I'm currently listening to Christopher Tolkien read The Silmarillion ("Of Beren and Lúthien"). On LP. I picked up "The J.R.R. Tolkien Soundbook", which includes two records on which Tolkien reads excerpts from The Hobbit and all three books of The Lord Of The Rings, one record on which Tolkien recites and sings poems and songs in English and Elvish, and the aforementioned reading of The Silmarillion by his son.
It took a lot for me to play these. The set cost me ten dollars. They came in a cardboard case, which was beat up a bit. Each album was sealed in plastic. The virgin playing of each record was captured using a USB turntable. Had I been able to find the recordings on CD, I would have not opened them to play them, but all I could find were cassette sets in fair to good condition. Yeah, it was probably foolish to crack these babies open, but I'm not regretting it.
In other news, there's a bit of a leak in my house. We noticed it whenever the dishwasher ran. It leaked right down a drain pipe, right into the basement. We called a plumber out to take a look, and he wanted to put a hole in our wall to find the source, and I would have to move the dishwasher. And he would charge me $120. So I came home from work and removed the dishwasher. I then filled the sink up and let the water out while Sarah watched the leaky place in the basement (the dishwasher shares the drain with the sink). No leak. I repeated the process just to be sure. I then ran a rinse cycle while the dishwasher was in the middle of my kitchen. No leak in the basement. Then Sarah noticed that the kitchen floor was flooded. Yep, our two year old dishwasher was leaking. She called the plumber and told him we didn't require his services, and I began looking for what exactly was leaking.
The heating element has two wires attached to it. The element is inside the tub, the wires outside. The element penetrates the bottom of the tub to receive the wires, and the gaskets that seal that hole had failed, causing the mess. We'll be ordering a replacement, but I'm concerned about this happening again in two years. Any advice there?
And that's about it for now. Wassup?