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

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I love local news. I forgot how much I like local news until I read an ode to why local journalism is important in a newsletter. I’m not talking about the town listserv or a Facebook group—I’m talking about the weekly newspaper that you can pick up in the front lobby of the library or have mailed to your home.

It is rarely depressing in the way that the national news is depressing. And it’s exciting when someone I know is featured in the paper; they become a mini local celebrity. When we go to Chincoteague, I always pick up their local newspaper and read it to catch up on things because we know so many of the names and places in those pages, too.

Do you have a local newspaper? And do you read it?

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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.

Thus begins my staycation. For those playing along at home:

March: Surely we’ll be able to go to Ireland in July. COVID-19 will be under control by then.

April: We may not be able to fly this summer. Maybe we should drive to Montreal.

May: The Canadian border is closed. We need to stay close to home. Maybe we can do a week at the beach.

June: We are going nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere ever. We are stuck at home foreeeeeeever.

I was at peace with this in July. I was thankful that Josh cleared weeds out of the backyard and set up a high velocity fan to blow while we’re reading (chemical-free mosquito solution). There were benefits of staying home. Easy access to the bathroom = drink all the seltzer you want. No long drives or waiting in line or mask wearing for hours on end.

But last week, I realized that it had been over eight months since I had seen running water. Eight months. I couldn’t stop thinking about the opening to Spalding Gray’s Impossible Vacation (has there ever been a more perfect time to understand that book?) and his mother’s feelings about being able to see Narragansett Bay. Not that I am going to fall apart mentally from being unable to see the ocean but… I related. The longest I usually go without seeing the ocean is the four months between December and April.

Going to the river (or the ocean) means (1) bringing all food and water, (2) avoiding all inhabited areas—being willing to walk far to get to a spot without humans, (3) figuring out how to not use a public restroom at any point. Entering and exiting like ghosts.

I will be around this week. Reading a lot of books. Maybe working our way through the new Umbrella Academy.

The impulse to own a waffle-iron during my first 45 years of life: 0 times.

The impulse to own a waffle-iron during one random week of the pandemic: 78 times.

The Wolvog loves waffles, but I didn’t want to own one more tool or appliance. All was fine—for his first fifteen years, he just ordered them when we were at a restaurant. Except we’re no longer going to restaurants. Or hotels with breakfast rooms. Or… anywhere one gets waffles.

I bought a $9 electric waffle maker and told the twins I would leave batter in the refrigerator and they could make themselves waffles in the morning. They were happy, and the Wolvog informed me that while the little waffle maker was enough, it was not the waffle of his dreams.

I wanted him to have the waffle of his dreams.

So I bought an old-fashioned waffle iron that weighs twenty pounds. You heat it up on the stove and then pour in the batter. I had to try it the day it arrived, so I made waffles at 9 pm after I cleaned it. Golden. Fat. Crispy. Buttery. The Wolvog sighed as he ate and said, “In less than one week, you have hit peak waffle.” There is no higher compliment.

So I now own a waffle-iron. And a mini waffle maker. It’s breakfast-for-dinner time.

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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:

• “The Losing of Things” (Stirrup Queens) —thanks, Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Look at me getting all loosey goosey with the dates. But I read Searching for My Silver Lining’s post about bobbing this week. She returns to a memory of learning how to tread water while holding a brick—part of her lifeguard training—and how that skill transfers to today, when so many people are exhausted from emotionally treading water. She writes, “In short, though I’m exhausted, I’m still somehow afloat while desperately treading water with cement boots. I’m seeing this from others too. May we all continue to bob.” Love it.

Jewish IVF has a post about people getting comfortable with the new normal. She points out: “There are people who have gotten used to the new world. They’re out and about in a way that works for their family. Then there are those of us who are still as worried today as we were in the tail-end of March.” I am still in the tail-end of March phase. And as she says, it’s not the black-and-white facts that give her anxiety but all of the grey areas where we need to make decisions because we’re not being given concrete, consistent guidance.

