I definitely dwell mostly on the negative side of things, and there is certainly a lot to be negative about!
But I'll list a few positive developments, though a few are minor indeed.
I have had a few abstracts accepted to conferences recently. It's nice to know I haven't lost my touch, even though I don't really have enough time allocated to this sort of thing at work, which means tackling it in the evenings, along with all the other things I am trying to juggle.
While I seem to be missing a lot of the Sun Ra music that I have downloaded or ripped in the last year or so, I did come across a folder of 8 albums and I have another 2 on another hard drive. I know I have far more than that, so, hopefully, I will come across that fairly soon.
I have been filling in some gaps in my jazz collection. For some reason I am interested in relatively early 1950s jazz from France. Recently I picked up some CDs by Hubert Fol and Guy Lafitte. I also managed to locate a re-issue of a rare LP called Jazz Boom No 1.
I had assumed I had ripped this previously, but that doesn't seem to be the case, so I just ripped it now, which greatly increases the odds I can listen to it while at work! I'm partway through ripping 2 box sets from Vogue records, and in a few cases trying to track down some of the sessions that weren't issued in the box sets.
I actually have quite a long ways to go with the ripping, and I probably should try to finish ripping several classical box sets I have lying around, but before too long, I would like to re-rip the Jazz in Paris box set. (I ripped it back around 2005, but at a fairly lossy level, and I don't think I even captured song titles or the key performers.)
Between the original box and a bunch of follow-up re-issues, there are something like 120 CDs involved, which will clearly mean going to get another hard drive to back things up properly in multiple locations! I have no idea what I paid for the set, though likely around $250. I see the few complete sets on the market are running close to $2000!
We had quite a rain storm in the early evening, though it was just about done raining by the time the movie (The Dead Zone) ended. The streets were, in fact, flooded, and I was very glad that our basement was fine, as I was half-expecting water to be seeping in.
The last thing that has gone better than expected is that our dehumidifier in the basement had stopped working because the filter was jammed up with lint (and cat hair). I cleaned this off and put it back together, but it wouldn't run. I tried all kinds of resetting buttons and even just leaving it off for a day to let it cycle back to normal, but nothing worked. I was very close to calling a repair man for a quote (though realizing it was probably just as cheap to buy a new one!), when it started working again spontaneously. It's been running ok for a week now, and hopefully we won't have any other issues for a while. It's certainly unusual for an appliance like that to self-repair, but it was definitely good news for me.
