Obsession Confession

It all started last week. I promised Ms. G if she would cooperate in all her morning activities to get ready that we could listen to her princess songs CD on the way to day care. You know the hit songs from Aladdin, Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. Yes, this is what our listening habits have disintegrated to as of late. We listen to the songs over and over and when we are not listening to them, they are still playing in my head.

Well we get in the car and I insert the disk, but instead of feeding in smoothly, it goes in sluggishly and then the last little bit doesn’t go in. Now in hindsight I know I should have blessed that small bit sticking out and pulled it out right then and there, but no, I shoved it the rest of the way in. Would this have changed the outcome, probably not. Anyway it wouldn’t play, it wouldn’t switch to any other of the 5 cds also inserted in the player, it wouldn't do anything.

Later the hubby looks this issue up on the internet and we find this is a common problem with Troopers with CD changers after about 4 years. My car just hit the 4 year mark about two months ago. There is a trick with a credit card that you can use to try and ease your cd’s out of the player. Some have had luck with this and others haven’t. We didn’t. So here we are riding around without being able to play princess songs. Maybe a blessing in disguise, but really if it keeps Ms. G entertained it’s a good thing, plus she is so cute when she sings along.

So we haul ourselves down to Circuit City to buy a new car stereo. This is a good thing, I can get rid of the CD changer and have a little storage pocket put in, plus the new stereo has an iPod hook up. The only problem is that my iPod is the old shuffle version with a USB connector. So guess what I am getting for Christmas, a new iPod! I am really making out in this deal.

Now to the obsession. While at the hairdresser the other day we got to talking about iPods and CDs and Roger said he had all his CDs burned into iTunes. It got me thinking we have a bunch of CDs burned in but not all of them. Now that I am getting a new iPod, I decided I should burn them all in, except for few losers.

So I started gathering up the CDs, checking to see which ones are already burned in and which ones aren’t. I’ve got three piles going. The pile of ones needing to be burned in is growing. The pile of ones to be checked is out of control. I realize about halfway through this process which has been going on for days, that we have about 400 CDs and probably only 20 or so had been burned in before I started this process. We started out with about 11 gigs of music between what was burned in and also iTunes purchases and now we are up to 20 gigs with another 120 or so CDs to be burned in. So anyway I am obsessed about getting these songs in. I will not rest until every last CD is in my nice neat library.

Some stuff I may never listen to again, especially some of the hubby’s CDs, our musical taste is quite different. In fact out of 400 hundred CDs there are only three duplicates that we brought to the house when we moved in together. No Doubt “Tragic Kingdom”, Wallflowers “Bringing Down the Horse” and Soundgarden “Superunknown”. What is really cool is that I have found a lot of music that is great and that I never listen to anymore because disks are so cumbersome, wow can you believe I just said that! Remember records! Anyway yes, cumbersome.

Being an ex-diva I have some favorites, at the top of the list are Chris Cornell and Ella Fitzgerald. Prior to this obsessive population of my library, their presence was nil in iTunes. Now I have dozens and dozens of songs at my fingertips by these two greats. Yesterday I played Soundgarden’s “Power Trip” and wow I remember what I loved about music and singing, before princess songs ever entered the picture.

Some favorites added include:

Parliament “Tear the Roof Off 1974-1980”
New Order “Substance”
Ella Fitzgerald “Ella in Berlin”, The Best of the Songbooks” “The Legendary Decca Recordings”
Slickee Boys “Cybernetic dreams of Pi”
Fugazi “Repeater”, “In on the Kill Taker”
Ricardo Lemvo “Mambo Yo Yo”
The English Beat “Special Beat Service”
John Coltrane “Mainstream 1958”
Nirvana “Bleach”
Squirrel Nut Zippers “The Inevitable”
Soundgarden “Louder Than Love”
PJ Harvey “Rid of Me”, “To Bring you my Love”
Blackgirls “Procedure”
Black Flag “In my Head”

I could go on but won’t because I am getting behind on sorting out what needs to be burned in, so I have to go and continue with my obsession… And then burn an MP3 disk for the car to listen to until I get the new iPod!