I was filing an email when I heard the unmistakable clink of a ring going down an air vent. It reminded me of the opening of Lolita when Humbert Humbert says her name is like “the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps.” The ring hit the metal side of the air vent three times and then went silent. Followed by child’s wail.

“MYYYYYYYY RIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!”

The ChickieNob wears a mood ring that she plays with incessantly.  We bought it for her this fall while we were at the beach because she had mentioned earlier that week that she wanted a mood ring.  And then we were standing in front of a case of mood rings.  So… we bought the mood ring.

We tell her not to take it on and off, but she absentmindedly twists it while she reads.  She was standing near the bookcase, reading while twisting the ring, and it popped off her finger, bounced, unluckily turned sideways, and bounced through the vent grating to its doom.

I took the grating off the vent — it simply pops up off of the carpet — and peered into the gaping maw of the air vent.  There was a lot of dust, a rusty nail, and some dried up spiders.  But no ring.  I shined a light into the passageway but could only see a few inches beyond the mouth of the vent.

At this point, Josh came home and he dragged an unbent wire hanger through the vent, hoping to snag it on the unseen ring and bring it closer to the mouth of the vent.  No luck.  The kids went down in the basement and commented that they could hear the scraping of the hanger in a vent in the ceiling.  What if instead of trying to drag the ring up, we tried to push it down so it would drop through the ceiling?

This required power tools to remove the basement vent grating.  Once we did that, we realized that the vent above, while connected to the vent below, was not a straight shot.  So we placed the grating back on the ceiling and made a plan A, B, and C.

Plan A: Continue trying the hanger method for another 10 minutes.

Plan B: Give up for the time being and go out after dinner to get a temporary ring.  Wear temporary ring until we return to the beach to get another mood ring.  Return home with temporary ring and try “grabbing” the real ring with two-sided tape stuck to the end of the hanger.

Plan C: Something with magnets.  (We didn’t get too far in brainstorming this plan.)

We did Plan A for a bit, and then quit for dinner.  As we were eating, I looked over at the Dyson and wondered if there was any way I could use it in the air vent to suck out the ring.  The neck is long and made of metal, which doesn’t lend itself well for jamming it into the hole.

Still, I tried this after dinner while Josh washed the dishes so we could go out to obtain said temporary ring.  Of course the wand of the vacuum couldn’t be manipulated into the hole, and I almost gave up.  But then I wondered if I could detach the tubing from the neck, keeping the other end still connected to the motor, and snake that tubing down the vent.  Yes, yes, like a possessed woman, I dissected the Dyson and dropped the tubing down the air vent.

It took several tries to get the tubing deep enough into the vent, but after about three minutes, we heard the unmistakable clink of a ring being sucked into a vacuum.  We quickly shut off the motor, and there, nestled in a mound of dust, was the aforementioned mood ring.  Safe and sound.

The ChickieNob cleaned it and stuck it back on her hand, promising she would never take it on and off again.  And she didn’t, for exactly 8 minutes, until I caught her twisting it on and off her little fingers.  We used our newfound not-getting-a-temporary-ring time to get ice cream instead.  All is well that ends well.

Thank you, Dyson, for making such a powerful, easy-to-take-apart vacuum cleaner.  It has caught bugs for me over the years, cleaned my carpets, and, of course, saved rings.  What more could one want from a household product?

Happy Tax Day. Actually, I’m sure you’re NOT happy about Tax Day, but hopefully your taxes are done and filed.  So there’s that.

*******

Josh made me recycle Old Minty.  Old Minty is… was… my laundry basket.  I got him before I started college.  I filled him with my dirty clothes and dragged him down to the basement laundry room.  Old Minty followed me to grad school, where he helped me take my clothes to the sketchy laundromat.  Old Minty was there for me at my first grown-up apartment, my first job, my second job, my engagement, my marriage.  Old Minty gave rides to the twins around the living room.

And then Josh started saying things like, “Don’t you think we should replace the laundry basket?”  And, “Don’t you think I should be able to carry clothes to the laundry room without getting my hands cut up by the jagged remains of your basket?”  And, “Melissa, it doesn’t even look like a laundry basket anymore.”

