I’ve been recording my vinyls onto tape. That’s because the CD player in my car doesn’t work, so I always just hooked up a portable CD player into the tape deck with a tape adapter. Then I bequeathed an iPod from a friend when he got a new one.

  Last week, or maybe the week before, the portable CD player and iPod both stopped working. I don’t think it was on the same day, but pretty close.

  So until I get the built-in CD player fixed, which might be covered under some esoteric insurance policy, I’ll be listening to tapes. I grabbed up all my good tapes I have left and have been pretty disappointed with most of what I’ve found at thrift stores in the last few weeks.

  Tapes are pretty short. A lot of them have lost that little cloth-like square that goes under the very bottom of the cassette and they squeak horribly, making them unlistenable like fingernails scraping across the dashboard.

  I’ve listened to the same 15 or 20 tapes at least once, and some twice already.

  So I’ve started recoding CDs and vinyls to blank tapes. I have to sit there and listen to the whole thing as it’s recording in my room, so I probably won’t want to listen to those records in the car anytime soon.

  The problem is cassette tapes are only 30 minutes on each side. So I’m pulling together albums, EPs, best of collections and any other music on one disc that are either 30 minutes or an hour.

  If an album is 30 minutes I can fit one on each side of a tape. The problem with hour-long albums is the song in the middle is going to get cut in half when the tape flips.

 While recording vinyl to tape you have to pay attention so you can stop the tape and flip the record to record the second side.

  But damn, it’s fun. I’ve also been making mixtapes – with real tapes. I really like picking up whatever records are lying around, picking some songs and making them fit together. It just feels like a more personal mix when you sit there an watch the records spin as you record them from a round disc of hard plastic onto a thin strip of fragile plastic.

  It’s amazes me more than any CD or MP3. I don’t need a computer to do this (except for the stopwatch, but if I had a stopwatch, I wouldn’t need the computer at all. It’s to time each side to make sure I don’t run out of tape in the middle of a song. That would be a horrible tease.

  I’ve found that you can’t use 90 minute tapes in car tape players because they get stuck.

So I’m scouring my collection, using iTunes and allmusic.com to look at lengths of albums. Most vinyls have the song length next to each song, but not how long each side of the album is.

  One my friends used to listen to Bookends every day on his ride to work, which was exactly 30 minutes, exactly the length of that album. I need to pickup some Minutemen albums, which can be as short as 15 minutes.

Here is a list of albums that I have, in no particular order, that are 30 minutes or less:

The Clientele – Minotuar (26:47)

Tim Hardin – One (27:10)

The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night (30:06)

Nick Drake – Pink Moon (28:22)

Simon & Garfunkel – Parsley, Sage Rosemary and Thyme (27:51)

Simon & Garfunkel – Bookends (29:13)

The Descendents – Everything Sucks (28:20)

Emitt Rhodes – Mirror (27:31) I only have this on vinyl and have never seen it on CD

Buddy Holly – The “Chirping” Crickets (28:27)

Bob Dylan – Nashville Skyline (26:48)

The Byrds – Notorious Byrd Brothers (28:28)

Albums I don’t have that are under 30 minutes:

The Ramones – Ramones (28:53) (why don’t I have this?)

Credence Clearwater Revival – Green River (28:47)

The Rolling Stones – December’s Children (29:04)

Aretha Franklin – Lady Soul (28:41)

Serge Gainsbourg – History de Melody Nelson (27:57) (also one of the coolest album covers of all time)

Here is a list of albums that are an hour or less:

Miles Davis – Round About Midnight (58:15)

Howlin’ Wolf – His Best: Chess 50^th Anniversary Collection (55:42)

Bob Dylan – Love and Theft (57:25)

Wilco – Summerteeth (60:04)

—Stefan

I am currently on my THIRD LG Lotus. 

