life — Page 227

Saturday Fun: Record Store Day

April 22, 2014 at 8:39 am by Claudia

On Saturday, my husband informed me that it was Record Store Day and to honor the day, he wanted to visit two of our local record shops. Count me in, I said.

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about record stores. In fact, I’ve written two posts about records and record stores; Things I Miss: Record Stores, and Things I Miss: Record Albums. I lament the loss of large record stores with new albums appearing every day; thumbing through the albums, reading the liner notes, discovering new albums and artists. Some of my best memories involve record stores. I had a huge collection of albums, most of which are now warped and unplayable after being stored for many years. Big mistake. Breaks my heart.

Don and I have been slowly buying vintage vinyl records. And new vinyl is increasingly becoming popular again, which gives me hope. I think there is a real difference in the sound of a vinyl record and a CD or MP3. The vinyl sounds more live, more exciting – less perfect in the best possible way.

It’s nice to be able to download music, of course. I do it myself. But where are the liner notes? Where is the artwork on the album cover? Where are the lyrics?

It’s not the same.

Interesting information: Musician Jack White, who has a store/studio in Nashville, is a big proponent of vinyl. He has a Record Booth in his store where you can record your own record! Don wants to do that. So do I! His store and studio are very cool and are decorated in a wonderfully retro style. In honor of Record Store Day, he recorded the world’s fastest record – recorded, pressed and distributed in under four hours.

Here are some photos of our day.

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Don, outside our favorite local record shop.

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I look so much like my mother in this photo.

Thumbing through the albums. Ahhh, I’ve missed this! That’s the owner in the background. He’s smart and funny and knowledgeable. Plus, he has a Record Store Cat named Watson who was sleeping on top of the albums that were just to the right of the group in this picture. Watson is inscrutable and clearly the lord of the manor.

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I include this simply because I seem to be wearing two pair of glasses. Interesting trick.

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Don with a Loudon Wainwright album. He ended up buying it.

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Oh, Joni. I have this album somewhere. Hours and hours of memories.

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I posted this on Facebook because it made me laugh. A spoken word album of correct pronunciations. Since I have spent years teaching this very subject, I remarked that I could have saved myself all the hours put into creating lesson plans and played the gosh-darned record instead.

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Look what I found! A near mint condition soundtrack to my favorite movie. I have this album somewhere, but I know it isn’t in great shape. So I snapped this baby up and it is now living in Mockingbird Hill Cottage, along with an Earth, Wind and Fire album that I also purchased.

I dare you to stay in a bad mood when Earth, Wind and Fire is on the turntable.

Go ahead. Try it.

I dream of a big record store, full of thousands of albums, with music playing and all sorts of music to discover. But, in the meantime, I’m sure happy that these charming shops exist, with owners who love vinyl and want to share that love with everyone.

It’s Earth Day today. Let’s use this day (and every day) to urge our world leaders to finally do something about climate change before it is too late. Or we might just end up with an Earth that is uninhabitable.

And finally, I wrote about this yesterday but I’m not sure how many of you saw it, so I’m reposting:

On another note: Several of you who subscribe to this blog via email have mentioned that you have not been receiving recent posts. This is a Feedburner problem and it seems to be happening across the blogging world. The short answer: there’s nothing I can do about it but trust it will be sorted out eventually. Feedburner often has mysterious glitches. May I offer some easy, practical advice? Most readers subscribe to a blog via email because the blogger doesn’t post every day and they want to know when a new post is up. You know I post every day. Every Day. So, barring unforeseen circumstances, there will be a new post on this blog every morning. Why not simply bookmark the blog on your browser and click on it at some point during the day? Quite frankly, that’s how I read blogs. (The only blog I subscribe to is my own and that’s just to keep tabs on whether the email is working – and it has been working for me.) Bookmark it. You can rest assured that a new post will be up by 10 am every morning. Like clockwork.

Happy Tuesday.

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Life’s Too Short to Worry About This Stuff

April 19, 2014 at 9:23 am by Claudia

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In the Life’s Too Short/I Can’t Waste Any Time Worrying About This Stuff Column:

Data Breaches: Every time I turn around lately, I’m on the receiving end of an email or letter informing me that a website or store or utility company I have done business with has been the victim of a ‘data breach.’ That between some date and another date, some nefarious group hacked into the site with the result being that some of my data, i.e., credit card info, name, birthdate, address, might be in the wrong hands.

When this sort of thing first started happening, I felt the usual panic, wondered what to do, wrung my hands, etc. But now? I just shrug my shoulders and shake my head and maybe change my password or maybe ignore the whole thing. If this sounds like an ostrich burying its head in the sand, you might be right. But the fact is, we all provide personal information online or at the cash register. We hope, of course, that that information is secure but there is always the risk that it might not be. In this age of digital everything, personal information is readily accessible – too accessible – but that’s the way of the world nowadays.

