The 82 Song

When I posted last year about our anniversary, I talked about "our song." Here's the whole story. (It's kind of a long story. If you want to just hear the song, go to the very end of the post)

About 15 years ago, a lady in our ward gave me and my cousin a bunch of tapes that she had recorded music on. I think she gave them to us so we could record our own music on them, but I never got around to recording over a couple of the tapes. The tape with "our song" (which we call "The 82 Song") on it happened to be one of these tapes. When I got my first car, I grabbed up a bunch of my cassette tapes because my car had a tape player in it. I played the tapes at random. I know I played the tape with The 82 Song on it, because many of the other songs on the tape became familiar to me. Here's the only explanation I can think of: The song was the last song on the tape, and I guess the tape lasted longer than the distance from home to college, so I never heard the song because I was at my destination before it ever started playing. One day, I'm assuming Charlie and I were driving to our parents' houses, and the song started playing. It was a really silly song, but it seemed to fit us quite nicely. This became our song.

The tape that has this song on it has been missing for quite some time. The last time I remembered listening to it was in our old car because it was the only tape player we had. This car bit the dust a couple years ago. I know we cleaned out the car before the scrap service took it away, but I was afraid I may have left that tape in there. I scoured our apartment for any cassette tapes. It didn't make the task any easier that this specific tape isn't actually labeled, and it seemed like most of our tapes aren't labeled, so it took even longer when I had to play every tape to make sure that it wasn't the tape with our song on it. I was resigned to the fact that the tape was gone. Normally, in the day of Internet, it would be a simple Google search to find the song, but there were a few problems with that. We have no idea what the name of the song is. We also have no idea who sings it. It occurred to me to ask the lady that gave me the tape in the first place. Maybe she knew who it was. The only problem is that I don't remember who gave it to me. My aunt recorded the song from the tape when me and Charlie were getting married to make us a wedding video. Sadly, her computer crashed and the song was lost.

We got a new entertainment center recently, so I was cleaning out the old one. And way in the back, hidden under a pile of papers and CD's and DVD's, I saw an unlabeled cassette tape. I ran into Sam's room to play the tape. I recognized the songs as they started playing, but I still wasn't sure it was the right tape. To make things a little more difficult, the tape player that we have doesn't fast forward, so in order to fast forward, I had to flip the tape around and rewind it, then flip the tape back. But my persistence finally payed off. The 82 Song started playing. I was so excited that I actually found the tape! Before I lost it again, I wanted to record it into digital form. But before I could do that, I needed to be alone in the house so it could be completely quiet. But, being the role of a stay-at-home mom, this rarely happens. Eventually, I forgot all about it.
Then, on our anniversary this year, Charlie mentioned the song on Facebook. I remembered that I still needed to record it. Soon thereafter, Charlie took Sam out of the house so I could record the song. I found the right place on the tape and pushed the record button on my camera and waited. About 3 seconds into the song, the tape player sucked the film up into it's mechanisms. I shut the player off as soon as I could, but it wasn't fast enough to save the tape. The only way I could get the tape out was to rip the film. I'll admit, I cried. I hadn't even written the words down. I decided that there must be a way to fix it. I found some splicing tape on the Internet for fairly cheap, but then I had to wait for the splicing tape to be delivered. So after a few days, I got the tape all spliced together, and wouldn't you know it, where the film in the tape broke was about 3 seconds before the start of The 82 Song. I didn't lose a single second of it. I finally got it all recorded.

I wanted to put it on here so everyone could hear it, so I set out to do that, but in the video, the only thing you could see was the tape player. I decided to make a movie out of it. Unfortunately, the format that my camera recorded in isn't compatible with my computer. Luckily, I found a program that would convert it. Unfortunately, now all my engagement pictures are missing, which I was going to use for the movie. So I figured I would just use one picture for now and just put the video up. Unfortunately, my video is having issues getting uploaded to Blogger. So hopefully this works. If not, I guess you'll just have read this entire post for nothing. Sorry! :)