a true break. Which is… fine. I mean, we’re enormously lucky to still be working, and I love what I do. Our kids are semi-self-sufficient. We’re healthy. Maybe it’s just a reminder that I need to do a better job setting firm limits and carving out downtime for myself. Or maybe I’m just better being ensconced in work than I am not doing things when I’m in the house.

We’re nearing six months into the pandemic, and it’s not going away any time soon. I either need to do better about holding time sacred, or I need to just admit that breaks aren’t completely helpful for me right now.

I ended up with a new phone in the middle of the pandemic. Josh needed a new phone—it wouldn’t charge or connect to the computer—but because my phone was over five years old (whereas his phone was only two), I took the new phone and he took my old phone to see how much more life we could squeak out of it while he waited to see if his old phone could be revived. We’re sort of all playing musical phones right now.

The Wolvog did the heavy lifting, setting up the phone so it looked exactly like my old one. He sat with me while I logged into all of the apps, patiently answering questions because everything felt unfamiliar even though things looked mostly the same. And then he wiped Charlie (fine, I only gave my phone a name about two hours before I handed it over to Josh, but it still counts) and uploaded Josh’s content onto the phone.

I love having more room. My old phone was almost full because I kept a lot of photos on it. The new phone feels like it has room to grow.

But it doesn’t feel familiar yet. We haven’t gotten to know each other. It’s funny to think of a phone like a friend.

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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.

Inconceivable captures that time between being “not really healed and not really acutely wounded any more” after a loss. I was struck by this thought: “It feels odd to cheer myself for things I do generally without any thinking at all.” But it is a big deal to take care of the day-to-day things after a loss. When almost all of your energy needs to go toward dealing with emotions, it is no small thing to borrow from that energy and put it towards running errands or exercising for ten minutes.

Much Ado About Nothing made me cry with her post about saying goodbye to a doctor, dying of COVID-19, and a hurt dog that she helped save. She writes, “Sometimes all the medical advances in the world can’t save a human, but a few people can come together and save a dog.” It’s really a gorgeous story of loss and love and life.

Lastly, Risa Kerslake writes about how the pandemic is affecting her child’s first birthday. It’s just a day; but when you’ve waited for your child for so long, no milestone day is just a day. She writes, “I know that a first birthday party has everything to do with me and literally nothing to do with a baby that will have no recollection of the banners, birthday cake, and coordinating plastic forks.” You can read the first part on her blog, and then follow the link to a second site.

The roundup to the Roundup: New phone. 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 August 14 – 21) 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.

Another thought from Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan intersected with how I’ve been using Instagram. With the exception of a few family members, I only follow tourism sites, such as Visit Wales, Visit Scotland, and Tourisme Bretagne. It means my feed is filled with pictures of the ocean because all of the areas I love are connected to water. Even when I can’t be at the ocean, I can be at the ocean.

In the book, one of the characters—Edith—takes a picture before she eats anything while they’re out. She says on page 120:

Another day we got croissants and she said something in Cantonese, then translated—”Camera eats first”—as I made to pick mine up. That made me smile. I liked when she was unapologetically earnest about things, even if it was the angle of a pastry. She said Instagram made her look at everything more closely. Whenever she felt sad, she had a wall of happy memories to look back on.

Instagram with its water pictures is my wall of happy memories right now, even if they’re not my memories. I’m looking at other people’s pictures of places I’ve been and places I haven’t gone yet. It makes me happy to see so much water and the occasional rock stack or two.

I mentioned Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan in the July book roundup, and I really loved what it had to say about relationships and learning about yourself. But it also had an economic thread running through the book. The main character is middle class. The two relationships are both upper class.

The way money plays into our idea of adulthood came up in the book and a newsletter at the exact same time. Or, I guess, I was reading both at the same time. In the book, Dolan writes on page 31:

Staying in his flat was possibly a rupture from the capitalist notion that I was only worth something if I paid my own way economically.

And then in the newsletter,

We talk to therapist Jordan Pickell, who notes that many of us have grown up with the idea that independence is the greatest marker of success: Can we live alone? Pay for things alone? Take care of ourselves? Write a book and make it popular on our own? But the healthiest adults are those who are interdependent, supporting the people they love and allowing themselves to be supported in return.

It seemed especially fitting right now, during COVID-19, because almost everyone needs some help, whether it is literally day-to-day aid, unemployment money, or simply that segments of life—such as childcare—continue as normal so you can take care of the things you need to take care of.

It’s such a bizarre idea when you step back from it. How did we decide that paying your own way made you a grown up vs. having the emotional maturity to treat people well and contribute to society? Certainly in other times in history (and in other cultures right now), your worth isn’t determined by what you can buy or the amount of money you earn. Your ability to pay for things. It’s all about contributions. Are you playing your role? Are you keeping the community moving forward together?

It was food for thought.