Retirement Projects

I am really enjoying retirement here in the Villages, even though we've barely scratched the surface of things to do.  First, we can wake up when we're ready, with no alarm jarring us our of sleep. I get up and go outside to find the daily newspaper on our driveway.  This is the local paper, the Daily Sun, which gives a little national news, but is mostly focused on things happening in our area.  Over breakfast I read the paper, then spend a little time exercising.  Then after a shower I get dressed and proceed with whatever I feel like doing with the rest of the day.

In an effort to reduce clutter, I have been working on 2 long-term projects.  One is to scan all the documents, recipes and photos we have collected over the years.  The photos I will eventually give to someone in the family, but the documents and recipes get recycled, slowly eliminating some of the clutter we brought with us.  This is easy to do while I am doing other things, because my scanner is in my office (formerly the breakfast nook) right off the kitchen.

The second project is to rip all the LP's we have collected to MP3 files and add them to my iTunes library.  From there they will be available to play in the house or on my iPod when we travel.  I now have 16, 905 songs in iTunes.  Most are from our CD collection, which I ripped a long time ago.  I'll probably be working the rest of the year on the LPs, since they have to be played through in real time in order to copy them.   I start the day by putting a record on the turntable while I'm making breakfast and continue playing as many as I can throughout the morning.  Then, later in the day, when I get a chance, I copy the resulting files to my computer and edit them to remove unwanted scratch noises, split the albums into individual songs, and add all the info such as artist, album name, composer, genre, etc.  It's time consuming, but fun.  Ray can never tell what kind of music he'll hear me playing each day.  This week it is a 21 record set of his called "The Swing Era", with music from the 1930's through the 1950's.  It's great wake-up music.