Busy Days

I've been busy, which is good because I like to be busy. I have been disassembling my train layout for one thing. I am amazed by how much work this involves. I guess I shouldn't be surprised when I think about how long it took to get it together. Did I really put all those wires under there? Did I really wire all those control units under the layout? How did I manage to crawl around under there? Well, I guess it was me because I don't remember seeing anyone else under there. So, I now have all the trains, cars, people, vehicles, buildings, track, switches and landscaping packed away. I have pulled out all of the wiring and need to decide what to do with the control boxes attached to a panel under the layout. I was thinking of leaving them attached and just removing the panel, but it would save a lot of space to pack the controls separately. Besides, I don't know where they might go on an entirely new layout. I have to figure that out.

While I'm doing all of this demolition I am multi-tasking. I am listening to old LPs (phonograph records). The idea is to decide on which ones to keep and record onto my computer with the idea of discarding the LP once it is digitized. I am finding that the discard pile is growing bigger than I thought it would. It seems that my tastes have changed over the years. I hope that they haven't just changed for the day that I'm listening. I would hate to make a mistake and throw out music that I want to listen to again someday. Some of these records are old, but not as old as the 78 rpm records I still have somewhere. This is what it says on the back of one LP. The tile is "The Fabulous Four Hands of Frankie Carle." Frankie Carle was a piano player and the album features some blues on a grand piano and some old time songs on an upright honky-tonk piano, hence the album title. This is what it says:

This is a "New Orthophonic" High Fidelity recording,
designed for the phonograph of today or tomorrow. Played
on your present machine, it gives you the finest quality of
reproduction. Played on a "Stereophonic" machine, it gives
even more brilliant true-to-life fidelity. You can buy today
without fear of obsolescence in the future.

The LP is copyrighted by Radio Corporation of America in 1961. I wonder if any of the engineers of that time had any idea of how we would listen to music fifty years later. And I'm thinking, "WHAT, I remember this record. I used to listen to it, but IT'S FIFTY YEARS OLD!!! You can see how this is traumatizing me.

So, I am choosing the records that I enjoy listening to and that have superior sound quality for processing. There is so much music available to us today. Back in 1961, I'm told (it's a little before my time), you had records, tapes and radio. Radio was very local, except at night when you could pick up signals from all across the country. Now we have Internet radio, satellite and the ability to download any kind of music from anywhere, anytime. With cable TV, we also have music of any type available 24 hours a day. How much time do I want to spend recording old LPs when it takes about 45 minutes, give or take a few, to get each record digitized including typing in the names of all the tracks?

In the meantime, I am still trying to get my iPod Touch to sync photos from my computer. I called in my neighbor who knows almost anything to do with computers. He spent over a half hour here yesterday and about an hour or more today and he is baffled by it. He has been searching the Internet for some kind of answer and while some folks have similar problems, none of them has found a solution. We will eventually figure it out, but at least I don't feel so bad that I couldn't figure it out myself. By the way, speaking of music, my neighbor lent me a hard drive with 100 GB of music on it and told me to copy whatever I want. The hard drive has all kinds of music, the kind a DJ would use for a wedding or party.

When I get done with all of this multi-tasking I will have to post some new pictures on this blog. Also, I have not forgotten about my novel that I am writing. I'll get to these things. I should probably listen to some music, but there is so much to choose from. Decisions, decisions.