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

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I am eternally grateful to everyone who has continued to do their job through this crisis––for example, health care workers, but also grocery store employees, farmers, delivery workers, and cleaning staff. The people who are keeping the day-to-day going; making sure we have food and disinfected spaces and health care.

But I have been thinking of the ethics of it. And other people are clearly thinking about it, too. Wired magazine asked last week: “People are being encouraged to stay home to avoid exposure to the coronavirus. Should they ask others to bring them food?” Are we being kind when we ensure people have work to do? Or are we being cruel when we ask other people to take risks we’re not taking?

There is clearly no easy answer.

I will say that I truly love our Italian ice place. (Priorities, people!) They put out a call on Facebook and gave people a day or two to place orders for paid pickup (over the phone). Then they brought the pickup orders to our town so people could nip out, grab their bag, and go. It was a fantastic solution where we all met in the middle to disseminate dessert by making the transactions between people as brief as possible. Not perfect but an interesting solution.

Are you ordering out right now?

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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 mean, beyond everything.

Everyone is home, pretty much all the time.

Josh and I take walks. We walk down to our friend’s house and stand on the sidewalk outside their house while they stand about 30 feet away at their door. And we talk to each other across the lawn.

Josh and I rarely made time for walks before this. It was one of those three-times-a-year thing we did on the few days when the weather was nice. But now I’ve put firm limits in place. I’m going to take a daily walk. I’m going to shout across the lawn to my friend. I am not going to work 24 hours per day.

We’re meal planning. We always did a loose weekly meal plan so we wouldn’t have to take a dozen trips to the store. But now we have an iron-clad meal plan. When you don’t have the luxury to go to the store all the time, and said store doesn’t have many ingredients in stock, you get a lot less choosy about what you’re having for dinner.

I am trying to read things that are not virus-related. I’m reading fiction. Unfortunately, all the fiction seems to veer into virus territory. Like I’m reading a book in which the characters are all in isolation due to a war. So it makes me think about how we’re in isolation due to a virus. But when I catch my mind wandering into hysteria, I return to the story and try to focus again on fiction. Mysteries are good. Fantasy is good. Family dramas are good. Dystopias are not.

We are watching Broadchurch. I never wanted to see it when it was first on, but now I’m giving it a chance. I love it, even though it’s gut-wrenching.

What are you doing differently?

It feels like a goat rodeo in our home. We are trying, people. We are trying hard. But I feel overwhelmed 100% of the time.

Which freaks me out because I feel like we’re also on top of things. We have a family check-in at the end of the each day. Everyone states how they’re feeling. What worked. What didn’t work. What we each need. What we need others to stop doing. What needs to happen. Those meetings make me feel like we’re on top of things. And I STILL feel overwhelmed 100% of the time.

[Side note: I do recommend setting up a nightly meeting like this if you have two or more people in your home. Roommate, partner, kids, parents, etc. Having it set up means that everyone knows there is a time to vent about things without letting frustrations build up or learn what needs to happen to things go smoothly.]

Anyway, I normally work from home, so my adjustment is just having more people in my work space during work time. Everyone else in my home is adjusting to a completely different work routine. So… right… we’re trying. Not always succeeding. But trying all the same.

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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:

• “How Does Coronavirus Relate to Childlessness?” (Childless by Marriage)
• “The Next Chapter for Life Without Baby” (Life Without Baby)

Okay, now my choices this week.

It probably won’t shock you that a lot of bloggers mention Covid-19 this week. By the Brooke gives perspective with C.S. Lewis’s essay on living in the atomic age. Humans have adjusted to living with many things that freaked us out upon first encounter. (And sometimes still freaks us out now.) I love her line: “A microbe may break our bodies, but it need not dominate our minds.” Thank you for this reminder.

Biogirl looks for the good points in her situation. “We are so lucky. And I will tell myself that everyday when I am bored, or lonely, or overwhelmed. I will tell myself that when I am sad for the things we are giving up. These problems are so small in this moment, compared to what others are facing.” Again, a good thing to internally repeat when things feel overwhelming if it’s true for you, too.

Infertile Phoenix is applying the lessons learned from infertility to the current situation. A great point: “I can be easily motivated by fear. However, I can remain aware of my panicky feelings, but I do not have to act on them.” And like infertility, this remains true, too: “We don’t know what the other side will look like yet, but we will get through this.”

Lastly, Inconceivable! has a post about isolation after the NICU that felt very familiar because it was our life, too, in the kids’ first year. She writes, “All this to say, these precautions aren’t totally new to me. The fear isn’t new. The isolation isn’t new.” And states what we all know too well: “Waiting, as I think we all have experienced in various ways, is far tougher than most people give it credit.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Goat rodeo central. 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 13 – 20) 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.

Yesterday, while thinking about living backwards, I came across this Wikipedia page which catalogs stories set in the future that is now in the past. Like 1984. It’s clearly past the year 1984, so it’s a story “set in a future now past.”

Or 12 Monkeys––which I’ve been thinking about non-stop since COVID-19 started spreading––in which a virus wipes out humanities in 1996. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Astro Boy. Back to the Future II. Infinite Jest. We’ve lived through their time periods.

There’s some comfort in it. After all, right now my brain is going wild with questions about what the future will be like. I’m writing a story that may or may not come true. The comfort comes from looking down the list and realizing that we’re not ruled by robots (unless you count our mobile devices… we’re sort of ruled by our phones) and the planet’s oceans haven’t been “dissolved due to an atomic experiment.” Small silver linings.

When things feel uncertain, it’s a nice reminder that everything we fear doesn’t actually happen. That’s what I’m telling myself today.

The New York Times recently had an article about a woman who teaches people how to live civilization-free. It’s survival skills for a world in which there is no end to the survival period. As in, she’s not teaching you how to get through an experience. She’s teaching you how to adapt and continue on as the experience becomes the new normal. Or the old normal because she’s returning people to how we lived before cities and cars and books and hospitals.

The reporter spoke to people who live this way all year round after going through a six month Stone Age Immersion:

“People say, ‘Oh when the apocalypse comes. …’ What are you talking about? It’s here. I’m a collapsist,” she said. “I’m not invested in maintaining the comforts we have.”

A collapsist. It certainly feels like something is collapsing. It has felt this way for a long time; before COVID-19. There’s a fin-de-siècle, pessimistic odor in the air, except that we’re not actually in a fin-de-siècle. We shouldn’t feel like there’s a proverbial cliff in front of us.

I don’t think I could live like the people in the article. Not just the idea of living close to nature… I mean, I’m not really a nature person, especially when there are crickets outside. But because I associate thinking about the future with hope. Nature is lovely, but I think the thing I love about cities is the innovation. And that is what I would miss. I don’t know if I could feel hope if living backwards was my existence.

I would hopefully survive the collapse of civilization because that’s what humans do; we continue on. But there was something that made me so sad as I read the article.