I miss libraries, too.

They really were a place where you could say yes to everything. I mean, you still can if you’re checking out e-books, but it’s different because I’m always aware that when I check out an e-book, I’m using up one of the book checkouts. (Libraries pay for a two-year contract for each copy of the e-book or 52 checkouts. Then they have to buy a new copy.) I didn’t feel badly saying “yes” to a physical book and then not reading it, but I don’t do that with e-books because that wastes library budgets.

Prior to Covid-19, if I was in a bad mood, I’d go to the library and browse the shelves. Sometimes I went home with nothing. Sometimes I checked out a book just for the sake of bringing something home. Retail therapy without any money exchanged.

So this is exactly what I miss:

Because libraries are places of abundance. Where else can you look at something, be only 13% sure you want it, and bring it home anyway, risk-free? Where else can you say to your children, “Pick out anything you want, anything at all.” I’m not rich, but at the library I could be extravagant.

At the heart of that post is the real question that has been thumping in my heart every time I’ve seen our closed library: “Who knows how we’ll feel about sharing books with strangers in the future?”

I can’t imagine walking around the library just because. I can’t imagine going out anymore just because I feel like getting out of the house. I can’t imagine lingering in a place or wandering around or sharing an aisle with another human. I can’t imagine picking up books that other people have touched. I can’t imagine bringing them into my house.

I don’t want to live like that. I want to be a library person because “library person” was part of my identity. Without that, I don’t feel like myself. But I also don’t know how to go back to seeing that community space as a safe space. Which makes me really miss libraries.

Eadwynn didn’t survive the transfer to the bigger pot. Eadwynn II didn’t survive. Period. She was dead on arrival, though I still attempted to coax her back to life. I went back to the nursery to get Eadwynn III (third time is a charm!), and the horticulture teacher at the local high school was there. She stood 18 feet away from me in the tent and gave me a 10-minute lesson in gardening.

I used her advice to pick out a few new plants. Please meet Mary the chive plant, Edith the parsley plant, and Sybil the basil plant:

What I really need (clearly) is an indoor gardening class because when I checked out, the woman ringing me up said, “Just know, we’ll still have plants all summer if you need a fourth try.”

Don’t break my heart, little plants.

I am really bad at this, but I want plant friends.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Risakerslake has a beautiful set of watercolours based on embryo photos. She found an artist who makes them on Instagram. You provide the embryo picture, choose the colours, and the woman paints the print. What a cool keepsake.

Amateur Nester has a guest post about how Covid-19 is affecting IVF cycles. She writes: “They are open 365 days a year — weekends, holidays, even Christmas and Easter. It seemed our treatments always fell on holidays and Sundays (and my husband is a Pastor!). Thanksgiving, New Years were two of our treatment dates, just to name a few. Amazed the staff was available EVERY SINGLE DAY… and then… COVID. Closed, shut down, no IVF treatment cycles would proceed for the indefinite future.” Read how she’s navigating the emotional side of the experience.

No Kidding in NZ unpacks Mother’s Day. She wrote it before the day began. “This year, though, I know it might be harder. I think we’re all a bit more vulnerable at the moment. I know I am … I have had the occasional moments when I have felt emotions welling up. Unexpectedly so. Uncertainty does that to us. Loneliness does that too.” Mother’s Day can be hard any year, but the pandemic amplifies emotions.

Lastly, Searching for Our Silver Lining has a post about balancing the return to the old normal with looking forward after The Great Pause. She explains: “But my hope is that despite the attempts at gaslighting, people will not be able to easily forget what has come from this period. That in addition to making right all the wrongs, they remember the good that came out of this. And that combined, it makes us a better species.” The post is like getting a hug from afar.

The roundup to the Roundup: Still attempting to have plant friends. 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 8 – 15) 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 April.

The House in the Cerulean Sea (T. J. Klune): In another time and place, I may have smiled wanly while reading this book, but encountering it during the pandemic was like being thrown a happiness lifesaver. It is such a sweet story about a social worker for magical children who is sent to a remote orphanage to report on the conditions. I loved every character in the book, and I still have Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea” stuck in my head. But mostly I laughed aloud at a time when I really needed a good laugh.

