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

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We’re going to do a channel island trip in the future (my plan is to ultimately hit every weather station named in the Shipping Forecast, but that’s a post for another day), so I read the tourism posts from Guernsey and Sark.

Guernsey wrote recently about the tradition of hedge veg stalls, which are small, unmanned boxes that people set up near the road where they can sell extra vegetables from their garden or crafts or books. It’s done on an honour system; you drop the coins in a box and take what you need.

We have them around our town, too, though we don’t call them hedge veg. And they almost always sell either eggs or vegetables. Every once in a while, you’ll see one selling plants, and, of course, there are Little Free Libraries, but this sounds like a fun way to get creative and make a small amount of money at the same time.

If I lived on Guernsey, I would fill my hedge veg stall with cookies and copies of a serial story.

How about you?

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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’s the 14th anniversary of the Roundup. (Pssst—that’s the first post from 2006.) I’ve been writing it almost every Friday for 14 years—more than a quarter of my life.

It’s the longest running project on my blog, and since my blog started in the early days of blogging, it is in a tiny category of continual, long-running internet projects, such as Wordless Wednesdays and… um… everything else I just Googled is now defunct. So. Our tiny niche on the internet gets to claim one of the longest, ongoing, never-pausing projects. Go us.

But it’s also a tiny peek into what sticks and what doesn’t. IComLeavWe is defunct. The LFCA is defunct. MicroblogMondays is still going strong (but is much younger than the Roundup—only six years old or so).

Thank you to everyone who keeps writing their blog so I have something to read and posts to roundup every Friday.

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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:

• “Immer weniger” (Elaine ohne Kind)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Kveller has a post about how infertility prepared her for parenting during the pandemic. I’d argue that infertility prepares a person for the pandemic—full stop. You don’t need to be parenting to see how going through the stress of infertility helps you process the stress of the current world. She writes, “When I was going through infertility, I did not know what was going to happen. I didn’t know when my next appointment would be, if I could attend my friend’s birthday party, or even plan a vacation —and I certainly didn’t know when or if I would get pregnant! Turns out this experience prepared me for parenting in these uncertain times.” Me, too.

The Barreness got me with Nirvana—we are stupid and contagious right now. She meanders through a backyard visit with parents, protest signs, and life during COVID-19. This line is exactly how I feel as a fellow rule follower: “As a rule follower, I am saddened by nobody else doing the work.” Maybe it’s not actually nobody, but sometimes it feels like nobody.

JewishIVF has a similar sentiment with her post on choices with COVID-19. She writes, “I could do all these things if I chose to. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that it feels unsafe to make those choices … It must be nice to not live in a head-space of constant worry. Maybe that’s what I’m jealous of.” It made me think about how that was also a feeling with infertility. How would it feel to not exist in the head-space of constant worrying and just live normal family building? I was always jealous of that.

Lastly, Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles writes about grandmother’s last friend dying. Her grandmother died near the end of her friend group, and she writes, “There were 3, maybe 4 of her super-close contemporary friends still alive to mourn her, and now they are all gone.” Even without knowing her grandmother or her friends, it made me sad to think that a “whole generation of beloved matriarchs is gone.” Sending peace of heart.

The roundup to the Roundup: The 14th anniversary of the Roundup. 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 17 – July 24) 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.

I found out about a love-letter-to-restaurants project online, and I nodded over the opening statement: “Restaurants make us feel happy, satiated, soothed, carefree, inspired, restored, embraced, blown away, taken care of, connected, complete.”

Taken care of. That is the feeling I am missing the most in all of this. It isn’t the food itself because I’ve been able to recreate so many dishes at home. It’s someone asking me what I want and bringing it to me. That doesn’t happen in many facets of my life. It’s someone else doing all the work and letting me sit back and relax. It’s someone else cleaning the dishes after we’re done. (Okay, Josh does 90% of the dishes, so I guess I am cared for on that front.)

I’ve felt those other things before—satiated after being hungry, carefree after hanging out at the table during a long meal, inspired to cook new things, blown away by tasting something amazing.

But it’s the taken care of that I miss the most.

There are plenty of things that are hard right now. It is hard not to see each other. It is hard not to be able to nip to the store and pick up ingredients. It is hard to learn via computer and not be able to get a doctor’s appointment and deal with job instability.

But conversations… those don’t have to be hard. We’re making them hard.

I am totally happy to answer people the first time. No, we’re not getting together with people. No, not even six feet away. Yes, totally thrilled to talk via phone or video call. We’re all figuring out each other’s comfort zones and then interacting accordingly.

It’s the reanswering that is so draining. No, we’re not getting together with people. No, we’re still not getting together with people. No, even this week, we’re not getting together with people. How about I let you know when things change for me? Because, no, we’re not getting together with people.

When the twins were little, we had a code word that meant “you already know the answer to that.” (It also meant “stop” and “you are about two seconds away from me completely losing it.” It was one of those fantastic multi-purpose code words.) So when I said the one word, they knew to pause and think deeply about whether they knew the answer and just didn’t like the answer and were hoping for a different answer, or whether they truly didn’t know the answer.

Because I get it. No one likes hearing my answer, and I don’t like giving my answer. Go back to that first paragraph. I cry at least once a week because it is so hard not to see one another. Because I want to nip down the store and have the social-emotional learning part of school and get a physical and have everyone have a job. I want there to be a different answer, too. But I want to be safe—I want me to be safe, and I want the people around me to be safe.

I’m waiting for different information so I can give a different answer.

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

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In July 1983—37 years ago—two artists decided to live 24/7 8 feet apart, connected by a piece of rope at their waist. The only other rule of the project was that they couldn’t touch. 8 feet apart, never alone, and no touching the other person, though it’s clear from images that they touched other people during that time.

It’s interesting to read about the performance art piece now because while we’re not joined at the waist, I have spent over four months with the same three people. While we have the ability to leave one another, we tend to gravitate to the same rooms, sometimes all at the same time. So we’ll all end up on our bed, talking. Or sitting in the kitchen. Or playing with Linus in the living room.

I go through waves when I need alone time, and waves where I am completely fine with the fact that our world has become so small.

How are you doing?

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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.