It’s my birthday today, which means that I have a new immortal friend. Except this time, it’s a polar bear, and this time there are TWO of them––twin immortal polar bears.

The first is named Hillel. I decided to keep with the theme of Jewish philosophers––Akiva, the immortal quokka, Hillel, the immortal polar bear––because my animals are also very wise. You can tell by looking at their furry faces:

I am calling him Hilly, for short. Mostly because I had a friend in college named Hillel that we also called Hilly or Hils. And I always thought that was super-cute.

I was only expecting one polar bear but two showed up. So I named the second one Houdin after Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the father of modern magic. He is from Blois, a city that is special to our family, and… well… I love real magic AND fake magic.

Hillel and Houdin. H is pronounced in Hillel and not in Houdin.

Stuffed representations of my very real, very immortal polar bears.

So… my birthday. I am having big feelings about this birthday. I had a hard time leading up to it, and I’m having a hard time today.

I wish I could cuddle up with the real Hilly and Houdin, though I imagine that if I tried to burrow into their fur that it would smell like fish and sea water. (Let’s not talk about what bears could do to a small lady and pretend that Hilly and Houdin would never harm someone who loves them this much.) But since cuddling with the real Hilly and Houdin is not possible, I’ll just gorge on ice cream instead.

Happy birthday to me.

I went down the rabbit hole twice this week. The first was looking up Brideshead Revisited, a book I’ve never read and now totally want to read. (Or, more accurately, I would love Jeremy Irons to read it to me so will need to purchase from Audible.) A character in a book was reading it, so now, once I start reading it, it’s like a book inside a book inside a book… if that makes sense. I’m picturing it like two mirrors facing each other, reflecting the reading of Brideshead Revisited 1000 times.

The other rabbit hole was the Holocaust document archive. I found both brothers. One ultimately died at Mauthausen. The other went from Flossenbuerg to Buchenwald. And in finding these brothers, I also found their sister and now I’m exploring her story and two of her children. (One other child got to Israel, another got to Paris, and the third died of natural causes.) Various family members have sent me their notes over the years, and using old census forms, scanned records, and conversations, I was able to put all the siblings in birth order. And now they are in a neat row, lost information known.

I feel like I end the week with more order in it. And a book to read.

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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:

• “Happy Retirement, Dr. Ob-Gyn” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “Regulating What We Don’t Understand” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Uterus Monologues has a post about the logistics of life after a miscarriage, namely, her inability to plan a holiday because… what if? She writes, “Even things you know in your rational mind are statistically very unlikely seem eminently possible in pregnancy after loss(es). Bad luck is your entire evidence base. And as for the thought of actually miscarrying again while away….” Her description of your life shrinking––that is exactly it. It makes your world feel so small. As well as her description of how it feels to go away and unplug from the endless cycles and family building thoughts.

The Gayby Project is back with a post! She writes, “But I’m back, and I need this space. And I need the friendships I once built here, even though I think many of ‘my people’ have moved on from the blogosphere. And so, maybe there will be new people who I will find and who will find me?” Indeed! Clearly all of us. Her child’s diagnosis has thrown her for a loop, and she needs––like so many of us––to talk it out to find sense. Go circle the wagons.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ writes about the Pain Olympics and their purpose. She explains, “Playing Pain Olympics helps me to put my own pain into perspective.” She continues later with the point: “Someone else can’t put your pain in perspective for you! … Equally, I can’t try to tell anyone that their pain is less or more than mine (even if I think it). I can however tell myself where my pain fits on the scale.” It’s a beautiful post, marking the Pain Olympics as a part of the healing process.

The roundup to the Roundup: Brideshead Revisited and family members found. 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 May 24th and 31st) 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.

Lifehacker lays out a scenario where someone cancels plans, and then asks: “What are you going to do with this unexpected freedom?” Seriously? Are there really people who stand like a deer in headlights, not knowing what they would do if their plans get cancelled? Doesn’t everyone know the only acceptable option is to binge Netflix?

No?

After I stopped rolling my eyes and they returned to their normal position in their sockets, I started thinking about what I would do if I found myself with a free evening and wanted to be productive. I have a long “do this at some point” list: work on the family tree (I want to recopy it because I’ve written all over it, and it’s a little messy), work on a photo project that I’m doing of the kids, or work on the Scotland photo album. (Yes, we’re talking about the trip from 11 months ago… no… it isn’t finished.)

I do work on those things, but it’s hard to carve out time for them when there are so. many. shows. on. Netflix.

What would you do with found time?

My mother sent along a link to a new Holocaust archive that opened to the public consisting of scanned documents and general information. Name, town, prisoner number, concentration camp. I dove into it, trying to find my great-grandmother’s brothers.

And I think I found them, many alternative spellings later; two men who fit in terms of name, town, and camp. I knew they were in Buchenwald and the town they’re from. There is a birth year listed on one of the documents, so I asked family members if they could name my great-grandmother’s siblings birth order. Was one of her brothers 9 years older? If yes, I found them. If not, this was someone else with the same name.

But no one knew.

And all the people who would have known are gone.

It made me so incredibly sad. I’m seeing a lot of family members this upcoming weekend, so I was going to carry around a list of names of her siblings and see if we could put them in order by pooling everyone’s information. Maybe no one can put them in order on their own, but perhaps they could at least say person A is older than person B, and in doing so, the order will logically present itself. At least, that is my hope. Plus I have a few papers to go through that have family stories written on them, and maybe there are clues to the birth order in those papers.

I guess it just brings up how sad I am that I don’t have my grandmother anymore, so I can’t ask her these questions. She would’ve known where her mother stood in relation to her siblings.

I actually knew they were in Buchenwald because Elie Weisel was in Buchenwald, and they were from the same town. It always gave me comfort that I knew some of their story by reading his story. They are one of the various townspeople crowded together with Weisel in the ghetto and the train and the camp. And so I knew they also ended up at Buchenwald, though unlike Weisel, they did not get out.

This is my first time diving into Holocaust records. And, on one hand, it’s upsetting, but it’s also all I have left except for a photo and a few stories. These documents confirm these people existed. They were my great-great uncles, and they had wives and children and lives in Europe. And they should be remembered, their documents collected, like everyone else on the family tree.

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

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Today is Memorial Day in the United States, a day to remember people in the military who have died in service to the US. It should be a somber holiday considering that it is marking countless deaths, but it’s billed as the “official start of summer” and plenty of stores host Memorial Day sales.

It made me think about how I would feel if October 15th––Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day––became an excuse for cookouts and pool parties. I would feel really upset to see a day designated to mark something emotional and sacred being used to sell cars or mattresses.

Sending thoughts to everyone who is mourning a loss today. Thank you to everyone who serves in our military and the families who support them.

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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.