In Five Years (Rebecca Serle): What you think this book is and what this book actually is isn’t clear until you close the last page. And while that normally would have made me annoyed, in this case, I was blown away. Like literally blown away by the ending. It’s a 3 or 4-star book that becomes a 4 or 5-star if you stick with it to the last page. And I can’t reveal any more than that or you won’t get the big mouth drop when you realize that you had it all wrong.

The Secret History (Donna Tartt): It’s a classic. And there’s a reason it’s a classic. A classmate is murdered—you know from the opening that he’s dead—but it takes the whole book until you understand why and how the murderers did it. It’s chilling, and maybe not the best book to read when we’re all feeling a little stressed out by the pandemic. But still an amazing read to put on your TBR list for another time.

Eight Perfect Murders (Peter Swanson): I enjoyed it, but I also had big feelings about the book (see yesterday’s post). So… I give this one a solid maybe. I have the feeling I’d like other books by the author, though I don’t know if you’ll love this one unless you’ve already read all the books that he ruins or if you really don’t care about spoilers. I do care about spoilers, so I had mixed feelings about this book, but it was an enjoyable read, that fact aside.

What did you read last month?

I encountered two books this spring that built their plots on spoilers for other books.

The first one I started reading and realized that a bunch of Agatha Christies were going to be spoiled for me if I continued reading the book, so I needed to stop, check which ones they were, weigh out how I felt about having a bunch of mystery endings revealed, and then read on. The books “spoiled” were mostly books I already knew, so it was a low annoyance. But considering I only started reading Agatha about 18 months ago, if I had encountered this book at a different time, it would have sucked. Especially because it wasn’t clear that this was going to be part of the plot until I was several chapters into the book.

The other book is built on the premise that someone is using the murders in famous mystery novels to conduct murders around town. You’ll be able to figure out which book I’m talking about when you see my monthly book review post tomorrow. (Hint: if you don’t want to know which book, skip that post.) The book also ruins another famous mystery by revealing the twist ending during a conversation between two characters in the book. So… one book ruins almost ten books.

As in, literally ruins them because why else do people read mysteries except to try to figure out the mystery? If you know everything before you start reading, it’s not really an exciting read. It’s like setting up a game of Clue and having the person tell you, “By the way, Professor Plum is going to use the candlestick in the study. Let’s play!”

Anyway, I knew which books were being ruined in that book (with the exception of the one that popped up in the conversation, which I had luckily already read), and I had to stop reading it in order to rush through one of the books on the list so I could enjoy that mystery before returning to have the ending revealed in the spoiler-laden book.

Most of the books being spoiled were pretty old, and in a bunch of cases, the author was no longer alive. But in one case, the book being spoiled came out while I was in college. So it’s old, but it’s not that old. I kept poking around online to see if the author commented on how she felt about her book being ruined in order to have another author’s plot work, but I haven’t seen anything yet.

Which brings me to the thing that kept running through my head as I read the spoiler-laden book. The whole idea felt shitty. Clearly the author would not like the ending of his mystery revealed, so why would he ruin many other books? I mean, yes, on one hand, you can go with the thought that people don’t deserve to have things be spoiler-free after X amount of time. And it wasn’t like the book was required reading. But the whole thing left me shaking my head, even though I mostly enjoyed the spoiler-laden book once I had read the one mystery that I cared about. Still, it shat on the golden rule of doing unto others yadda yadda yadda.

So readers spoiling books—it accidentally happens. But writers spoiling other books in order to create their book… what do you think about that?

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

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I learned a new term this week: allostatic load. It is “the damage on our bodies when they’re repeatedly exposed to stress.” It’s what is happening to your brain from living under the stress of Covid-19: either because you’ve lost your job or you’re in fear of losing your job or your job puts you in harm’s way or you’re working at home but you can’t really get work done at home or you’ve lost a loved one or you’re in fear of losing a loved one or you’re about to meltdown if you don’t get out of your home or someone has just asked you for something and you have nothing left to give.

All of the above.

And we don’t know when any of this will end. Or what the next three years will look like.

I wasn’t sleeping before the pandemic, but I’m really not sleeping now during the pandemic. I’m awake at least once per night, but sometimes up to four times. I have a lot of nightmares.

It would be really nice if the universe could give us a break.

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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.