Coronavirus. I spend a lot of time thinking about Coronavirus. Partially because it is in the news every second of the day, and partially because it is an easy thing to obsess about. When I’m out of the house, I am paying attention to every surface I’m touching and reminding myself not to absentmindedly rub my eyes. When I’m home, I’m thinking about never leaving the house.

Except that everyone else in the house often leaves the house. So not leaving the house doesn’t actually protect me. Or them.

It’s hard to gauge how much to worry. I don’t worry about the flu, and the flu is much more widespread. (Though I do get a flu shot yearly, so that may explain why I don’t worry about the flu.)

Many years ago, right after 9-11, there was a day that anyone living in certain cities–D.C. and NY, for example–were encouraged to make an emergency kit. What if you couldn’t leave your house for several days? What if water and electricity were shut off? What would you need? We got canned food and a manual opener. Peanut butter. Candles. Matches. Hand sanitizer. Jugs of water.

We didn’t keep up the box over the years, though the candles and matches are still in there. But maybe we should. Maybe we should do an inventory of what we would need if we couldn’t go outside for a week or two and gather those items. We can use them and replace them until we feel like this is over. Or maybe that’s just unreasonable panic looking at this through the media lens, which regurgitates the story again and again. It’s hard to know what to do.

Though I guess purchasing a case of black beans can’t hurt.

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

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Last weekend, we surprised the Wolvog with his floating birthday and tickets to an e-sports event. It wasn’t actually a surprise because we needed his help to purchase the tickets. We couldn’t understand the ticketing system, but the Wolvog assured us that yes, the only option was 12 hours of games over two days.

12 hours.

I was quaking whenever I thought about going–I am not a fan of noise or crowds–but I went in with an open mind and LOVED it. He explained the game to us the night before and patiently answered questions while we watched. I ended up on my feet, cheering on the Washington Justice while they played against Paris and London.

If you had told me five years ago that I would be attending a two-day e-sports event, I would have told you that there was no chance. But I’m glad I went–and that he introduced us to this world–because we had the best time. It was the most female-friendly video-game-related event I have ever attended, maybe because the game itself has built in diversity on all fronts. And zero lines for the bathroom, even though the event was about 50% women. Win-win!

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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.

I read a quote this weekend that I keep turning around in my head:

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” –Henry David Thoreau

So the cost of dollars and cents translates into… life. The things we’ve given up in order to make the money to buy the thing. The time we’ve given up, the things we couldn’t do because we were busy with work, the energy expended.

So, to that end, if you need a car, you can purchase a high-end car, but that high-end car translates into life: education hours, career path hours, time spent at a job. Or you can buy a lower-end car and that translates to life, too. Or it’s also about upkeep: the more you own, the more life you spend maintaining those things. The less you own, the less life you spend taking care of limited items.

I am a huge fan of libraries, though I am also a compulsive book buyer. And it’s interesting to see that push and pull through the lens of life spent when there are a multitude of options at every bend. You can buy the book or borrow it. You can buy the big house or the small house. The high-end car or the low-end car. And it all ties back to life.

Why did February get to be the month that gets the extra day during a Leap Year? Why not add a day to any of the months with 30 days? Or add the extra day as December 32 to make an extra long vacation that year since many people take off for winter break? I get that February is the shortest month and this stretches it closer to all other months. But since it still doesn’t reach the length of those 30-day months, why bother?

In the Hebrew calendar, we get a Leap MONTH. As in, we repeat a whole month, twice. It happens about every three years. (I think the actual calculation is something like seven out of nineteen years.) The repeated month is the best month–Adar–which is the month we’re in right now. It contains Purim, which is a totally wild, celebratory holiday with a lot of drinking (if you’re older) and dressing up in costume (if you’re any age). I highly doubt Adar was chosen as the repeat for that reason–it’s the last month in the year. (The first is Nisan, which coincides with the spring.) But it works out to have double awesomeness regardless.

Though this year is not a Leap Month Year. Even though it is a Leap Year on the Gregorian calendar. These are dual calendar problems.

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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:

• “It’s my birthday (soon) and I’ll party like I want to” (The Full Stop Podcast)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Much Ado About Nothing is weighing her birth control options. Medications paired with a wonky cycle has her mulling over the idea of tubal ligation. But it has an emotional side, too. “If I go through with that, everything would be final final. No going back. It sounds so silly because of my age and history, but I can’t help but feel like I might regret it, or come out being upset and mentally and emotionally affected by it in a negative way.” It’s a big decision, and she’s taking it slowly.

Jewish IVF is marking her transfer anniversary now knowing happily how the cycle turned out. She writes, “This time last year I was up at night because I was sad and anxious about the what ifs of this never happening for us. These days I’m up at night because of dirty diapers and chapped nipples and I couldn’t be more grateful.” It’s a very sweet post of celebration.

Lastly, Torthúil has a post about February 17th, the day she got pregnant during a canceled cycle. She reflects on the ups and downs of that year, noting: “And yet, in the years since, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that rather than a happy ending, my life split into two parallel universes in February 2014. In one of them there is no AJ, and in one of them there is.” It’s a post about things coming full circle.

The roundup to the Roundup: Enjoy your extra day. 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 February 21 – 28) 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.

Yap is a disappearing chat room, a product of Postlight Labs.

Yap is an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. Your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them, which means unless you pay attention to what everyone says (for once), you’ll miss it.

Words appear on the screen. Words disappear off the screen. Just like spoken conversation, which is heard once and then goes away.

Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I don’t get the desire for the ephemera coupled with social media. Snapchat. Instagram Stories. For me, the whole point to writing something down–creation–is to have a record after it’s done.

I once saw a blog where the person had one post, and they erased and re-wrote that post each day. So if you missed a day, the post was gone. The person had no record of their thoughts over the years. And these weren’t tiny, Twitter-sized thoughts. They spent all this time writing out their heart and then erased it 24 hours later.

Which is to say that, clearly, Yap works for someone. It may even work for the aforementioned blogger. But it wouldn’t work for me.

Would you want to jump into a chat like this?