The editor, Jason Fry, wrote a great piece on Medium about returning to a town in Greece where he spent a summer as a child. He was taking this return trip with his parents as well as his wife and teenager. That childhood summer loomed large in his brain, and he was excited to return to the place they stayed, the restaurant they ate at, the archeological sites around town.

Except the place didn’t visually match his memories. And he realized while he was there with his parents that his memories didn’t match their memories, which didn’t match reality, too.

It’s a really interesting piece, and it’s something I think most people have experienced at some point in their life. You return to a place that held so much meaning for you that you’re certain those indelible, vivid memories in your brain must be fact. But then you arrive and doors are in wrong places or buildings are on wrong roads, and things start to mentally unravel as you realize your brain is holding on to faulty information and parading it as fact-based and unchanging as a photograph.

It made me think about how I’ve marked memory as the most important thing to hold onto, yet it’s completely unreliable. It’s such a strange idea––that we only have the vaguest understanding of what actually happened because memory is such a malleable, changing, degrading concept.

Imagine if you had a computer, and sometimes it saved your files and sometimes it changed them around without your input and sometimes they lost the files altogether. We’d never put our trust in that machine. Yet without the ability to get a reliable brain, we muddle through with memories that may or may not be accurate.

Anyway, it’s an interesting piece and it makes you think about the places you’d want to return to from your childhood; the houses or towns or parks you’d like to see again to check if they match up.

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

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Has there ever been a more fascinating line written? “In 1815, thousands of people came to watch George Wilson, the “Blackheath Pedestrian,” walk 1,000 miles.”

If I had been alive in 1815, I would have been in that crowd, watching the man walk in a circle:

[It was] a 1,000-mile walk, one of several feats of long-distance walking called ‘pedestrianism; that enthralled Britain in the early 19th century. He walked on a pre-measured circuit around Blackheath common, an area of public grasslands outside of Greenwich.

Like literally walked in a circle for everyone’s entertainment. People bet on the walker, consumed beer while they watched, enjoyed a day out watching a very slow, monotonous activity. That article, by the way, leads to more articles about competitive walking.

I found this completely fascinating. There’s a story somewhere in here.

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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.

It is finally dipping down into the 60s and 70s in DC, though on Wednesday — October, mind you — it was in the high 90s. It didn’t feel that hot when I walked outside in the afternoon. I mean, yes, it felt hot, but most of the time, I’m only outside for a few minutes at a time. You don’t really process heat when you’re spending most of your time in an air conditioned space.

But on Wednesday, I was volunteering at the kangaroo place. I was mucking one of the fields, being careful to drink a lot of water, but around 3/4th of the way through the job, I had to sit down. The world was spinning, and I thought I was going to vomit. I sat down for a few minutes in the shade and started to feel okay, but when I went back to mucking, I immediately felt clammy and shaky and ended up needing to take a break again. I spent 2.5 hours at the ranch, so not that long an amount of time outside, but I felt sick enough that I wondered if I should call Josh to drive me home.

I felt queasy for a chunk of the evening, even after a cool shower and time inside.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the last few days. There are people who work outside for hours a time, people who live without air conditioning, people who walk long distances because they don’t have transportation. The animals who live outside all year round and weren’t built for 98 degree temperatures in October. What will the world look like five years from now? Ten years from now?

Steve Irwin said, “If we can teach people about wildlife, they will be touched. Share my wildlife with me. Because humans want to save things that they love.” I love this world and in a general sense, the people and animals in it. I want to believe Irwin that the world is saveable, but I’m terrified for us.

This week, I purchased two more sets of tickets so the ChickieNob could see Cabaret for the fourth and fifth time. I took her to see it a few weeks ago — it was her first time seeing the show — and during intermission, she made me promise that we would go again.

I love that it means so much to her because I’ve written before how the show saved me in the 90s. Maybe every generation gets their own mesmerizing Emcee. Mason Alexander Park is her Alan Cumming, holding court on the stage and making your eye follow them as they weave their way around the dancers.

