Musical Memories

Oh wow. I’m lis­ten­ing to the B‑52s Wild Plan­et album. The actu­al album. Like, on vinyl.

One of the things unearthed in my par­ents’ base­ment this week­end was the first stereo I had when I was about 11. I bought it at a garage sale. It had been put away at some point because the speak­ers died, and it was still there. And it has a turntable. So it is now sit­ting here play­ing through the stereo in the liv­ing room.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, our stereo is a lit­tle book­shelf thing that isn’t ter­ri­bly adapt­able. It has two sets of RCA jack inputs on the back, one for phono, one for video. But the phono jacks don’t work right—everything is all fuzzy. I’ve looked inside before, and those don’t seem to look quite right, but I don’t know that much about these things. It isn’t dirty con­tacts, though. I tried clean­ing the con­nec­tions a while back.

In any case, now sam­bear is on his way home with some sort of thing that will hope­ful­ly enable us to hook three sep­a­rate devices up to the one work­ing set of input jacks—the TV, the turntable, and the com­put­er (for play­ing MP3s on the bet­ter speakers).

The kids are want us to just buy a new stereo for the liv­ing room that’ll do sur­round sound and everything—because they want this stereo in the play­room. Yeah, that might hap­pen at some point—but it isn’t in the bud­get any­time soon. For now, adapters cost a lot less than stereos.

Gosh—doesn’t every­one want to come help move the piano and some book­cas­es from the par­ents’ house to ours next week­end? Dad­dy will let us use his truck! We just can’t let him pick any­thing up—he’s still recov­er­ing from the neck surgery.