Yes, I have records. LP's. 12" vinyl platters. The ones that weigh down, are fragile, attract scratches and aren't portable. Yeah, those. Most of the time, I think they exist in our common consciousness as some icon disassociated from what people think when they see the icon.

No one who sees the record icon will think of LPs. They may think of recordings in general, both the nound and verb. They may generalize it to music. Maybe they understand the concept of an album, a set of songs the creator wishes to be heard, either as an accidental set or a deliberate composition.

Him, I just self-distracted. Anyhow, SK has a collection of "Let's Pretend" stories on LP. These are radio plays for kids from the 1950's (one set) and 1970's (the other set.) She loves these, and wanted them recorded to our MP3 player before her scan so she could listen to them and get her mind distracted from the scanning machine and the pain that lying flat on her back would generate.

We went out and purchased a USB turntable. It has RCA jacks too, but we purchased it for the USB connectivity. It's quite amazing: we plugged it into our laptop, then waited with the install CD at the ready. No need - for some reason, Windows (XP, mind you, not Vista) recognized it for what it was.

Then since, I've been recording albums to MP3. First, we went through the 20+ LPs. Then, with Halloween next up on Kitten's holiday calendar (I guess Labor Day doesn't count.) we recorded her scant handful of Halloween records. At that point, I wanted to keep it in use - I figure we purchased it, and we should use it to get the most out of our money.

Well, the holiday after Halloween that was of major significance to Kitten is Christmas. Then again, it's SK's favourite time of the year, so Kitten may have caught it from her. At any rate, we're now recording Christmas LP albums to MP3. In the middle of summer.

I want to make sure SK has her happy place music if she needs to go anyplace else for any other long and painful scan.