High Fidelity

Finally getting around to a life-related update as opposed to the impersonal NMT reviews I've been doing, here is an update.

Rebecca and I have been putting a lot of work into sprucing up our little downtown Portland apartment to really feel more like home so we've done a little IKEA-ing and a lot of simplifying and reorganizing. Highlights are Becca's beautiful curtains she made for the front room, some bought light-eliminating curtains for the bedroom (sleep tight :)), a much-needed bookshelf, wall hangers for my guitars, and a nice lamp for ambiance and such. Pictures of all of these changes and such will follow, hopefully with some pictures of the pretty fall colors before they're all slimy on the ground.

What this update really is more about is that I finally got to set up my record player that I bought a couple months ago. Along with that, I found the old poster sticky material I still have left over from the dorms for helping me lay the cables for the surround sound around the room. I have to say. Nice smooth vinyl sound through the well set-up (imho) surround system coupled with a good amount of hard surfaces makes for a decent listening room.

Record player. Cheap, but good old records. Becca's cool gold-painted stand. Good times.

A side effect of having the record player available for ready use meant that we had to go raid a local record store for more records. Luckily we found Everyday Music's bargain section. 50 cents a piece with Oregon's lack of sales tax makes collecting old beat up records not very harsh on my wallet. With my nine records for $9.60 and Becca's eight for $9.00 even, I'd say we did pretty well.

$18.60 worth of good decisions.

My purchases: 2001, A Space Odyssey score; Bad Company's 'Straight Shooter'; Jim Croce's 'Life and Times'; Dire Straits' 'Dire Straits'; The Doobie Brothers' 'Taking it to the Streets'; The Doors 'Strange Days'; Heart 'Little Queen'; Jethro Tull 'Aqualung'; Warren Zevon's 'Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School'

Becca's conquests: Donavon in Concert; The Best of the Lovin' Spoonful; Joni Mitchell's 'For the Roses'; Simon and Garfunkel's 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'; Cat Steven's 'Tea for the Tillerman' and 'Teaser and the Firecat'; a collection of Renaissance instrumentals; Puccini

Overall a good haul and lots of good repeated listening times are ahead.

Oh. And here's a picture of the cat looking for attention when we were taking pictures.

Silly Samwise.