Before we went to Orkney, the Wolvog “took” me to Orkney via his VR headset and plopped me down at the port where we would be landing. I wanted to see what the roads looked like and figure out the layout of the island.

When we reached the very real Orkney Islands, we landed in Stromness without a plan. We had zero clue how we were going to get around, but we were directed to go to the library where there was a makeshift tourism office. When we stepped outside, I immediately knew where to walk. It looked exactly as it had in the headset, and I could point in one direction and say, “There’s a restaurant around the corner,” and then run a few feet away and peek around the corner to see the restaurant from the VR headset, waiting for me.

It was surreal.

I’ve thought about that experience while we enjoyed the “beach.” Was I there? No. Did I feel like I was there? Sort of. I’ve revisited places I’ve been before via pictures or movies and been able to connect to the place via memories, but this was a situation where I connected to the place via virtual reality BEFORE arriving. Whether or not I ever arrived was actually beside the point. I had a sense of the space, albeit a flat understanding stripped of the smells and people and food and sounds that greeted me once I was off the boat. The same was maybe true for the beach we chose on YouTube.

Eater had an article about whether virtual experiences were “enough” in the age of pandemic. If we can’t travel, is setting up armchair travel experiences good enough? Can it satisfy the itch, especially if we cook some food from the area and try to recreate the atmosphere as much as possible?

The author reached the conclusion that it’s not quite enough, even though sometimes it’s interesting. The jury is still out on my end. Maybe it’s enough right now to be trying to solve the problem, even if we sort of know that there isn’t a real solution to arrive at in the end.

Josh and I plugged my phone into our television and streamed a 12-hour beach video from YouTube. Then we got into our bed and read books, pretending we were at the beach.

The pros: No sand blowing into the pages, seagulls begging for food, or need for sunscreen. Bathroom is mere steps away. No people playing their radio. (That’s my beach pet peeve.)

The cons: It is not the beach.

The issue is that I’m near-sighted and cannot see the waves on the screen without my glasses, but I cannot wear my glasses and read my book. I technically need bifocals, but since I’m not getting bifocals (and taking off my glasses works fine for reading), this makes enjoying the waves and the book at the same time difficult.

The ChickieNob wandered in during the experiment and told us that she thought the whole thing was weird. That the real beach doesn’t have a watermark for a website in the lower left corner. Plus my phone ran out of battery and died so our beach trip was cut short.

But it’s my new Plan B. French fries while walking around the kitchen (that’s my boardwalk) while bird noises play, and reading in bed on the fake sand. Now if I could just figure out how to set up mini golf in the living room…

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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 Science and the Art…” (Regie’s Blog)
• “Grit” (Searching for My Silver Lining)
• “Congratulating Myself” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Waiting for Baby Bird marks the anniversary of learning she was pregnant. She writes about her husband’s enormous grin on finding out the news and how she can’t forget the look on his face. She writes: “You might ask why would you want to erase it, because it was a happy moment, right? It was. And it still is. Yet, at the same time it isn’t. Because that life I promised to protect? I couldn’t.” Instead, she has been in a state of pregnancy—of anticipation—for eight years, and she talks about why she still has hope.

Infertile Phoenix had a hard day this week and she unpacks it in a post. The pandemic is stressful, and navigating the world right now is stressful. She writes, “I started crying as I was driving to the city, thinking about how I’ve wasted my life and how I would’ve lived my life differently if I’d known I was infertile (while also remembering that I had, in fact, already written a blog post saying just the opposite–that I WOULDN’T have changed anything about my life).” It’s about living life under stress for nine straight years. And she’s right: we’re not alone and sharing our stories helps.

Lastly, My Path to Mommyhood has a post about a People magazine article that finally—FINALLY!—acknowledges that not everyone who tries to adopt ends up parenting. She thanks the couple in the article, saying, “It’s okay to evaluate your life and know that you have the kind of relationship that could withstand that loss and building a new life, and then take that exit off the family building heartbreak highway towards that new existence.” Yes.

The roundup to the Roundup: Bringing the beach to my home. 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 May 15 – 22) 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.

Lest we think our pandemic is special, the Guardian reminds us that while we (as in, you and me) may have not lived through a pandemic prior to this point, humanity has lived through a pandemic multiple times. And written about it.

Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behaviour during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine.

Uh… yes… that sounds familiar.

And maybe I need this reminder right now because I’m reading about things re-opening and thinking, “I cannot imagine myself going back to the beach.” I mean, yes, I know there will be a point when I return to the beach because we are a beach family. But in the short term, I cannot imagine getting there any time soon, even as beaches reopen.

Theater = yes, because it’s time-sensitive.

Movies = no, because they eventually come to DVD so I don’t need to take the risk.

Haircut = will hit my breaking point one day.

Bookstore = guilty pleasure so I’ll figure out how to justify it to myself.

Clothing store = will use my pandemic fears to get out of ever trying on new clothes.

But right now, it doesn’t feel like we’re in the after yet. At all. I’m holding my breath watching states reopen and wondering what the numbers will look like next week.

At the same time, it brings me comfort to read this:

And then, of course, the plague ends. That’s the actual good news that these books bring. The epidemic always passes. The majority of people survive.

This too shall pass. At some point in the future.

I read something that I found helpful recently, and I’m passing it along because I hear a lot of people doing this—including myself. It’s the idea of the “second arrow” or compounding pain with the secondary feelings that follow the first pain.

The Buddha taught that when we experience something painful — a physical illness, or the news that someone we love has died, or witnessing suffering all around us — it’s as if the world has shot an arrow into us … But often, what we then do is shoot a second arrow into ourselves. That second arrow is any thought we use to spin up a “story” around our pain, as a way of resisting simply being with the experience of pain. This can manifest in many different ways.

It’s in the family of the Pain Olympics except that it’s turned inward instead of outward. You can berate yourself for not dealing with things better or lash out in anger at the people around you because you’re upset with the situation. Second arrows can be worry or guilt. They’re the secondary crappy feelings that we trot out as if the first crappy feelings aren’t enough. But, of course, if we take a step back, we can see that they’re not the same thing. They’re two different sets of feelings; the initial bad thing (the pandemic) and then our reaction to it (all the other feelings).

I liked the article because it outlined how to put it into practice. How it feels on the page is very different from how it feels when you try to do it. Because it’s HARD. It’s hard not to let my mind go to the worst place and justify it with the fact that anxiety = preparation.

Passing it along in case it’s helpful to you, too.

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

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It feels morbid to talk about funerals in the middle of a pandemic—something I wouldn’t have thought twice about pre-Covid-19—but I really loved this tradition I saw in Atlas Obscura.

Funeral cookbooks.

In Thailand, funeral books preserve memories and photos of a person. They’re handed out at the ceremony as people say goodbye. And some families include recipes that the person made while alive. Isn’t that brilliant? So when you miss them, you can make that dish. And great recipes don’t die out with the person.

I have a chocolate chip cookie recipe that people like that I would include. Or my hamantaschen. Or you can include foods you liked (vs. recipes you created). What would be in your book?

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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.