1018th Friday Blog Roundup
Somewhere around this time five years ago, we first started hearing about this troubling virus. Back then, the only cases were in Wuhan, and it didn’t seem likely that it would reach the US. And if it did reach the US, it would remain on the west coast. By “likely” I don’t mean virologists — they probably had a very different understanding of the disease. I’m talking about the blissfully unaware state I was in this time five years ago.
What would that Melissa think if I told her that five years later, she would still be masking indoors?
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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 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. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:
- None… sniff.
Okay, now my choices this week.
Finding a Different Path explains the point of unhappy thoughts, kicking toxic positivity to the curb though a pack of slogan laden pencils with the best ending ever: “And that’s how the toxic positivity pencil met its well-deserved demise, shattered into a zillion pieces while 13-14-year-olds with pencil-murdering glints in their eyes looked on and cheered.” What is the story? Well, you’ll have to click over to read it.
Lastly, No Kidding in NZ proves the opening message that after five years, COVID is still around. She came back from an amazing trip and immediately fell ill. She shrugs her shoulders: “That’s fine. It’s the end of a long year, and I hope for you it passes peacefully whether you celebrate or not. I’m looking forward to the rest of summer (having missed the start of it in Europe), and health returning.” Here’s to better health soon.
The roundup to the Roundup: Five years of COVID. 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 December 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.
8 comments
Five years seems like such a long time and such a short time.
So much has changed and yet so much has not.
I thought abput writing my own post about this, but I’m too exhausted and feeling crappy. I, like Mali, caught Covid during/after returning from a short trip. Vaxxed and Max Boosted and have been working on the front lines since before Covid was a thing. There’s a first time for everything 🙄🙄🙄 10+ days of feeling UGH. It is not the popular opinion, but keep masking, you dont want this shit!!!
If I had known then what I know now …
Ugh. 5 years. My kids haven’t set foot in a school building in 5 years. I’ve lost so many friends because I refuse to “move on”. It’s kind of hard to wrap my brain around some days.
I feel you ANDMOM. So depressing to realize that the vast majority of people are happy to live in denial and carry on, as if there isn’t an ongoing pandemic of an airborne vascular disease that causes damage to all organ systems. Especially when many of them actually took precautions at the beginning and cared about harming others.
Also still masking indoors (most of the time).
We had a webinar on resilience a few weeks ago. It was mostly for sworn officers, and the presenters talked a lot about mindset. It was appropriate for them to say to people who frequently view and/or experience traumatic events “you are the only one who can fix your feelings about these incidents. Try to remain positive about the future and do not let yourself be convinced that everything is like this.” But I know that my boss, who had already made us watch a Ted Talk on how stress is good for you, if only you don’t view it negatively, would take that and turn it into toxic positivity. Her view would be “you just have to see the benefit of your work! Stop focusing on the needless external pressure to get things done on arbitrary timeliness! Stop worrying about our tendency to punish – we would *never* use that indiscriminately!” Toxic positivity is insidious.
Five years… sigh. 🙁 I know or have heard about SO MANY PEOPLE who have gotten covid after travelling lately (many for the first time). And yet there were still tons of people at the airports & on the planes at Christmastime) who were not masking. There were more than we’d seen lately, but maskers were still very much a minority.
We are both fully vaxxed (taken every shot offered to date) and still wear masks in most public places, when we’re out shopping, etc. (I do, anyway — I know dh slacks off when I’m not around to hand him a mask…!) We still haven’t been back in a movie theatre, and we very rarely go to restaurants now — we mostly get takeout. Masking is such an easy thing to do — and we still haven’t had covid, so far as we know. I’m sure we will get it eventually, but I figure if we’re on our first round while other people are on round 3,4,5 or more, we’re ahead of the game…!
I’m sorry to be evidence of awful covid. We spent three months in Europe, and from arriving in Ireland, to leaving three months later, we masked only at airports, on planes, and in the London underground. Maybe one or two other places. (Oh yes, briefly at Hamilton and another theatre in London). But we were the only ones in Heathrow (perhaps saw two or three other people) masking. It is so easy. I prefer it on flights, because I don’t dehydrate so badly.
But when no-one else is doing it, I find I can succumb to peer pressure. We were fine for three months – fully vaxxed and boosted – and were only in uncrowded restaurants, at tourist sites usually outside, etc. But as we got to the six month mark after our vaccinations, we were also surrounded by Londoners with their latest variety of covid, whereas our vaxes were based on what was expected to be prevalent in NZ last winter. And I was probably a bit rundown too, after all that travelling.
Interestingly, they said in the UK that this winter (Nov/Dec) there were three times as many people hospitalised with respiratory illnesses (including covid) than the same time a year earlier. That’s shocking!