656th Friday Blog Roundup

I frequently have songs pop into my head and cannot remember where they came from or how I know them.  It happened this week with a Hebrew one, so I called Josh at work and started singing it into the phone when he picked up.  When I finally ran out of measures that I remembered, he said, “Who is this?”

My heart stopped and I murmured slowly, “It’s Melissa.”

“Just kidding,” he said, and started tossing out possibilities, none that were even remotely close.  All I had to go on was that it was (1) an album that came out in the early or mid-90s, (2) was next to a Teapacks song on a mixtape but wasn’t a Teapacks song, and (3) had a woman who screamed out the bridge.

That afternoon, I searched the basement and found the mixtape.  (Well, mixCD.  It was one of my first mixCDs because I didn’t even have a CD player until 1999.  The mixCD is from 1997, and I had to play it on other people’s stereos.)  I put it on and found the song.  I was trying to figure out how to upload it to the Internet so I could ask someone the name of the song when Josh had the most brilliant idea: Shazam the song.

(I know.  He’s really smart.)

It was Ha-Mechashefot’s “Kesem al Yam Kineret.”  Of course!  I realized that I hadn’t heard anything about this band in years, so I Googled them, looking forward to buying myself a new album and discovered that the lead singer died probably somewhere around the time that I originally made the mixtape.  She was only 26.  Remember how I wrote this week about mourning the death of a celebrity?  What if it comes 20 years after a person’s death?

I couldn’t stop watching this video.  She was so… alive:

It has been stuck in my head all week.  But every time I start singing it, I feel sad.

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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:

• “Negative Thinking in Infertility and Childlessness” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “I Did Not Give Up” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Countingpinklines has a post about the baby gifts she knits.  She writes, “I find the act of gift giving for a new baby bittersweet. On one hand, I truly am happy for the friends and hope everyone will be healthy and happy. On the other hand, well, there’s always a persistent thought of ‘when will it be my turn?’”  Just like every baby announcement, each gift hits her differently.  But all the knitted pieces are gorgeous in the end; infused with love and hope.

ChezPerky has a post about keeping things in perspective.  She tells a story about a stressful morning, and how a chance meeting with a new neighbour changed the way she viewed all the annoying moments in her day.  And I love this thought because we all make promises to ourselves that we can’t keep: “I need to carry myself with more composure and stop always looking like such a mess. I will make this promise to myself. But by tomorrow morning I will have made a mess of my morning again. Maybe this time I can keep the promise an extra day. Thursday is a good goal. Right?”

Lastly, Delayed But Not Denied has a mind-blowing post, wondering how people around her mother felt seeing her pregnant belly.  Many people talk about the here and now — are people triggered by their pregnancy — but I never thought about how I was probably the reason for someone else’s sadness back in the 70s.  That someone saw my mother pregnant and maybe they went home and cried.  It also drives home the universality of the experience; that we didn’t invent infertility, and it will still be here long after we’ve stopped trying to build our families.

The roundup to the Roundup: The happiness and sadness of listening to good music from someone who will never make music again.  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 July 21st and 28th) 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.