Retail Therapy

[Happy birthday to anu3bis!]

Unlike many of our friends, msmemory and I are pretty fond of shopping as recreation. Not necessarily *buying* stuff, mind -- simple window shopping is often fine for us.

That said, we don't indulge quite as much as we might wish, for a variety of reasons. The bad economy, and my rather uncertain income, mean that we have to keep the outflow under control. Even more, there's the issue of finding space for stuff -- we're trying to keep this house less cluttered than the old one, so we can't buy stuff willy-nilly, because it all has to go somewhere. And frankly, I'm a novelty-focused lifeform: the mall holds little interest for me, because it's all the same boring stores.

Today, however, was an example of Shopping Doom for us, aided and abetted by a good cause.

This weekend, WUMB is raising some money by selling off much of its huge collection of LPs and CDs. I assume that they've transcribed all this stuff to digital format or something, and are selling the physical media. Prices are quite reasonable ($4 per CD, less for LPs), so we decided to go paw through the 15,000 albums they have on display.

We were doing okay for a while -- there were one or two interesting discs and some that seemed worth buying on spec, on the theory that $4 is low enough to experiment a bit. Then I realized that there was a whole 'nother, smaller section. *That* turned out to be where all the folk music was, and our fate was sealed.

Suffice it to say, we went broke saving money. They had dozens of albums from Folk-Legacy Records, lots of Green Linnet and Rounder, and so on -- it took an effort of will to not buy *everything* from Folk-Legacy. We synergized in the worst way: I went through and picked up half the Christine Lavin, and then she went through that section 20 minutes later and picked up the rest. I took the whole collection of Capitol Steps, because silly political music is always welcome. (And nonetheless, we only managed to replace one of the LPs -- the seminal Turning Towards the Morning by Bok, Trickett and Muir.)

It was outrageous even by our standards: we bought something like 2 years' worth of CDs in just under 2 hours. But the money's going to a good cause (I think we spent our way through a lifetime's worth of pledge breaks), we got a *huge* amount of music for the money, and it'll take us six months to listen to it all. I quite look forward to it...

Retail Therapy

[Happy birthday to anu3bis!]

Unlike many of our friends, msmemory and I are pretty fond of shopping as recreation. Not necessarily *buying* stuff, mind -- simple window shopping is often fine for us.

That said, we don't indulge quite as much as we might wish, for a variety of reasons. The bad economy, and my rather uncertain income, mean that we have to keep the outflow under control. Even more, there's the issue of finding space for stuff -- we're trying to keep this house less cluttered than the old one, so we can't buy stuff willy-nilly, because it all has to go somewhere. And frankly, I'm a novelty-focused lifeform: the mall holds little interest for me, because it's all the same boring stores.

Today, however, was an example of Shopping Doom for us, aided and abetted by a good cause.

This weekend, WUMB is raising some money by selling off much of its huge collection of LPs and CDs. I assume that they've transcribed all this stuff to digital format or something, and are selling the physical media. Prices are quite reasonable ($4 per CD, less for LPs), so we decided to go paw through the 15,000 albums they have on display.

We were doing okay for a while -- there were one or two interesting discs and some that seemed worth buying on spec, on the theory that $4 is low enough to experiment a bit. Then I realized that there was a whole 'nother, smaller section. *That* turned out to be where all the folk music was, and our fate was sealed.

Suffice it to say, we went broke saving money. They had dozens of albums from Folk-Legacy Records, lots of Green Linnet and Rounder, and so on -- it took an effort of will to not buy *everything* from Folk-Legacy. We synergized in the worst way: I went through and picked up half the Christine Lavin, and then she went through that section 20 minutes later and picked up the rest. I took the whole collection of Capitol Steps, because silly political music is always welcome. (And nonetheless, we only managed to replace one of the LPs -- the seminal Turning Towards the Morning by Bok, Trickett and Muir.)

It was outrageous even by our standards: we bought something like 2 years' worth of CDs in just under 2 hours. But the money's going to a good cause (I think we spent our way through a lifetime's worth of pledge breaks), we got a *huge* amount of music for the money, and it'll take us six months to listen to it all. I quite look forward to it...