The calendar on my wall says that it is Monday, May 29, 2006. It must be a minor cosmic coincidence that exactly 5 months ago, I gave up on the project known as Operation Lambchop. There's not really a good reason why I gave up. I could tell you that it was kind of a pain to update the website whenever I listened to a CD, that it became to much of a bookkeeping hassle, which it did, but that's not really why I quit. The real reason is because I found myself in the exact same predicament that I was in before - I had too many (new) CDs.

Allow me to take you back to December 3, 2005. That was the Friday I completed the first, real Operation Lambchop. Over the course of 11 months I had listened to the 609 CDs that were in my collection prior to the start of the year as well as 95 CDs added over the course of the year. As one would be apt to do when completing such a fufilling project, I went out the next day and bought some CDs, and I assure you, it felt good. Really good. Shortly thereafter, I placed a massive order with my CD club. That felt good too. Then I bought some more CDs, and then some more, and then some more. By the end of 2005, only four weeks after the project was completed, I had added 61 CDs.

I sensed the problem early. It was starting again. I had 61 new CDs but had I listened to them? Nope, not all of them. "No problem," I thought to myself. "You've been disciplined for a whole year. All you have to do is listen to these as they come in and get rid of that whole 'never listened to it' stigma out of the way. Then you're free to listen to choose what you want to listen to and when to listen to it." Perfect! How could I lose. Well, I lost on December 29th while sitting on CD #740.

Fast forward to today. It's Memorial Day, so I'm home from work rekindling OLC. It's just after 9 AM and I'm on my second disc. I'm trying to break my old OLC record of 14 hours and 13 minutes of music in a day, and if I make it through this iTunes playlist, I will. I'm going into this second (or third, depending on your view) round of OLC head-on, because, well, my collection of CDs currently numbers 900. You heard me correctly. There are 160 CDs that I haven't listened to since I quit the OLC project. It doesn't seem possible, but my numbers don't lie. Of course, these 160 CDs include everything released in 2006 and it would be nice to know if they're any good or not (because, how does someone rate the 'Top Albums of '06' when they haven't listened to any of them (insert joke about your favorite music magazine/blog//website here)).

Below is the official record of the "new" Operation Lambchop, or you can view the whole list HERE