I allowed myself to be swayed by his arguments that 23 years is a long life for a plastic laundry basket.

He placed Old Minty with the recycling pick up.  He was taken away from me and churned into plastic bits.  I bought a new basket.  It has zero personality.

I miss Old Minty.  I ask the other family members if they miss Old Minty, too, and they stare at me blankly while saying, “What?”  Old Minty loyally served this family for decades, and now they’ve all forgotten about him and attached themselves to the new laundry basket.  “Oh, new laundry basket, you’re so great because you don’t collapse under the weight of a few pairs of underwear.”

New laundry basket is NOT so great.  He doesn’t even have a name.  But Old Minty does… did.

I clearly have not mastered the Kondo method.

*******

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.

*******

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:

• “Four Hours Out of the Cloud” (A Half Baked Life)
• “Who Tells Your Story” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Bent Not Broken has a post about being stuck between two expectant grandmothers in an unexpected place — her own living room.  She writes, “Two expectant grandmas.  In my living room.  Talking about their excitement about becoming grandmas.  About planning and throwing baby showers.  About buying things for their new grandbabies.  I had no escape.”  It’s about the pain of infertility still stinging, and also the ability to rebound faster from these moments as time goes on.

Bereaved and Blessed reveals the 9 words that she has used to define her year during each of her 9 years of blogging.  I love the idea of setting one ahead of time, though I’m terrible at (1) figuring out my word and (2) sticking to it, but even more, I love the idea of looking back and summing up the year.  Go wish her congratulations on almost a decade of blogging AND see the word that defines her 9th year.

Lastly, as much as blogging has made life easier, allowing us to pool our collective knowledge as well as give comfort from afar, Non Sequitur Chica points out the other side: that sometimes we worry needlessly based on what we’ve read on other people’s blogs.  It’s a story about moving her daughter to her big girl bed, but it’s also a good reminder that YMMV (and all those acronyms the kids use these days).

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s Tax Day.  I miss Old Minty.  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 April 8th and April 15th) 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.

Did that title scare you good?  Well listen up, kids, because I’m about to tell you a story that will give you nightmares.

Uh, and hopefully help you if this happens to you.  Or at least get you to make a few quick changes right now that may help you in the future.

So there I am, moving my iTunes library from one computer to another, and I pick up my phone to check my email.

[Aside: The fact that I was moving my iTunes library is not relevant to what happened, but I just want you to know that I was already in a very stressful technology situation.  Okay, and I was actually taking a break from moving my iTunes library and the ChickieNob was using my computer at the time.  But regardless, high stress with technology, get it?]

Inbox was there, happily storing all the emails I needed to return at the end of the day.  And then the inbox was gone.  White screen.  Totally empty.  What a weird glitch.

I closed down the email app and opened it again, expecting to see my inbox back on the screen.  But the inbox was still empty.  I bumped the ChickieNob from my computer and sat down to check my email.  Oh thank G-d my inbox is right there on the screen.  It must be a weird glitch with the phone that will right itself soon.  I’ll just push the refresh button on the computer to be sure.

OH MY G-D THE INBOX IS GONE GONE GONE.

Like gone.

Totally and completely gone.

I am panicking because I keep all sorts of important emails in my inbox plus there are all the emails that I hadn’t answered yet from that day.  I check folders to see if the emails have been archived, but they’re not there.

I remember one of the emails normally kept in my inbox contains a very unusual last name, so I use it as a search term and can’t find it in the account until I navigate down to a little link at the bottom of the page asking if I want to check in the trash.  Yes, Gmail, I want you to check everywhere.  Wherever you put my emails since you clearly know where they are.

And sure enough, that email is in with the thousands of emails in my trash.  I empty my trash every other week, but in between, it fills up with thousands of emails.  So I can find that one email because I can use the last name as the search term, but all those other emails?  I don’t remember their contents exactly.  All I know is that they were in my inbox; not the specifics of their contents.

