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

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Every year, I hope beyond hope that people will not post phony pregnancy announcements for April Fool’s Day, and every year, I am disappointed by humanity.

But this year, really, please, skip April Fool’s Day. Not just pregnancy posts—skip COVID-19 posts. Skip posting anything that may be misconstrued. When in doubt, don’t post.

I have to spend time on the Internet on Wednesday due to my job or I’d stay offline. So please, humanity, don’t let me down this year.

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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.

COVID-19 fears and the world imploding.

I was going to end the post there. But I guess I should add other things.

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We finally watched the end of the last season of The Good Place. This is a spoiler-free comment. My throat felt tight when Chidi explained the wave analogy and losing people you love:

Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it: its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And… it’s there. You can see it. You know what it is. It’s a wave.

And then it crashes on the shore, and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be… for a little while. That’s one conception of death, for a Buddhist. The wave returns to the ocean. Where it came from. Where it’s supposed to be.

Even though I’ve heard that analogy before, hearing it from him gutted me. I ended up smushing my face into the covers and sobbing.

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We’re on a town listserv for a beach town that we visit about six times per year. I like to keep up with the news even when we’re away. Someone started a thread asking people to describe their perfect day in the town and what they’ll do when shelter-in-place is over.

At first, I happily described picking up books at the bookstore and reading on the beach and eating ice cream every night. It made me feel good to think about how the day would unfold.

But by the time I finished writing my entry, I felt so sad because that day felt so far away. It may not happen for months. Some of the businesses I named may not even be there after this. Which means my perfect day won’t be able to happen.

It feels so strange to have a place be so close but feel so far away at the moment.

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Someone asked on Facebook who you want to hug when all of this is over.

My mum and dad.

I really miss them. They live nearby but we’re only seeing each other via video calls. And even before this, a few weeks ago, we moved to elbow-bump goodbyes instead of hugs.

What is making you sad right now?

The twins begin online school next week — this is the last day of our emergency shutdown. Meaning, they haven’t been on vacation… and they haven’t been in school… they’ve been in limbo. But that changes on Monday.

I have no clue how this will go.

These past two weeks have been strange. Amorphous. Even though my day had shape, their day didn’t. One evening, I realized that we didn’t own coasters, I wanted coasters, and there was no way to shop in-person for coasters. The ChickieNob went into the recycling bin and pulled out materials for coasters. Coaster-making 101 filled the morning. Other times, I heard them cheating their way through four hours of Wii bowling. One random Wednesday, the Wolvog mused to himself, “I suppose I should study French or do something like that.” I told them they had to read The Magicians with me.

And underneath it all, anxiety of the unknown. Would we ever get back to normal life? Would we ever venture out in public again? What would life look like two weeks from now or two months from now? Just a lot of unanswerable questions rolling around inside our heads.

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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.

In Quest of a Binky Moongee writes about how COVID-19 has impacted fertility treatments. Her heart goes out to everyone who has been canceled mid-cycle or had treatments pushed back due to shelter-in-place orders. “But for a lot of people who want a baby, it already feels like time is slipping away even when COVID-19 didn’t exist.” I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I would not have handled the pause well, and my heart goes out to everyone, too.

Life As I Know It, like a few other bloggers, have restarted their blog while navigating the current pandemic. She jumps from thought to thought: from anger at people who aren’t practicing social distancing to fears stemming from news stories. It’s nice to hear old voices again.

Lastly, The Uterus Monologues writes about last Sunday’s Mother’s Day in the UK. She is currently pregnant for the fifth time, holding hope, and she writes, “I have spent more than a year of my life pregnant. Yet I still feel in limbo-land when it comes to that label: ‘mother’.” An event changes that, and she states at the end: “Your loss counts. But most importantly, so does your love.” Go read the whole thing.

The roundup to the Roundup: How will online school work? 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 March 20 – 27) 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.

So you know that song in Pippin “No Time at All” where the grandmother sings that “spring will turn to fall / in just no time at all” to indicate how quickly you move through life? Or the saying, “a May-December” romance?

I spent way too much time trying to figure out how the months correspond to ages. I had to work backwards from the end of the year:

December = 91 – 100
November = 81 – 90
October = 71 – 80
September = 61 – 70
August = 51 – 60
July = 41 – 50
June = 31 – 40
May = 21 – 30
April = 11 – 20
March = 0 – 10

And I guess January and February are a dark zone.

So I’m in the July of my life. Common vacation period in the northern hemisphere. Hot temperatures. Trips to the beach. Abundance of pick-your-own fruit.

Do they say the opposite in the southern hemisphere? That fall will turn to spring? An October-March romance?

This is what happens when I have too much time on my hands.

I couldn’t sleep this past weekend because Josh was going to run to the store in the morning. We used to run to the grocery store at least two times per week. I’d change my mind about dinner, and he’d run to pick up a missing ingredient. Or I’d have an hour wait near the Whole Foods, and I’d run in and pick up a few things.

But we’ve been sheltering in place and not running out. Suddenly grocery shopping felt like a huge deal. Like something to worry about at 2 am.

He left at 7:15 am so he could be at the store when it switched over from elderly shopping hours to normal hours. He managed to get over half of the things on our list, which felt like a major win. It is weird to feel elated over the idea of getting two sweet potatoes when a few weeks ago, we could purchase dozens without a second thought.

There’s an Icelandic saying, “þetta reddast,” which means, “it will work out in the end” (or something close to that). In looking up the saying, I found an old BBC article that contained two perfect quotes: “We just believe in our abilities to fix things. With the conditions we live under, we’re often forced to make the impossible possible.”

And this: “þetta reddast is less a starry-eyed refusal to deal with problems and more an admission that sometimes you must make the best of the hand you’ve been dealt.”

You adapt. You figure out ways around things. You adjust your expectations. You let yourself feel elated that you have two sweet potatoes instead of zero sweet potatoes.