In an effort to restore some of my “alt cred” within my music collection, I resumed ripping my CDs last week, but with a controlled pattern of focusing on less mainstream bands – That Dog, Pulp, Love Battery, The Blasters, and my paltry collection of Adrian Belew. Then I moved on to The Who.
Problems with my email server prevented me from doing much work on Thursday, so I focused on other tasks around the house as well as a few “housekeeping” issues. Friday was fairly business as usual with work balanced with wrangling the kids followed by the weekly swim lesson for August & Déla.
More after the jump…
August has always had “coordination” problems, and it has taken him a lot longer than “normal” to show improvement with the swim lessons, though he absolutely loves it. Déla, on the other hand, 2 years his junior, has been taking lessons for a much shorter time and is already just about caught up with him in proficiency. We are looking at Kindergartens for August and joke that while we did an extra year of preschool for him (which we absolutely do not regret) to help him get ready, she will be ready to join him in Kindergarten next year after only one year of preschool. She’s not brilliant or special or further advanced than every other kid out there, but it just shows that she really works hard to keep up with her older brother. It will be interesting to see what happens next year when they are separated with August in Kindergarten and Déla still in preschool.
Starting out this week I managed to get more of my CD collection ripped to MP3. I’m still randomly going through my collection attempting to gather all of one artist at once. This is also forcing me to go through and organize my CD collection – essentially find the various discs. I have my collection alphabetical my artist, and then chronological within each artist. For example, David Byrne’s output comes after David Bowie’s. Within David Bowie, one would first find “Ziggy Stardust” then “Let’s Dance” then “Earthling”. Some of my discs are exactly as they belong, while some (such as the missing Clash disc which I have mentioned in a previous post) are simply somewhere else, such as by the CD player. Other artists are quite literally spread throughout the house with a multitude of discs in various places. One such artist is The Cure. I have a number of albums and singles in various places that I am trying to gather all together so that I can have everything all in one spot before I rip that band’s catalog to MP3.
For instance, I found one of my Elton John CDs as well as a Cyndi Lauper, both of which I knew I had, but didn’t know where they were. After plugging in a few of those holes, I moved on to rip such bands as erasure, Madonna, The Donnas, Garbage, The Circle Jerks, Eurythmics, The Cars, The Dickies, Everclear, Tin Machine, and a few others.