Oh well.....Life goes on

As my dad used to say. Life is getting back to normal a little more everyday. Tonight we have an artist's meeting at the new studio. This will be my first full week back at work. We'll see if I make it thru the whole week. Last week we took off Thursday-Saturday to get the house clean and put my dad's record collection away in one of the bedrooms.

Not sure if I've written about my dad's record collection before. My dad was nuts about music. When I say nuts, I mean he had OCD. He collected records, I'm talking vinyl here, albums and 45s, starting when he was around 16. He ended up with a collection of around 40,000 records! It's difficult to picture that many records, so let me help with the visualization. His record collection takes up one FULL bedroom! That is records all around the room floor to ceiling! Now, many people have record collections, but not only did he collect them, he organized them! They are all cataloged extensively. The 45s are cataloged chronologically by the week they hit the Billboard top 100 and also by artist alphabetically. The albums are cataloged in alphabetical order by artist. He had the top 100 singles from 1943 thru the early 1990s!

Some of my best memories as a kid were the times I spent with my dad listening to music. It's no wonder I married a musician! Dad always had a record room. When I was younger it was just a closet or half a room, but as I got older, they took up more and more space. I remember weekends spent combing yard sales, Goodwill and anywhere else he could find records for a quarter or less. My brother and I would always whine because it was so boring! He always had a list in his wallet of the records he was looking for to fill out the collection. Every week when he received his newest Billboard magazine he would show me which songs had gone up the charts, which had fallen, and which were new to the charts. That was always my favorite part because he would then play any new records for me and we would talk about what we liked or didn't like. He loved to make me mix tapes of my favorites and I would play them on my cassette player over and over. If there was a record I liked, he would buy it for me and make a tape. I rarely got to keep the record myself, unless he had a double of it!

Now, all those records are in my house and I look forward to playing them soon. We still need to put up shelves so they can be accessed and set up our record player so they can be played. I know he will be there beside me, listening to music, just like the old days.