Here’s to new beginnings

Thank goodness for search engine caching.

I had the most horrible feeling come over me when, after hitting FAWM, I saw that they’d wiped the site to prepare for this year’s song-writing extravaganza. I’ve been to this site many times over the last few months to read lyrics to my songs as I noodled around on the guitar looking to tweak the best melody or bridge or intro signature out of my limited music vocabulary. Imagine my shock when I clicked over and saw a bold red background instead of my lyrics. All of them were gone! It took me a moment to realize that not only had I never really memorized all 14 of my songs, but it would be impossible to recall all of the lyrics that I hadn’t previously recorded– which is most of them– especially the musically incomplete ones.

I looked through my email account for lyrics after I looked through my computer’s hard drive. It seems over the past year that I’d failed to save the songs to my hard drive, except for the one with the chords that I’d been practicing a lot and now know by heart. Naturally.

I know it starts up again in February and that this time of year is supposed to be about a new beginning, but I wanted desperately to see and read my old lyrics again. Even if I am not likely to finish a few of those songs no matter how long they stayed up on the site. As I began to try to prevent a silent scream from turning into a real one I tried one last thing. I copied the url into google and selected to view the cached copy. I was so filled with hope at the sight of the linked titles of my songs appearing on my cached profile page. By clicking each of the urls and pasting them into Google and then selecting the cached version to view, I was able to view and save my lyrics to my computer.

Relief instantly cooled my ears burning with disbelief at what had just happened. I couldn’t have been that dense, could I? How would I not have save a copy of my own lyrics off of a website that I know wipes all content, at some point after February, for almost an entire year? I thought variations of this as I carefully copied and pasted the next song into the search bar and selected the cache view. Song still there. Copy and paste into a text file and then hit save.

FAWM 2011 is now safe and sound for whenever I want to work on it some more. FAWM 2012 I’m ready for you to happen.

Happy New Year. May you be not so quick to lose your marbles– or songs– as quickly as I apparently have. And if you do may you find a cache that will save a memory byte or two of your creations.

*sigh* Google. You’re my hero.