First of all, you might be asking yourselves why I’ve bothered to buy two more Lotuses after the first one. Why I didn’t upgrade to something snazzy like an iBlackberry or whatnot. 

Or you might be asking yourself what the heck a Lotus even IS. (Although from the above paragraph you should be able to tell, unless you were asleep during the lesson in elementary school on context clues.)

A Lotus is a cell phone, and until recently, it always seemed to be the right cell phone for me—durable, reliable, and decorated in a pretty color. 

Yet, about a year after I bought my first version and paraded its purple beauty around town, I broke it. I broke it on my thirtieth birthday party night, trying to plug my camera charger into the phone port. 

Yes, I had been drinking a bit. 

At THAT point, I fortunately was eligible for an upgrade from Sprint, so I got a second Lotus for about fifty bucks. 

Unfortunately, that second Lotus broke last week. I came over to my friend Lauren’s house, and somehow champagne got spilled on it. 

(Enough with the jokes about drinking and cell phone mishaps. I’ve learned my lesson…I think.)

At first, I thought my phone was ok. It seemed that just one button was a little …slow. THEN, the other night, the whole freakin’ thing stopped working. 

I tried to call my student, to inquire whether she’d be in class, and my phone chose instead to call my family’s shoe shop. Imagine my surprise when I heard my Uncle Joe’s voice. 

“Uncle Joe?? Uhh…I guess I have the wrong number.”

It didn’t take long to figure out that my phone had gone completely ape-shit and was calling random wrong numbers. 

I frantically checked Craig’s List, after recalling the fact that I am NOT eligible for another phone until February. I found a Lotus for sale, for fifty bucks. 

I bought it. 

I bought it from this family in North Charleston. They drove up in their Buick, handed me the phone and its “accessories,” (an incorrect charger, but luckily I still have two) all shadily wrapped in a brown, unlabeled box. 

I took it home and I got it activated. I’m satisfied, despite the fact that the new phone is black, not purple floral like the other two. 

Beggars can’t be choosers, after all. 

And I’ve decided that if I break this phone, I’ll just downgrade to one of those Zack Morris cell phones. Heck—I had my first cell phone for a total of four years. It was archaic. And it kicked ass. 

—Denise 

 I fixed Denise’s camera, a Kodak point and shoot, by spraying compressed air from a can of duster spray onto the lens.  The first weekend of April, Denise went to Myrtle Beach without me to visit some friends. I would’ve gone but I instead opted to blast some organ at my first show with my new awesome band Go For Launch (www.goforlaunchband.com) that weekend.

  Although Denise kept her camera in a little case, sand still got in. If you go to the beach, sand gets everywhere. I read at Kodak.com that it’s best to keep your camera in a plastic zip-close bag if you plan on taking it to the beach.

  The sand particles kept the lens from extending properly. When the camera turns on, the lens extends. When it turns off it retracts. After the sand it was turning on briefly – it extended for a moment, then retracted and turned back off.

  Denise went to Best Buy where she bought the camera last fall and they said they saw sand and that’s damage caused by the operator. They wouldn’t replace it or fix it. Kodak said the same.

 I read a ton of blogs about how to fix a camera. None of the advice worked. But there was one I hadn’t tried because it wasn’t readily accessible. We’d given up on trying to fix it after a few weeks, when I decided to take the camera with me.

  I went to a good pawn shop (they do exist) that still sells film cameras and has an employee that knows cameras. He said he may know how to fix it. I had to dip out of work for 30 minutes because I missed him on my lunch break – apparently he took his break at the same time I did. When I finally met up with him, but he only tried what I’d already done – take out the battery, take out the memory card, obvious stuff. He didn’t fix it and said he was stumped. I told him I’d keep trying.

  At work we have a few cans of duster spray if you know how to kindly ask the right people. I sprayed the lens while the camera was off. Then I sprayed the lens as it extended and retraced, and turned off again several times.

  Still not working.

