Thoughtful Thursday – Use It Up – Music to my ears

Lessons learned from the Great Depression, via my Grandmother’s kitchen plaque “Use it up, wear it out, make it last, do without.” For the near future, I’ll be focusing on these four strategies. Starting at the beginning “use it up.” OK this is kind of a no-brainer, use all the ketchup, DON’T let leftovers rot in the back of the fridge, utilize that prepper pantry etc. etc. But when I dug a little deeper, I found a lot of assets I am under-utilizing. One of those is my library. We have a wonderful library here in our little town. Many, many resources both on-line and brick and mortar. I recently had an epiphany about just how important music is to me. It sets the tone for my day, times my workouts, inspires me, soothes me; it can pump me up or lull me to sleep. While we were living in South Dakota, I played background music all day, everyday, on the sound system in our RV. Castle Serenity has no such system and I do not feel inclined to spend the money to purchase a new one, soooo I mostly use my phone. I have a wonderful little resource from my library called Freegal which allows me to download 5 songs per week from the library for free. The same library also offers digital albums to borrow rather like e-books. I have a fairly impressive collection of CD’s that I’ve ripped to my backup drive so all, in all I’ve got LOTS of music available. Now, how to utilize it.

I use a little off-line music player (since they did away with googleplay ;-p) called musicolet, works great and, oh yeah it’s FREE. I curate a new playlist for my mornings every month and I’m adding new playlists for evenings and workouts. Here is my “Morning Activities” play list for June:

Beautiful Day – Joshua Radin
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper
Mine – Taylor Swift
Time in a Bottle – Jim Croce
59^th Street Bridge Song – Harpers Bizarre
Super Trooper – ABBA
Bubbly – Colbie Caillat
Come a Little Bit Closer – Jay and the Americans
Hands – Jewel
Firework – Katy Perry
Gypsy – Fleetwood Mac
I Hope You Dance – Lee Ann Womack

There you have it, how I’ve stopped buying music (download or hard copy) by “using up” what I have. If you utilize Spotify, you can also find this playlist here. Next week I’ll touch on the more obvious use for Libraries: reading.

Til next time ~Stay Safe and Be Kind to each other ~JP