Record.

Long day at work on Wednesday. Tim offered to pick me up, so I met him at the red line Fullerton stop. We headed back to Logan Square and Tim shouted "HEY THE RECORD STORE IS OPENNNNN!" We pulled a u-turn and headed in.

We've been without a stereo received for...our entire marriage? We had wandered into this same record store last fall and there were several receivers available, and we'd always been meaning to go back.

So we headed in. The place was bigger, painty-er, and had about four times the stock it did last time. It was a whole new store, but with the same sign it had last time: Logan Hardware. We spent about 30 minutes talking to "Jim," the owner, who walked through all these different receivers; really, I just listened until they said something like "channels" or another term I still remembered from the MSUM music department.

We ended up getting on the high end receivers, and then wandering into a back room that said "STOP. You may enter if you have purchased $10 today..." or something like that. Guess what was back there? ARCADE GAMES. FOREVER. There were all the games Tim had played growing up, and one pinball game for me. There were completely free, and you could play for as long as you liked. Pretty fantastic.

BUT THAT'S NOT THE WEIRDEST PART. I was telling a fellow colleague about the cool arcade stuff, because she also lives in Logan Square but apparently only goes to one restaurant. She recommended I talk to another colleague who "really liked records." To prepare for this conversation, I googled the shop and found out that...

the guy who had sold us our receiver, the owner of the shop, was this guy named Jim Zespy.

Jim Zespy grew up in Fargo. Tim knew him growing up, and I met him in 2002 in my then-boyfriend's apartment. He was a pretty well regarded recording engineer, audiophile, musician, etc. Just WEIRD. Especially because when Tim walked into the arcade, he immediately exclaimed that the games were exactly the ones he had played growing up in Fargo. Duh. Cause that's what this guy based his collection on. Just weird.
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Also. This tid bit. When I finally had the conversation with my colleague (a beautiful young lady who owns a cat, has worked for classical music organizations, complains of having too few bookshelves), I mentioned that we should exchange music sometime. And she said, oh, do you have a specific type of music you like? Cause I like everything, but I really love hard core and metal.

...

...

...

UH...are you serious? I said. She went on to tell me (as we complained about how both of us don't see enough music anymore) that the only concerts she'd seen lately...

was Rob Zombie...

with Korn...

...in Indianapolis...

IN 2010.

Pretty much made my day.