  After the fifth or sixth time spraying all sides of the lens it kept turning off in split seconds. I was ready to give up. That was supposed to be the solution! At least according to those fix your camera blogs, which I don’t entirely trust … maybe it’s the internet I don’t trust. The other solutions didn’t work either.

  I figured I’d give it one more shot. Spraying around lens. Power on. Lens extends, keep spraying all around it … What! Magic! Sha-boom! said my head as it took a second to dawn on me that the camera stayed on! The lens stayed extended!

  I was indescribably excited, relieved and proud.

  “It’s working, it’s working!” I exclaimed to my two co-workers in production. They got excited too, and said production can help fix anything.

  “Persistence pays off,” I said, smiling, and they agreed.

  I was so happy that I could spare my honey from spending another $150 on a similar camera.

  I wiped the remaining sand specks off the lens with a soft cloth and sprayed duster all around the extended lens. I took some photos, but they turned out blurry. I wasn’t worried though, because I’d read about that on the blogs … how the first few shots after a fix like that are blurry, but they get better.

  In what was a daring move at the time, I turned the camera off. I crossed my fingers. It turned on again, and stayed on. I took more photos and they were clear as day. I called Denise to tell her the good news.

—Stefan

And now for the answer of what you’ve been wondering: 

What it’s really like to date a writer when you ARE a writer. 

Well, I’ll tell you what, it’s not easy sometimes. Mostly because recently I’ve come to following startling conclusion:

Stefan’s a harder worker than me. 

That’s right—I said it! And you might ask why I say this? Well, for example, every time I have writing to do, I do what any normal writer does. 

I put it off. 

And of course, Stefan inevitably asks me at some point, “Babe, did you get any of your writing done today?”

Um. No. But I’m working on it. 

There have also been times when I blew off a phone interview until a later time, or another day, only to be reprimanded by Stefan:

“Honey. You should always go ahead and get the interview WHEN YOU HAVE THEM ON THE PHONE!” 

Right. Okay. Thanks for the advice. 

Because Stefan and I are both in the writing profession, I also admittedly find it difficult to let him “proof” any of my stories. However, a recent piece I did for a regional magazine caused me much distress—it was my first for that publication—so much that I ASKED STEFAN TO LOOK IT OVER!!! 

Which he happily did, and no, he didn’t BUTCHER the thing,  but let’s face it—  a critique by the same person who washes your back in the shower can be rather…daunting. 

I guess my point here is, if you plan to mix business with pleasure, proceed with caution. But hey, Stefan and I manage to make it work, don’t we? 

—Denise 

I stopped at a McDonald’s this morning to start my week with food and coffee to give me morning energy. I’m not a morning person. I got my food, but the not-so-smart cashier made it more difficult than necessary by not listening. I’m quite certain I wasn’t mumbling, and the toddler that was screaming as if the Empire State Building just toppled over onto him was taken to the bathroom where his gripes were muted somehow by his mother or the thick door.

  Here’s a transcription of my conversation with the cashier that I wrote on the back of the receipt while waiting for my food and coffee.

“How are you doing today?”

“Good,” I said, half joking, glad I wasn’t that kid or his mother. “I’d like a number one with coffee and two creamers, to go.”

“You want the meal?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want to drink?”

“Coffee.” Did she not listen to anything I just said, I thought.

“Small, medium or large?”

“Small.”

“Cream or sugar?”

“Yes, creamer.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“Sugar?”

“No.”

“Is that for here or to go?”

  She seemed like a robot programmed to ask each question in a certain order instead of listening when I gave her all she needed to know in the first sentence. I guess she couldn’t push the buttons on the computer in any order without asking all those questions.

  The big wigs ideally want to hire people that need as little training as possible. They’re like automatons. The less training each fast food employee requires, the more corporate dollars go to the upper circles. I’m not saying the cashier is at fault, but it would’ve been a lot easier and could’ve saved us some breath if she’d listened.

—Stefan