The people behind all of this are contemptible, of course. They do bad things that affect innocent people. I think it’s terrible. But, in the end, I can’t go into a panic every time I this happens, because it seems to happen more and more often. I can’t be worrying all the time about identity theft. There’s so much written about all of this – especially on the web – that one can quickly be overwhelmed by it all. I’m not going to be blissfully ignorant, but I refuse to let this crap rule my life.

So I shake my head, shrug my shoulders and move on.

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Rules on Blogging: Please stop. Please stop with the ’10 Things That Make a Good Blogger’ kind of posts. Or ‘What Every Blogger Needs to Know.’ Or, even more maddening, ‘How to Coordinate All Your Social Media or When to Schedule Your Pinterest Pins or your Facebook Posts or your Instagram posts” or “How to Use Social Media.” Always with the proviso that you must do these things if you want to be taken seriously. There’s just too much of this kind of ‘expert’ advice out there. And the result is that we lose that individual stamp that is so vital, the thing that makes one person’s blog different from every other blog out there.

I realize, of course, that for many bloggers, their blog is their business. I get it. And I respect that.

Regretfully, at least to me, blogging has changed. What started out as a creative way to share with each other and expand our world, to journal, to share photos, to create, to write – let’s stop for a moment and say that again – to write, has now morphed into an arena where everyone has to have a new project on the blog every day, then has to Tweet or Facebook or Pin and hype the heck out of it. And every stat has to be checked and rechecked and compared to every other blogger’s stats.

If there’s any way to squeeze every ounce of joy out of blogging, that kind of stuff is sure to do it.

The number of bloggers out there has multiplied and multiplied and multiplied some more since I started blogging six years ago. The arena has become much more competitive, with everyone vying for readers, for ad clicks, for a rung on the ladder of ‘blogging success.’ It’s exciting, for sure, this blogging world. And blogging can lead to recognition, to possibilities, to maybe even a book deal. All well and good. Though, as to book deals and blogger hype, I have to raise this question: When did everyone become an ‘Expert?’ The internet has suddenly given everyone a chance to claim the title of Expert. Really? I’m highly suspicious about that one.

Let me say here and now: I don’t claim to be an Expert on anything.

I don’t want to see blogging become the equivalent of a strip mall, where everything is the same and the content is so similar that one could be in any city or town with all of the shops so interchangeable that nothing is really new or fresh or original.

I have to stop myself because there’s SO much I could say about all of this and I will, someday.

Really, in the end, my point is this. I started blogging for the sheer pleasure of it. It brings me joy. Anything that takes that joy and boxes it up and surrounds it with a list of ‘rules’ and things I must do will be summarily tossed out the window.

Life is too short and joy is too hard to come by. It’s too precious to mess with.

Happy Saturday.

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Reunion

April 8, 2014 at 8:35 am by Claudia

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Do you think Scout is happy her daddy is home?

Or that her daddy is happy to see her again?

Ah, what a reunion! Scout was so happy to see him that she never let him out of her sight. She was exhausted at the end of the day from all the excitement.

It was a dark and rainy day but the minute I saw Don at the train station, it was all sunshine for me. So, so happy to see him again – so happy to have our little pack together once more. This particular separation was the hardest yet for us. We’ve been through many of them over the years and we seem to handle them pretty well. But this one was another story. Of course, the dreadful winter we suffered out here had a lot to do with it. But also, the older we get, the less we seem to be able to tolerate being away from each other. There’s just been too much of it in our history.

But the work we do as artists requires that of us. Work often takes one of us to another city or another part of the country and it takes us there for six weeks or two months or six months. In an ideal world, we’d be able to visit each other for a big chunk of that time, but we haven’t been able to do that for a long while. Our commitment to our dogs required one of us to be at home with them. Riley needed constant care that only we could provide. Scout is older now and she also needs one of us with her. Don’s apartment in Boston was a third floor walk-up with too many stairs for her to navigate. We stayed here.

So we do our best.

If another offer of work came for either of us, we’d take it. We need the work. We need the money. But we are a wee bit jealous of all of you who live and work in the same general area. The thought of going off to work and being able to come home every night is a little glimpse of heaven for us.

Now, we’ll go through a little re-entry period where we adjust to life together in our little cottage. But it won’t take long.

And Don cooked dinner last night! Hallelujah!

By the way, I loved, loved the stories you shared on yesterday’s post. I laughed out loud when I was reading them. Thank you.

Happy Tuesday.

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Saturday Fun: Record Store Day

Life’s Too Short to Worry About This Stuff

Reunion

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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