Vinyl shelf A-G, starting with Air and ending with Galaxie 500.

Our ongoing saga of music storage continues and this week, record shelves arrived. This is fortunate because we are people who like vinyl.

It's a habit I can't give up. I grew up listening to records (back when you could still buy LPs for $6.99 and up) on the worst stereos imaginable. Then there were all those days at the radio station with the legions of QAX records. Then there were the halcyon days of the early and mid-'90s, when everyone else unloaded their vinyl collections for CDs and you could fill in your collection at Reckless for cheap or at the old Galgano's on Irving Park for $1 an album.

In recent years, I've lost patience with the format, but I never lost my "High Fidelity"-like obsession with the records. They've moved from apartment to apartment with us and now they are properly displayed at last.

This has given forth to some internecine marital competitiveness between E. and I as we try to out-hipster each other ("You have Fishcotheque by the Jazz Butcher and I don't? How did that happen?"). While he was busy filing his Nurse with Wound albums, though, I quietly resurrected the albums I was ashamed of owning.

Yes, it's out of hiding for the Fixx and Genesis and that Who album nobody liked. And what ever happened to my copy of Ghost in the Machine? Let them go proudly amid the '80s college rock and '90s indiepop and decades of R&B and soul.

In a way, it's good to be old and not care about the relative coolness of your record collection.

Perhaps not quite old enough, though. Let pause a moment and consider the records nobody wants...

"Whose copy of Bert Kaempfert and Roger Williams' Magic Moods is this?"
"Not mine."
"Must have belonged to your parents."
"Must have belonged to your parents!"
"I don't think so..." etc.