Well, That Didn't Take Long...

Tonight I'm playing with my Christmas presents. In particular, the Pyle retro-look turntable (CD-player, tape deck, AM/FM radio, streaming blue tooth bookshelf stereo) that I very broadly hinted to Hal I wanted. And he got it for me, so yayz. I really, really wanted to be able to play music in the living room, and now I can.

Since we moved into the house, we haven't really had an audio system as such set up in the living room for lack of space on top of the entertainment center, and I don't even remember the last time we actually had a turntable hooked up. Admittedly, there's the option of playing single CDs in the DVD player, but that's fiddly, and while the Roku can pull in Pandora, it's set up for Hal's stations which tend to be cluttered up with jazz and the squally stylings of Dave Alvin and whatnot. Ugh. Which has largely meant that I don't listen to music nearly as much as I used to do. Streaming audio on my computer just doesn't fit my work style much of the time, and requires me to actally be in my study to hear it. It always seems like such a goddamned lot of fuss to wade through the zillions of duplicate tracks and assorted cruft in MediaMonkey to load new songs onto my phone or my little mp3 player, and so I don't. Besides, for whatever reasons of childhood imprinting, and the need to be able to dance to my tunes, my lizard brain knows that the music should be housed in the living room.

And now, it is. The huge thing about this is that I can play the rare, oddball LPs that I managed at the 11th hour to find and rescue before we sold my parents house. I had been looking for them for years since my folks moved permanently up to Mariposa, and only found them during the mad final week when we cleaned out the house for sale. These are items so obscure, you can't even find most of the stuff on YouTube: an Israeli folk duo from the late '50s, a Swedish electrified folk group from the early '70s, and like that. The songs of my childhood. Now available in my living room as fresh as the last time I heard them, complete with that authentic analog pop and hiss. It's lovely. But my goodness a standard LP side is short. I had forgotten how short.