This has been a week for song lyrics. I've mentioned before that we will often spontaneously start singing, but because we don't know the words we'll just make them up as we go. For example an instrumental version of James Taylor's Fire and Rain came on the radio. What we came up with was:

Oh I've seen whales and I've seen stoats
I've seen hairy things that would gladly eat your goatsO'
Seen nasty guys by the name of Hall and Oats
But I never thought I'd see

What brought it to the fore, though was a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago. We were talking to some friends of ours. They are professional musicians and write all their own stuff (Hint: Bobs and Lolo). We got talking about music and we somehow came up with an idea for a song about Bigfoot. I suggested that a good tune would be “The Girl From Ipinema”. Over the next week I played with the idea and came up with a lyric. Actually just the first verse, but unlike Whales and Stoats it is a complete verse. The other three not so much:

Big and tall and red and hairy
They say the one they call Bigfoot is scary
And when he walks by
Any one he walks by goes
(Spoken, Yelled) Ahhh, look out run away, Bigfoot, run away, Aaahggg

Writing a whole song is difficult. A single verse is one thing but in a song the verses have to string together, to lead somewhere. That's what I couldn't get.

Then on Tuesday I had an idea. Not about the Bigfoot song, but something completely different. It happened in the strangest way too. I was walking back to my car at the end of the day. I always cut through the building and come out of the door on the southwest. This time of year it means that I walk out into the blazing afternoon sun. So on Tuesday I opened the door, got hit in the face with blinding sunlight and most of the following popped into my head (To the tune from O Holy Night):

O holy crap, my wife has come home early
She will see, where I tripped and spilled my beer

She's gonna find the sink is full of car parts
And the deer half butchered In the tub

I just lost her jewelry in a poker game last Thursday
A girl named Slash is passed out in our bed

I fell on my knees while I was playing football
Why I was wearing her wedding dress I cannot say
And how did I get a tattoo that says I Love Devine

Oh holy crap, my wife has come home early
She will see where I tripped and spilled my beer.

Why the melody for O Holy Night appeared out of nowhere in April, I don't know. Oh I do know about the April part. I've wondered about O Holy night since I was a kid. It just always seemed a little odd. Most performances were a little overwrought, a bit over the top. And then there were the lyrics. I was around eleven or twelve before learning that the line wasn't “Long lay the world in sin and arborvitae”. I just couldn't figure out why God had a thing against shrubbery. Unless he was a Monty Python fan that is.

But the best line this week came from the BBC (something not uncommon). They were doing a story on the new particle detector that was being built. Its similar to the one in the Sudan Mine in Northern Minnesota or the neutrino detector in Japan. It consists of a large reservoir of liquid buried deep beneath the earth. The surrounding rock stops most of the solar radiation, leaving the exotic particles to react with the liquid. In this case the detector is being tuned to detect Dark Matter, hard to detect particles that make up about a quarter of the universe. What caught our attention was when the BBC announcer opened the story with "Deep beneath the snow capped mountains of South Dakota." That woke both of us up right quick. Only later did they add that it was located in an old gold mine under the Black Hills.

Sometimes I wonder if I write more than most people. At least I wonder if I just know more English than most people. This line came about because of a funny incident that happened at work. I was editing an owners manual for one of the robots and discovered a typo which I pointed out to my boss and the programmer that had written the section. You see, Com Port is a plug on the back of a computer. Comport is to behave in a good or agreeable manner. Both are perfectly acceptable terms but they are in no way interchangeable. The thing is that not only did neither of them know the word comport, the programmer had it embedded throughout his code, on visible screens, and in the screen shots he'd supplied for the manual. One little typo took half a day to sort out and I was the only one that had ever heard of the word. The best part was the next day when my boss said that he'd used the word. His kids were acting up and he told them "You kids need to comport yourselves better" Apparently it got reeeealy quiet while they tried to figure out what he wanted.

In other news we got our new furniture. The couch and chair we got to replace the three overly large oak and leather chairs from Minnesota. Those were donated to the Lantzville Fire Department a couple of weeks ago. The sale was yesterday but by the time we got there, about five minutes after they opened. They were already gone. People around here know a good deal when they see one.

Anyway the couch and chair fit well, we think they'll do very nicely. We ended up with more seating space that's more adaptable, and comfortable. The couch is a microfiber that looks just like distressed leather, and the chair is in an ivory fabric with a birds and eggs print. Both look very classy. We draped the brown fake fur blanket across the chair and the couch has ivory/bird print pillows so they match up quite well. The best part of the couch though is the chaise. It can be moved from one end to the other or, should we want to, be installed on the chair. Adaptability is a good thing. Plus it's not only made in Canada, it's actually made in BC.