What to do when the lights go out

There's a whole school of instructions for fun things to do in a power outage. People actually get ready, have candles, games, rules, notes and so on. That's a little too crazy and organized for me, but in the same vain, one of my readers asked a great question. "What the best way to utilize your time when a piece of gear's in for repair?" Do you make do without that piece or should the system lay idle while you're waiting? Now in my case, I go to plan B. Here's my example. One miserable afternoon about six months ago, while in a foul mood, I got agitated trying to place the needle guard on my $3,000 Lyra cartridge (without my glasses on) and ripped the bloody needle right out of the body; thus discombuberating the cartridge and eliminating the turntable from the system. Drat! What did I do? Pulled out the original Denon moving magnet the Lyra replaced and started listening to that as the Lyra's being repaired. How's that working out? Great, and here's why. The Denon had wonderful qualities, yet wasn't as good as the Lyra. In my quest to upgrade I gave up those qualities in favor of others. It didn't take me long to be making great music again. Sometimes we're forced into making changes in our system we don't want to, but change is good. It just depends on how you deal with it. Don't forget tomorrow I will post late and let you have exclusive access to the Kickstarter campaign for Sprout. The first 100 of you committing to Sprout will receive one for 50% off the retail price of $799 and get a personally signed unit from Scott McGowan. As soon as I know the link address I'll post to this group. Can't wait!