A Hearty Welcome to 2025!

Good afternoon! And welcome to the 2025 Christmas sharity season! It's been a long time since last Christmas (when I gave you my heart, and a whole awful lot of 45's!) but I'm back with a big long season just chock full of music you may or may not want to listen to. I've got good stuff, I've got bad stuff and I've got lots of stuff in between. You're just going to have to look and listen to figure out if it's a good fit for your playlist or lot. I think there's something worth listening to in each and every one of these records, even if it's only one time. I've been recording albums for myself since just before Christmas of last year, I just got the itch to start ripping some of my new records and I haven't let up since. I think the most recent record I ripped was less than a week ago. Not sure if anything that recent will have time to get all the way through the process, but maybe. I don't have an exact count but I estimate I've ripped about 450 full albums in the past 365 days. I've also made over 3400 passes with the scanner to assemble all these album covers. I've generated over 20,000 files between all the individual songs and images taking up hudreds of gigabytes on my poor old hard drive. I have not finished all 450 of those records, nor will I share them all. Quite a few of them are just records I wanted to listen to and if you want to listen to them they are streaming on Spotify or Amazon or Apple Music (Does anyone call it iTunes anymore?). But I've got plenty of obscure stuff for you that so far has escaped the digital era. I've been thinking about what to say to you today for weeks now, yet when I actually sit down and begin to type it all flitters away like butterflies in a hurricane. Oh, I need to share the fact that most of the season this year will be on autopilot. Sometime just after the middle of the year, my wife's family invited us to spend the holiday with them in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I've never spent a Christmas way from my own warm home here in Central Florida, so this is truly going to be a Christmas adventure for me. I've spent the past two months trying to get all my records finished up and all the shares pre-posted so that the blog keeps going even when I'm in the great American Southwest. If I see something interesting out there (like snow!), I'll try to drop in a picture if I can. And I plan to respond to comments just as quickly as possible, so please leave plenty. You know that a blog like this exists because of feedback from the visitors, so please let me know what you like, what you don't like, what you think might be interesting or related to the record at hand. This place is the most fun when it's a little community of folks who are all here for the music. I'll also have a laptop with a terabyte of data stashed away just in case I need to fix something I've done wrong in the mad dash to the finish. It may take me a day or two if I need to correct a link or something, but I should be able to make it happen. When I found out we were going west for the holidays, I figured I'd have to cut back to a single post a day (like last year), but the harder I worked the further I got and I think you'll be surprised with how much I was able to pull together and how long we keep going. I don't want to give anything away, but it's going to get crazy around here at times. Tomorrow is Black Friday, and after you've gone and celebrated Record Store Day, stop by Wal-Mart and get yourself a new, giant external hard drive. (Be sure it's a Western Digital though. I got a Seagate last time that only show 10% of the advertised space when I fired it up, and they refused to replace it, saying I had modified it somehow! I'm still angry about that and want my $150 back.) You're going to need that space because I'm sharing everything in FLAC this year. The files sizes are about double the size of the old MP3s and I know not everyone is going to be happy about the format change, but we've got to move forward sometimes and this is the year for me. There are plenty of software packages out there that will convert this music to whatever format you may need for your iPod, Zune, or even RealPlayer. Everything I have from my phone to my car handles FLAC with no problem these days, so I made the plunge and have not looked back. I'll think of more to say later, but I'll sign off for now. Don't forget to leave me a comment whenever possible, that's how I judge my self-worth this time of the year. I'll be reading them aloud to my in-laws as we sit around the fire each evening in our adobe hacienda. They love to hear what you guys have to say, or at least I hope they will. I plan to provide a soundtrack to each evening that will quite likely drive them all insane. Here we go, hold on tight! Keep arms and hands inside the vehicle at all times and take small children firmly by the hand!