Working to Carols

And that's what I did today, did my work to Christmas carols. And ended up traveling in time.

A lot of my Christmas music is still on cassette, having been collected one by one, most of them not in print anymore and not on CD, from places that no longer exist: MediaPlay and Oxford Books. James has had, for many years, a dual tape deck which we have used to play cassettes in the living room. Several years ago the uptake spoke on the left-hand side quit working so since then I have been playing Christmas tapes on the right-hand deck. This morning the uptake spoke on the right deck quit working as well.

I could have played the tapes on the deck in my craft room, but instead I pulled out the Panasonic tape recorder I bought back in 1980 to copy off the episodes of Star Blazers that I was audio recording off WSBK TV-38 every morning (yeah, I really do like the series that much). I haven't played poor "Calvin"—it has lots of red buttons on the front; I thought immediately of Calvin O'Keefe in A Wrinkle in Time—in ages. I have to wiggle the volume button to get the sound to play properly, but it still runs pretty well. Just a bit of old-fashioned hiss in the background. Very nostalgic indeed.