586th Friday Blog Roundup

On Tuesday night, for about two hours, Freddie Mercury was alive.

My dad and I got tickets to the one-night-only showing of Queen’s December 24, 1975 Hammersmith Odeon concert.  My dad used to buy me Queen records at Peaches, which was a now-defunct Rockville record store where all the albums were stored in wooden fruit crates.  (Excellent for splinters!)  In elementary school, I told my teacher that my favourite song was “Bicycle Race” but it was really “Killer Queen” and still is.  Plus I liked to look at the fold-out poster that came with Jazz of all the naked ladies.

So to say that I was excited for this event was an understatement.

But first I had to get there.  It wasn’t that far away, but the traffic was so terrible that my heart was pounding thinking that I wouldn’t make it in time.  I was averaging three miles per hour.  But I got there and found a parking space and found the theater, and we plopped down in our seats a few minutes before show time.

And then we waited.

And waited.

And the people around us started muttering about something being wrong with the broadcast.  For 20 minutes or so, we didn’t know whether they would be able to air the footage, and I just wanted to sink down onto the floor and cry.  Which I know sounds very dramatic, but I had been so looking forward to this event.  A non-viewing would have been the straw that broke the camel’s back on my crappy day.

Except it didn’t because the management came in and told us they had worked it out, and then suddenly Freddie was on the screen!

So the film began with a documentary.  They interviewed the three remaining members of the band today and showed old footage from interviews in the 70s.  And it was great except… it was running for a really long time and I started panicking that this was it: that it wasn’t the actual concert itself but instead a documentary about the concert.  Sure, they were showing tiny clips from the show, but the vast majority of the half hour was just the band members talking about the making of the first four albums.

Then the credits started rolling and someone in the theater shouted, “It better not be over!”  But when the credits finished up and those first chords of “Now I’m Here” started, my heart exploded.  There was Freddie on the screen with his mullet (what an unfortunate choice) and his skin-tight satin body suit with no visible panty lines, and Roger Taylor sending up a spray of water with his drums.  (Roger Taylor is like Aquaman.  Totally cute but you may miss him because he’s overshadowed by the Superman-like Freddie.  So I’m telling you, look at him.  Because totally cute.)

Anyway, it was a really really good night, and just made me so sad that Freddie’s voice is gone.  Recorded, yes, but I’d rather still have him here.

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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:

• “Having 3 of the 5 Instead of Having it All” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Northern Star!
• “MicroblogMonday: Signs and Symbols” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Will Carry On has a post about two visits to the cemetery to visit her children’s graves.  She writes about trying to break up the ice covering their markers and admits: “I’m not sure what came over me. Perhaps it was maternal instinct, but I couldn’t have that layer of ice suffocating my babies. I realize how silly that sounds, and even knew it then. I mean, how could they suffocate, when they’re already dead?”  She counters that visit with a return to the cemetery.  It’s a post about the many facets of grief and finding beauty in the sadness.

Life and Love in the Petri Dish has a post about the ups and downs of a donor egg cycle that speaks volumes about the hidden story behind the public’s understanding of infertility.  It’s the sort of post I want to send out to everyone and say, “This is infertility.”  Not the glossy stories told after the fact, but these gritty moments in the thick of it all.

Hope Floats Among the Cherry Blossoms has a post that made me say, “me, too.”  It’s about how all of our lives are on a timer, and she wants to spend as much time with her parents while she still has them.  She asks if she is the only person who thinks this way, and my answer is that I think about stuff like this a lot and take proactive steps so I never have regrets.  Plus my parents are really cool and I genuinely like hanging out with them, such as going to concert movies above.

Lastly, Project Progeny has a brief, sad post where she admits: “When I start to think too much, to feel too much, the gremlins in my head start talking – ‘You could be replaced by a brick and nobody would even notice the difference’.”  But clearly I would notice the difference since bricks can’t write poignant posts.  Which leads me to believe that there is really no one out there who could be replaced by a brick and have no one notice.  Just a thought.

The roundup to the Roundup: One night with Freddie Mercury.  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 March 4th and 11th) 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.