I read a Forbes article about taking a “bookcation” if you can’t take the real thing. You mentally go to another place for a duration of time—let’s say the weekend—reading travel guides or fiction set in the place and imagining yourself there. I’m assuming you can even extend your bookcation into meals, making food from the place, or peppering in appropriate movies at night.

In week one of the lockdown, this would have been a great idea. (Though at that point, I was collecting ideas and not executing any of them.)

But now we’re in week… six. (I think? Time is funny at the moment.) A bookcation sounds more exhausting than refreshing. And possibly sadness-inducing. Plus, I don’t think I can handle one more good intentioned article putting one more thing on my you-should-do-this list.

I’m now in the stage where I read articles about a possible resurgence of cases in the winter, and I make lists of things I need to do if we have a window of time when we can leave between the first and second surge. I methodically watch a single television show, one episode per day, because I don’t want to have to get to know another cast. (“New” feels tiring at the moment.) I read books. A lot of books. I try to convince the kids they want to play cards with me. That’s about all I can handle at the moment.

But I think if I could muster up the energy for a bookcation, it would be to visit Devonshire. We’d eat scones and read Agatha Christie and look at other people’s photos.

Where would you go?

Josh did our bi-weekly grocery store run this week, and he picked me up a basil plant as a treat. We named it Eadwynn, and placed it on the kitchen table by the window. And then the fretting began.

Is this the best place for her? And how often should I water her? And how do I harvest her leaves without killing her? I turned to the good people of Facebook who attempted to gently coach me through new plant ownership. But I am emotionally carrying a lot of plant killing baggage. I am not known for keeping plants alive.

I have grown unnaturally attached to Eadwynn. She like… my best friend now.

AMS, who no longer blogs but is responsible for the clickable map on the blogroll, has been walking me through how to be a good Plant Mother. Like getting her a bigger pot. And nurturing and harvesting her to keep her happy. I just want her to like living here. I want her to hang out with me and be my best plant friend.

I’m so glad you’re here, Eadwynn.

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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:

• “Another Weird Anniversary” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Kveller has a wonderful essay about Covid-19 impacting family building. She writes about her infertility: “But now, after weeks of lockdown in the U.S. (and throughout most of the world), Covid-19 has become a magnifying glass on any issues with which someone might have been struggling before … Before Covid, infertility was a struggle that plagued me and my husband, Tzvi. Now, we feel even more uncertain than ever about whether we’ll ever be parents.” I think many will find something familiar in her words.

Lavender Luz has a guest post about adoptees and the pandemic. She explains how adoptees may be processing current events, and what they need to hear to feel reassured. She writes about the fears that kids may be feeling. I love love love what she says about emotions needing to move: “Right now I’m full of emotions — frustration, sadness, alarm, lack of control. Emotions need to move. This is not specific to adoptees, nor to children, nor to this pandemic … In a time of crisis, our basket of emotions can overflow pretty quickly if not regularly emptied. To empty my basket, I need a lot of sad books and movies.” Yes to the good cries that empty our baskets.

Project Progeny has dusted off her blog and writes about the sounds of the pandemic. “Every afternoon we hear sirens from police cars to initiate curfew. For a long time it was at 1:00 p.m., now it’s 5:30, and then the eerie silence begins. Eerie, but beautiful too. We hear birds, and wind, the quiet sounds of a neighborhood – voices, household sounds, even roosters.” The sights—yes—but I hadn’t thought about how the sounds have changed.

Lastly, Anabegins has a post that echos what is happening right now inside my head and home. She writes, “Taking it day by day helps. Just doing the next thing I have in my planner … If I think too far in advance it all falls apart. What is the rest of the year going to look like—if you asked me 2 months ago, I’d have given you a very detailed play by play of our family’s entire plan.” Same.

The roundup to the Roundup: Welcome to the family, Eadwynn. 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 April 17 – April 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’m reading through a backlog of People magazines. I’m still back in January, issue-wise, so I find myself yelling at the celebrities, frozen in time at various parties. “BRAD PITT, WHY IS YOUR HAND ON TOM HANKS’S ARM? HE WILL HAVE COVID-19 IN WEEKS! SIX FEET APART SIX FEET APART SIX FEET APART!”

Just kidding, it’s now something like eighteen feet apart. Isn’t it quaint how once upon a time—like between the printing of the issue of People magazine and now—we thought six feet was enough?

Anyway, the pictures are old and the people are blissfully unaware.

Josh and I went through this back in 2016 with the election. We had old episodes of @Midnight, and we watched them after we knew the results. There’s Chris Hardwick, joking about Trump, AND HE HAD NO IDEA THE SORT OF SHIT THAT WAS ABOUT TO GO DOWN.

I wanted to shake Chris Hardwick and tell him to wake up and join us eight days down the road.

It’s awful.

I’ve also become jealous of fictional characters. They go out to dinner. They do not think about COVID-19. Of course, they don’t when the book was written in 2018. The author had no clue, therefore her characters have no clue. They get to dine out and see their friends and ride on public transportation. They take planes. They travel.

No one dies. Or, sometimes people die, but they don’t die because they’ve gotten COVID-19. They do not worry about every little cough. They never think about toilet paper.

I want to live in a book. Or an old issue of People magazine.

One of the nicest things about keeping a bullet journal (beyond the fact that I don’t forget to do things) is that I have a single sentence that sums up every single day since May 2014. I like to flip back and look at what I was doing on the same day a year earlier or figure out how much time passed between two events.

But lately, I’ve been flipping to February and watching life change. It goes from the pandemic being barely mentioned to mentioned frequently to mentioned every day. I can literally see the moment where it flips over from random-event-that-may-or-may-not-ever-reach-us to event-that-is-everywhere-in-the-world.

There is the time before, the old normal, and the time now, the new normal.

There was an article in LitHub about the last train trip the author took before travel stopped. She meant to write an essay about why people should write on trains. Instead, she wrote an essay on grief and fear; two feelings that keep growing for her because there’s nowhere she can go to move away from them from a few moments. They’re always in the home because all of us are always in the home.

She explains, “One of the troubles with writing, now—one the troubles I’m having writing this essay—is that in our forced isolation grief gets in the way, and so does fear. I guess this has been true for me for longer than I’ve realized. Moving fast kept the fear and grief at bay. But now there’s nowhere to go.”

It is so strange to see my journal change from plans and meetings and errands to home, just home, pretty much every day. What was unfathomable in February is happening now. I think if I had to describe the feeling that keeps popping up for me, it’s disbelief. How can things be like this now when they weren’t like this just a month or two ago? Disbelief keeps following me around the home because there’s no place to go and move away from the feeling for a little bit.

That Melissa from two months ago has no clue what is coming down the road.

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

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The Daily Mail has a series of photos with a slider. If you move the slider in one direction, you see how the British town looks during tourist season. If you move the slider in the opposite direction, you see how it looks today, during the pandemic.

Of course, it’s not just the UK. This is the scene everywhere. But the pictures are eerie, and I can’t stop toggling the slider back and forth, watching the people disappear and then pop back up again.

A hotel called us last week and canceled our birdwatching trip. They offered to move the reservation, but we have no clue when to set a new trip. And it’s not as if the birds will stick around and wait for the tourists to return.

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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.