Lastly, Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles took a pregnancy test on CD44. It was negative, and she writes: “I didn’t cry when I got the negative test. I never expected anything different. I didn’t even feel like I wanted to cry until I talked to my gyn’s office and they told me they wanted me to come in for my annual checkup… in November.” In another time and place, she would have gotten what she needed emotionally from her doctor. But it’s these small moments: that sense of irreality that comes during what were once the outlier experiences. Which are now part of the old normal; covered up by the new normal.

The roundup to the Roundup: I hit peak waffle. 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 7 – 14) 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.

As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she read that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better about doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from July.

The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett): This book is such a good read. I had no clue where it was going or where we’d end up, and I loved that. There were a few places where the coincidences were a bit much and one analogy Bennett drew that bothered me, but I could overlook those things because what remained was so achingly beautiful. I couldn’t wait to get back to the story every day.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Suzanne Collins): This is just squeaking by onto the side of mostly liking it. Does it recapture the magic of The Hunger Games trilogy? Not a bit. But it’s an interesting backstory of how cruelty can form. I was happy when it was over, but I was also happy that I read it.

The Guest List (Lucy Foley): I was looking forward to reading this book set in Ireland while in Ireland. Oh well. It was a completely enjoyable mystery. Like The Vanishing Half, I was okay with the mountain of coincidences because I liked everything else in the book. I especially liked the ending and all of the nods to Agatha Christie along the way.

Sex and Vanity (Kevin Kwan): I adored the Crazy Rich Asians books, and I adored this book, too. It’s not in that world, though the name Astrid pops up (and you just know that it’s the original Astrid). It is ridiculous fun with the ultra-rich. My only complaint is that Kwan sent me on such a Googling spree that it look forever to get through the book because I kept getting distracted looking up various designers and locations.

Exciting Times (Naoise Dolan): This was probably my favourite book of the month. If you like Sally Rooney, you will likely enjoy Naoise Dolan. It’s about an Irish girl teaching English in Hong Kong, and the two relationships she’s having the same time. Dolan captures relationships so beautifully, the good ones and the bad ones. She made me feel like I was there in Hong Kong, hanging out with Ava and Julian and Edith. True—that’s the word I would use to describe this book, and it’s one of my highest compliments.

What did you read last month?

Along with the paint-your-own-pottery place, I learned about a second closure last week: My college coffeehouse. On one hand, it feels really far away—the last time I was there was about 19 years ago—and on the other, it is the setting of some of my favourite college memories. I loved this coffeehouse so much that I chose apartments near it so I could be close all four years.

I called it my home away from home because back in the days before cell phones, if someone wanted to find you, they needed to know where you hung out. I was either at home, in the literary magazine office, in the etching lab, at Hillel (the Jewish student union), or—more often than not—studying at Espresso Royale. I found it on the first week of school. In warm months, I got an iced decaf raspberry mocha. In the cold months, I got a hot almond milk.

So I have a lot of happy memories of studying with friends at this coffeehouse in the evening, but one of my favourite memories is meeting my conversation partner there weekly. In my first month at college, I saw an advertisement on a kiosk looking for native English speakers to serve as conversation partners. I filled out a form, asking to be placed with a woman, preferably one who spoke French or Spanish. My match was with a man who spoke Indonesian.

Okay.

But I gave it a try, and we met for years at the coffeehouse to talk. He would bring photo albums and use the pictures to practice descriptions. Or I would ask him questions about Indonesia. And we’d just talk… over coffee… or doodle objects when we couldn’t use circumlocution to get around an unknown word.

In the very beginning, he would leave me an answering machine message on Wednesdays to make sure I remembered that we were meeting the next day, and the messages always began: “1. PM. Thuuuuuuuuursday. Espresso Royale.” To this day, I cannot take down my Espresso Royale mug without hearing his voice in my head, reminding me of our upcoming meeting.

That’s what I thought about when I heard that Espresso Royale had not survived coronavirus, another business succumbing to the economic downturn and long term closure. My conversation partner and studying with friends and iced decaf raspberry mochas. (And also the people who would have sex in the single-room bathrooms at the back of the store. I gave them a few seconds of nostalgia time.)

It’s not just a business. It’s someone else’s receptacle for their memories. And it makes me so sad every time I hear about another placed closed forever.