Bonus

One bonus of my crafts room reorganization is the reorganization of our family's collection of compact discs.  The girls each have their own personal collections in their rooms, and I have no clue how - or whether - they are organized at all (not my business, thank goodness).  But the discs you see above are for all of us, and up until a couple of days ago they were scattered all over the house, with most of them gathering dust in my crafts room, which does not boast a CD player!  In fact, there are still about a dozen discs in Avi's car (and his CD player there is broken).  Need to get those into the drawer.

Naturally, I had to separate by category (but not too much) and alphabetize.  I can't help myself.  There is a divider running down the middle, from the back of the drawer to the front - if you look closely you'll spot it.  On the left of the divider is general, popular music.  Those discs are alphabetized by artist's first name (some don't use a last name, after all - like Beyonce and P!nk) or by name of movie if it is a songtrack (like Lion King or Hairspray).  We've got lots of variety in there, from Aretha all the way to Zydeco.  Over the years on our family vacations we have purchased a lot of the music Avi and I enjoyed when we were young, for our own pleasure and to introduce the girls to great music from the past: the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Billy Joel, Louis Armstrong, Phil Collins, the Temptations, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Celine Dion...  This summer I think I want to pick up some Tower of Power and possibly Earth, Wind & Fire...

We also like to explore unfamiliar music, and on one trip we happened upon some kind of fair or festival.  More than anything else we saw or did there, the music really grabbed us, and we ended up buying CDs by two new-to-us groups: Sajama and Brian Jack and the Zydeco Gamblers.  As I said,  Avi and I share our favorites from the past with the girls, and they keep us up to date on the music world of today, but discovering music together was a great experience.

Anyway, on the right hand side of the divider, in the front we have classical music (from Bach to Vivaldi) and in the back, Israeli music.  The latter runs the gamut from collections for kids to such artists as Ofra Haza, Shalom Hanoch, music from Avi's youth (by such groups as Kaveret), Danny Sanderson and Kobi Oz.

Of course you know the next step is for me to make a list of what we have, so that we don't buy any duplicates this summer!