I’ve mentioned my record collection many times on the blog. According to Discogs, we currently have 882 albums. Dude: that’s a lot.
Discogs, by the way, is one of the most useful apps I’ve ever downloaded. Without it, I don’t know how we’d ever sort our collection; keeping track of that much vinyl is impossible without a little digital assistance. We’d probably end up with six copies of Rumours, which – as much as I love Fleetwood Mac – is five copies too many.
Side note: I’m glad I started collecting records in earnest years before they became trendy again, because prices – even for used – have gone up quite a bit since 2007. New vinyl averages $25+ these days (and $35–$45 is not uncommon). Otherwise, I’d have to take out a second mortgage.
Alexa, Pick a Random Number
I’ve also talked about our go-to Saturday evening ritual: once 5:00 rolls around, we settle in for a night of cards, records, and drinks. We’ve been doing this since we first started living together in 2012, the only change being a switch from Friday to Saturday to ensure work or traffic would never interfere. It’s a great way to unwind after a busy week and a ton of fun. We play rummy or cribbage or SkipBo. Make tacos or burgers or maybe order a pizza and keep the party going for 4-5 hours. I always look forward to these evenings.
Music is a big part of our card nights, and we like to come up with a theme or genre (classic rock, ’80s bands, British Invasion, grunge, etc.). But sometimes we have no clue what we want to listen to, so we have Alexa choose our tunes.
“Alexa, pick a random number between 1 and 15,” we’ll say, because our albums fill 15 cubes of shelving. Once she’s picked that number, we ask her to choose a random number between 1 and 55, which is roughly how many albums each cube holds. So, for instance – I’m doing this right now for the blog – she picked 2, then 46. Which means we’d be starting our night out with Bon Jovi, Slippery When Wet (clearly Tara’s addition), and then choosing the rest ourselves. Alexa gives us a good starting point.
Since we’re always in the mood to mix things up, I recently suggested we limit our music to records in just a single cube. Tara thought that would be fun, so Saturday, we asked Alexa for just one number between 1 and 15. She randomly chose 10, which meant our options ranged from Night Ranger to Pretenders, The.
Guess I should also mention they’re arranged alphabetically. We’d never be able to find what we were looking for otherwise.
Housed within that cube are an eclectic batch of records. Like Nirvana and Oasis, Roy Orbison and Pearl Jam, Tom Petty and Phantogram, The Police and Pink Floyd, Elvis Presley and The Outfield. We had all kinds of fun mixing it up.
Thanks, digital DJ!
Fool Me Three Times, Shame on You
Happy April Fools’ Day! This has long been one of my favorite pseudo-holidays. But you guys know that already. Some of you have fallen victim to my pranks. Some of you have fallen victim to my pranks more than once. Sorry ’bout that.
(Not really though.)
I debated writing a we’re-moving-again! blog post today, trying to convince you we were continuing our eastward trek across the country, but decided the chances of fooling anyone this time around were slim to none.
One of the things I miss most about CenturyCo in Rapid City is the employee newsletter. Specifically, the April edition, where I was given free rein to create an April Fools’ issue. This led to articles about how our “fiber to the home” initiative would now include a bowl of oatmeal alongside blazing-fast gigabyte internet speeds, that we were borrowing a page from the NFL and drafting our next CEO, and all kinds of wacky telecom-themed goodness. That kind of satirical humor is my bread and butter.
Thinking about that last week, I wondered if I might be allowed to do a similar April Fools’-themed post on CheeseGov’s social media platforms. I figured the odds were slim, being a public-facing agency that virtually every Wisconsinite has an interaction with, but you never know unless you ask, right? So, I brought it up to my boss during our Wednesday one-on-one meeting, and her answer was swift and to the point.
Not a chance in hell.
I get it. A lot of people already mistrust the government. The last thing we need is to stoke those flames and make it worse. Even though my idea was pretty harmless – I suggested we unveil a new agency logo with gaudy colors, a tacky Comic Sans font, and a block of cheddar with a smiley face in there somewhere – she still didn’t want to rock the boat.
Oh, well. There’s always next year. Only not really, because I guess I can break the news to you now: I’ve just been diagnosed with a terminal illness and the doctors give me three months to live…
Ope, sorry. Old habits die hard.
Mark My Words 
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