I tried to get the Wolvog and Josh to guess my favourite Pete Seeger song, but they couldn’t get it after three guesses.

“It’s his cover of Garden Song,” I told them. “But my friend banned us from singing this at camp because I would always burst into tears at the same line.” I hit play on my phone, and the song filled the kitchen.

Sure enough, even though I didn’t feel sad, when I heard the line, “We are made of dreams and bone,” I burst into tears, and we turned off the song.

I don’t know why that line still gets to me almost thirty years later. That idea that everything feels so precarious; we’re so small and insubstantial: dreams and bones, soul and body.

The friend who banned the song died a little over ten years ago. I knew he died at that time, but I didn’t Google him until after I cried listening to the Garden Song, even though I’ve thought about him a lot over the last few years because we keep returning to the camp area.

I found a Twitter account he set up a few days before he died, with about ten tweets in quick succession, most of them links. Five people followed it: The man’s other Twitter account (a replica of the one I was on but under a non-English version of his name), three other people, and Yoko Ono.

My first thought was, “What is the story there? How did Yoko Ono find your account?” And I wanted to write to him and ask, but I couldn’t because we’re just dreams and bones, and he’s gone. There was this great story in the universe, and I would never know it because he was not here to ask him about it.

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

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If you’ve ever played the game Little Alchemy, you will love this new internet version by Neal.fun. However, it didn’t keep my progress when I closed the tab and reopened it to play again.

If you’ve never played the game Little Alchemy, you can now play it online, though I prefer the app version on my phone. The UX is a little clunkier than Neal.fun’s version, though the idea is the same: You combine items to make new items. For example, put two “earth” together, and it turns into a mountain. You can now combine a mountain with earth and get a volcano. You can add fire to the volcano and get lava. So on and so on.

Happy playing.

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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 connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

I found this a very moving essay about miscarriage, especially the note in the title: “The out-of-office message I struggled to send.”

After she takes some time off following her third miscarriage, she feels she needs to explain her out-of-office time to people, but she doesn’t want to say too much. She writes,

I simultaneously explain and obfuscate the reasons for my absence: Some unnamed “matters” did not “resolve” on “quite the timeline we expected.” Almost everyone responds the same way to that line, perfectly polite and mechanical: “I hope your situation has resolved.” Thank you. It hasn’t at all!

Though I love the simplicity of what she writes at the end, which maybe should have been the out-of-office message: “Thanks for your patience with my delayed response. I’ve been dealing with a difficult miscarriage.”

Because if we can talk about birth, we should also be able to talk about loss or infertility. If we can figure out how to give people medical leave for delivery, we should be able to figure out how to give people medical leave for a miscarriage.

The worst feeling in the world is standing in front of a dead computer. One that contains all of your photos. The Wolvog was still home for one more day when my 11-year-old desktop refused to turn on, and after trying several different things, he gently told me that ole Deskie wasn’t going to spring back to life.

Well, that sucked.

While he was home, he picked out the computer I should order and even ran to the store to get the monitor for me. But there were two factors in play: (1) The Wolvog was not going to be home to set up the computer when it arrived, and that was a reminder that he now goes to college far away, which made me cry a lot. (2) Did I need a new desktop? I do a lot of my work on my laptop, but the desktop is an insurance plan, enabling me to do my job if I can’t use my laptop. Did I really need the insurance plan? Would I use the desktop enough to warrant the cost?

I felt super guilty, but I bought the computer to do all my photo stuff. But now I really need to do a lot of photo stuff to make it worth it.

Ouch.

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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.

The Road Less Travelled has a post about how the words we use shape our understanding of the world. A case in point: regular families. It seems like a small thing, but when we see that term, our brain dredges up our understanding of the term and reinforces it, even when our primary understanding of the term reinforces a stereotype or misinformation. Simple fixes such as changing “regular families” to “people” ensure we’re not deeming one idea “regular” or “normal.”

Lastly, happy anniversary to No Kidding in NZ, who celebrated a milestone anniversary. She writes: “Being childless does not doom a relationship, just as having kids doesn’t keep people together. My husband and I became closer through our losses, and have stayed closer as the years have passed.” What made the post so interesting (beyond it being a huge accomplishment) is the idea of whether you celebrate your anniversary alone or together. I’ve always felt like anniversaries are for the couple — you celebrate your love for one another on your own. But then again, there are all these people at your wedding, so you start off celebrating your love with other people. Do you celebrate other people’s anniversaries with them?

The roundup to the Roundup: Goodbye, old computer. 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 February 2 – 9) 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 very rarely buy new clothes. Most things in my closet are 10 to 20 years out of date. But I look at clothes online a lot. I bookmark things I think I would like but don’t follow through and acquire new clothes.

Mostly because clothes shopping is rarely a happy, positive experience, and it’s hard to talk myself into doing something I know will bring me down. Plus, I don’t want to order online clothing unless I know how the brand fits my body. So it’s clothing stores or nothing, and I’ve opted for nothing for many years.

But ChickieNob and I decided to try clothing shopping while we were in Antwerp. I picked out a few dresses, she picked out a few bottoms, and we made our way to the dressing room. The woman working the room told us we weren’t allowed to share a changing room, which meant that I stood in my dressing room for a hot minute before I gave up, too scared to try to get into a dress by myself in case I needed help getting it back off. We left the store feeling defeated.

We decided to give clothing shopping another try, and we opted to go to the Boden store on the outskirts of London because we knew people with curves who shopped at Boden. The two experiences were day and night. While the first store had pounding music, unhelpful employees, and clothing for only one body type, Boden was brightly lit and quiet. An employee came over and asked if she could start a dressing room for us and if we wanted to share one. (Yes!) ChickieNob said, “I’ve never been to a store where there were so many things I wanted to try on.”

Me too.

I felt pretty.

I ended up with two dresses and a top that goes with an old skirt I have at home. I walked out of the store feeling so good about it myself. I can’t say that I’ll do it again any time soon because I mostly live in sweatshirts and cargo pants, but I’m still smiling about the positive experience.