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

*******

I love Fathom Events, and we see a bunch of National Theater Live shows every year. It makes London theater accessible for people outside London—it’s a brilliant idea. During the lockdown, National Theater Live streamed a show every week on YouTube. 16 weeks. 16 shows. I didn’t watch even one.

The Atlantic recently had an article about how to build that feeling of community from afar. Reading it, I realized what was missing for me with the NT Lives. When I see a Fathom Event in the theater, I’m seeing it with people. If they had set it up as a limited viewing similar to real theater—going live at a set time, not recorded, behind a paywall—so you knew other people were watching at the same time, you would have felt like you were seeing it with people. But being able to tune in at any point during the week and watch it without knowing if anyone else was on at the same time felt lonely. What made things easier also made things less enticing.

I think it’s still possible to build that same feeling of community from afar, but it has to happen in real time with everyone on together. It’s the difference between tweeting during the debates (knowing you’re seeing them with everyone else and talking about it in real time) vs. reading about the debates the next morning in the newspaper. One is a community experience. One is just imparting information.

*******

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.

This statement made me pause:

“According to neuroscientists, there is not a single organ or system in the body responsible for timekeeping. In fact, psychologists have identified many factors that affect our sense of time, some of which explain our heightened awareness of it this year.”

We have eyes for measuring light, ears for measuring sound, tongues covered in buds for measuring taste, and noses for measuring smell. We have nerve endings that measure the hardness or softness of an object. But we have no body part that we use—even in conjunction with other body parts—for measuring time. We need to look outside ourselves to a clock to know the minute, even if we can guess the hour based on where the sun is in the sky. We allow time to rule our lives, even though it’s something that we can’t perceive without help.

Isn’t that such a weird thought?

The twins and I have still been volunteering during the lockdown because it’s human-free and outside. We clean enclosures and feed the animals.

This week, we were mucking in two separate spots, and they called me over because a rabbit had just given birth—as in minutes to an hour earlier. One of the bunnies in the litter didn’t make it—it was only partially formed—and the rest were outside the nest area. The mother was lying down, too tired to move in the heat, though one of her friends helped us along, hopping around the nest. We got to gently set down each of the nine, living baby bunnies in the nest where they squirmed together, burrowing down into the hay and fur. The mother’s rabbit friend watched over them.

My heart exploded.

Newborn bunnies are about the size of a mouse; hairless with their eyes closed. Each one was so warm and sleepy and snuggly. By next week, they will have fur and long ears. But right now, they are at the start of everything. We didn’t know they were going to be there when we got to work, which made the moment that much more magical.

*******

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:

• None… sniff. (Especially because it was the 14th anniversary of the Roundup)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inconceivable has a post about her truly final cycle. After they finished, there was still a feeling that they shouldn’t be finished. After a lot of back-and-forth, they tried one last time. And got a positive before another loss. It is truly the end of their road now. She writes so achingly beautifully about her daughter, named after a character in the Lord of the Rings trilogy: “If somehow walking out of Mordor with her is the biggest battle we faced, this is the day we go to the Grey Havens and bid good-bye to something precious and special and end this final chapter.”

Infertile Phoenix has an empowering post about not remaining stuck. She has been waiting for a moving truck, and it fell through on the assigned date. She responds with a cheeky: “Oh a two week wait that ended with an undesired outcome? I’ve been here before. Lots of times. Moving forward!” That made me smile, big time.

The Road Less Travelled has a post about Auntie’s Day. Like the rabbit aunt above, aunts make things better. She points out that few people posted about it and asks, “How else do we spread the word that this holiday exists, and that aunts deserve recognition too?” We start by telling each other about it—early, often, and even after. It’s the fourth Sunday in July, so put July 25th on your calendar.

Finally, Not a Wasted Word changed her mind on kids being in the classroom this fall, and she talks about the situation from a teacher’s point-of-view. I think she makes an excellent argument, so I’ll let you pop over there and read her thoughts.

The roundup to the Roundup: Baby bunnies. 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 July 24 – July 31) 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.

There was such an interesting Longreads on the myth of Britain, which I would argue is not a myth insomuch as a facet. The author starts with two accounts of the country:

Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

The second Britain is our Britain; a place we love to visit and feel dreamy about. We talk a lot about taking a trip there every year during retirement, both because we suspect at least one of our children will end up living there and because it’s a storybook happy place.

We, of course, also know about the first Britain, mostly because we—like all of you—live in a place with two stories. We’re America, leading the world in COVID-19 cases and drowning in racism, and we’re also America!—the storybook land of Hollywood and Harvard and Hamilton.

The article is about Britain, but it also points out that “Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die.”

Other people believing your country’s myth—positive or negative—is uncomfortable because you exist in reality. And that reality is also a fantasy. The author admits:

I’m stuck in the States until the lockdowns end, but want to go back to the soggy, self-deprecating country I grew up in, the country of tolerance and diversity and kind people quietly getting on with things, the land of radio sketch comedy, jacket potatoes, decent bands, and basic decency. I know that that country, too, is imaginary; just as imaginary as any of the “Rule Britannia” flag-waggery.

Is reality the ugly truth or the beautiful lie or something in the middle, which is neither ugly nor beautiful but is a complex story that changes every single second. You can’t sell that, of course, which is what you need to do when you’re project a country’s narrative. You can’t say, “These are the things we’re proud of and these are the things we’re not proud of and the reality is that humans across the world all think they’re unique but are really more alike than we’ll admit.”

I love stories, and it’s easy to reduce things into stories. To tell ourselves and others stories. It is so much harder to not only love something complex but to explain to others why you love it, too, warts and all.

Josh and I are both taking vacation time in August. I need a break, or I’m going to burn out, but it also feels silly to take a lot of time off right now when we’re not going anywhere. Then again, that isn’t going to change any time soon. So I’m taking five days and trying to figure out how to take a vacation without going on vacation.

Because it’s too easy to fall into Saturday habits of going online, which leads into “let me just clean up my email” and finally devolves into “let me just take care of this thing and this thing and this thing.” At the same time, stating that computers are off limits doesn’t feel relaxing. I don’t want more restrictions than I already have.

There are spots along the river that are currently empty if you’re willing to pee in the woods. (I am willing to pee in the woods.) We’re thinking about bringing our beach chairs to the river and reading. It will be hot. And probably buggy. But it will be easy to bail and move somewhere else outside. So that’s in the plans.

I really love the blog A Strong Sense of Place, and they have recommendations for taking a vacation when you can’t go anywhere. They have two rules: you must have anticipation, and you must deliberately savour.

The savouring part will happen in the moment, but I’m trying to plot out my reading list for that week so I can get excited. Making a schedule. Planning fun foods to bring with us. It feels kind of less-than, and, at the same time, I am so looking forward to sleeping in and reading.

I am trying to come up with more on the anticipation front—ways I can get excited about the sort-of vacation. Ideas?