Nobody has posted here for a long time, so I thought I would just sneak on in and maybe no one would notice. I turn 73 this year and am a retired Family physician (reading through the years of posts I noticed there were a few of us). I started collecting music when I was 12 and have never stopped. In 1972/73 while we were still undergraduates, my live with girlfriend (still my wife) decided that I needed something better to play my records on, did a little research and bought me a Sonographe TT for my birthday. She loves music but has never cared about equipment and these days is a little uncomfortable with how complicated and expensive it all is so she sticks to the Sonos system in the kitchen. We still hear a lot of live music, except for pandemic pause and this year have seen X, Dar Williams, Peter Rowan, Lord Huron, Oregon Symphony 4 times and see Beach House tomorrow and Fontaines DC in May.
I guess at this point the living room system is somewhere between $45k-55K, but I continue to want physical discrete objects containing recorded music and I have around 14,000 pieces of vinyl maybe a little more and about 9500 CDs plus a handful of SACD. Now my wife, who is better at numbers limits me to 250 new CDs a year and my friend who is a contractor specializing in old homes when he isn't retired worries about the weight over our heads on the third floor. Kids 2 both in their 30s doing well in their own lives, the horses have all gone to heaven and we love our dogs, cat a little less so. I made over $100,000 one year of my working life and less than $75,000 most years but got to do something I loved in many different situations, Community Clinics (Zen Center of Los Angeles), free clinics, immigrant clinics at churches, self-owned private practice, Teaching in a Family Medicine Residency, and working for a large Catholic Health system. Encountered many characters, wonderful humans an a few but only a few I could have done without. I would have done it longer except for a head injury that put an end to it after 30years as a doc. Took over two years to recover as much as I was able which is good enough for me. Old Bear, Craig