Chickie commented that she didn’t know why watching the show made her so happy when the show itself is so sad, but I think it’s really about connecting with a character who is comfortable in their own skin, even if the world around them isn’t comfortable with that skin. They are leading the party; at least, until the gravity of the situation yanks them down. Who doesn’t want to watch someone who is unapologetically themselves?

I’ve seen a lot of performances of Cabaret–as in a lot of performances of Cabaret–and this one may just be my favourite, even if that Alan Cumming performance in the 90s will always hold a special place in my heart. It could be because Mason Alexander Park is that good, because the whole cast is amazing (especially Mitchell Hébert and Donna Migliaccio but also dancing by Connor James Reilly and Andre Hinds––they are incredible), or because Chickie literally lights up when she talks about the show. I just started playing the trailer so I could embed it above, and she heard it from downstairs and ran into my room like a moth to flame. That girl has some serious Cabaret blood in her veins.

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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.

Dreaming of Diapers has a post about not being ready to let go and move on from infertility. She writes, “See, this is my ONE life to live… and if by damned I don’t try my damnedest at the one dream I have ever had… to be pregnant and deliver a healthy child, then I wouldn’t be true to myself… and it would haunt me for the rest of my life.” It’s an important post about how we need to know ourselves. We get one life; we’re the only ones who get to live our life. We need to make decisions we’re comfortable with, even if we wish we had different decisions to make. Go give her support.

Life Without Baby has a post about a person leaving their community. It’s not because they’re parenting; it’s because they don’t want to identify as childless anymore. She explains, “She’s leaving because she no longer wants to carry around that label and all the stigma and resentment that can come along with it. She’s moving on, I assume, to embrace her life as a woman, with all its facets.” It’s a great post about identities.

And speaking of identities, The Road Less Travelled has a post about diversifying your identity that fascinated me. In the same way someone may want to diversify their investment portfolio to protect themselves from the inevitable ups and downs of life, people may want to diversify their identity. Head over to read her write up of the article.

Lastly, JewishIVF has a post about how even good change is hard. She has a lot of feelings as she prepares for maternity leave, and she writes, “My biggest issue was feeling overwhelmed with all the changes personally and professionally at the same time.” It IS a lot. Even when you want your life to be turned upside down, it can be overwhelming as you’re flipping over.

The roundup to the Roundup: Every generation finds their Cabaret. 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 September 27th and October 4th) 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.

Our shul has a program that runs every year between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. On Rosh HaShanah, you’re given a few paper shopping bags as you exit services. On Yom Kippur, you bring them back––filled––and the non-perishable food is taken over to a food bank we work with. Simple. Easy. It has always been part of that space between the two holidays.

The shul provides a shopping list stapled to the bag, and we fill it. Josh and I walk the line every year: fill the bag without ripping the bag. We’ve gotten it down to a science of balancing the weight of cans vs. boxes.

But this year, as we took the bags, the people passing them out told us the food bank was most in need of three things: diapers, formula, and baby food. She pointed to a box of example teething biscuits on the table. “Like this,” she said.

“So we’ll get diapers this year,” I told Josh. It will make things easier. Packs of diapers are lighter than canned vegetables. You can fill the bag to the top without ripping it, even if you fill the bag with multiple packs of diapers in various sizes. Baby food in those squeezable bags is pretty light.

And yet. It’s hard to step in that aisle. I usually avoid it at the food store unless I’m buying something for someone else. I will walk the extra aisle and walk past aluminum foil or dog food rather than walk past a wall of diapers or boxes with pictures of smiling babies.

I want to be helpful, and I hate the idea of waste––giving the food bank something they don’t actually need or want vs. something they clearly do. So I’ll go into the aisle this weekend when we’re doing our normal food shopping for the week; tuck the diapers and formula towards the bottom of the basket. Place them inside the bags when we get home and fold the top over so we don’t have to see it again while we’re waiting to take them over on Yom Kippur. I’ll pretend that it doesn’t bother me, that it’s just like shopping for green beans. Except it’s not.

You get it.