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other thoughts running

Records, playing, long

[Today’s run: 3.2 miles]

This week’s runs were M-W-F and gym days were M-Th. I’m going to head south early in the morning instead of going to Starkville for the running group. I hope to be on the water, fishing with my son not too long after the sun comes up.

I’ve made some purchases of LP records lately. I bought one on-line and about a dozen at a local thrift shop. The on-line one was Boz Scaggs. The thrift shop haul was mostly classical with a couple of Tony Bennett albums thrown in.

I play them on a cheap turntable attached to my Fisher X-100 tube amplifier which I refurbished awhile back.

The speakers are Klipsh KG2 which I bought right after we were first married. I bought the speakers, an NAD receiver and an NAD CD player… and one music CD. We were living in Chicago and my wife didn’t understand why we needed a stereo. But I had gotten my first full time job and she gave me a bit of leeway. The NAD stuff is long gone but the speakers are still here.

Some of the records I had in my teen years have disappeared over time. Maybe some day they will turn up. But I have plenty to choose from.

I also have a CD player and some CDs, nothing amazing.

For classical albums, there are a lot of recordings of the standard stuff available and I don’t really know which are good and which aren’t. But if I see a name I recognize I usually go that way. I go for the Horowitz or Van Cliburn or Itzhak Perlman or Yo Yo Ma if given the option. I would say my tastes are middling when it comes to composers.

I have some jazz too. I would like to get Ellington’s Far East Suite. I had checked that out from the library one time and I enjoyed it. And I would like to get the Brubeck Quartet Time Out album that has Take Five on it. I have some big band stuff that I like, one in particular is Moonglow by the Artie Shaw orchestra. Somehow I ended up with a whole bunch of George Benson.

My daughter bought me Abbey Road a few years ago and that is my only Beatles record. I have a lot of Chicago.


Forty seven years sounds like a long time. This year they are doing RAGBRAI 50 (this coming week), which means it was 47 years ago that I last did it.