I mean, could you list every email in your inbox right now?  No?  You just know that you want them, right?  Me too.

*******

Getting them back meant going through the thousands of emails in the trash and sending the right ones back to the inbox.  I hopefully found them all, but in case I didn’t, I moved everything from the trash to a folder for the time being so it won’t be automatically deleted.

Next I starred everything I always wanted to keep in my inbox.  My hope, if this ever happens again, is that I can scan the trash for stars and find all the emails again.  It may not work, but it’s worth a try.  I used two different star colours to differentiate between emails that should be there all the time and emails that are waiting an answer or action.

Lastly, I’ve started scanning and emptying the trash once or twice a day.  I’ve found all sorts of interesting things in there including comment notifications and a few emails I actually want.  So now I’m being super careful with my email and not thinking it’s a given that everything will be where I want it to be.  Oh — and I’ve backed up my email.  Again, it’s not perfect, but if my inbox disappears again, it will give me something to look at as I try to reconstruct my inbox.

This seems like a very common glitch based on Googling results online.  If it happens to you, first check the trash.  But hopefully, if you starred your inbox right now, you can find and restore those emails pretty easily.

That’s your public service announcement for the day.

For years (yes, years), Josh has been telling me to move my iTunes account to a different computer.  It may be because the laptop I housed it on is about three seconds away from dying.  Or the fact that I don’t automatically back up that laptop in the same way that I back up the desktop, ensuring that I will be screwed at some point.  (I like to live on the edge.)

My reason for not moving it is simple: I do not trust technology to work.  I do not trust that by doing X that Y will happen.  The shorter the instructions for completing the task, the greater the chance that it will all go to shit.  I assume that every time I update my software, something will go horribly awry and I will spend hours trying to fix the problem.

But this week, I decided it was time.  I was going to move it all over, sync the phone to the new computer, and live happily ever after.

So we started moving stuff over.  So far so good.  Sure, the playlists didn’t transfer for whatever reason — maybe 5 out of 20 songs made it into each playlist — but those are easy enough to reconstruct.  And certain files seemed to disappear into the ether.  No worries — we’ll just transfer them again.  And it took a looooooong time to move over a large amount of media from one computer to another.  (A note if you do this yourself: It will likely take a few days to move it all over if you do it for a few hours each night.)

And then it came time to sync the phone.  You see, you can back up your phone to multiple computers, but you can only sync with one.  So I had to trust that in syncing with a new computer that it would keep all of the information, apps, and media currently stored on the device.  And I do not trust technology to work for good reason: It often fails.

Sure enough, in syncing with a new computer, I needed to rebuild large portions of my phone.  Most of my music didn’t come over, which is probably fine because I rarely listen to it.  I had to reload movies and books.  Certain apps stopped working properly and I had to reinstall them.  But my photos were there — my most important thing — as well as my written and voice notes.  All in all, it took me a full day to get back to functional.

At least I don’t have to do it again for a while?

I am happy that I’m now syncing with a computer that is automatically backed up, which gives me a safety net.  It needed to happen, and it was going to be a huge time suck no matter when I did it, and even worse if the laptop died without the ability to move the media.  Plus, as a bonus, I sucked it up and also upgraded the software on the phone.  So everything feels fresh and up-to-date, at least for the next 5 minutes until the next iOS release.

Do you trust technology?  Do you update quickly or let things go for weeks out of fear?

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

*******

I’ve been debating whether or not to start The Silent History.  Is anyone else reading it?

It’s a novel that is written for the iPhone, and as you travel around, you unlock parts of the story based on your GPS coordinates.  Actually, I think you can read the main chunk of the story from any space, but then there are hundreds of side stories that can only be unlocked from certain locations.  It has been around for a while, and I’ve looked at it a dozen times without downloading it.

I sort of like this idea of needing to travel somewhere to read part of the story, with the location affecting how you read the words on the screen.  And I sort of don’t like this idea of getting off my bum and traveling somewhere for the sake of reading.

What do you think?  Yay or nay on this idea of literary geocaching and only getting to read a story from a certain location?

*******

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 posts.