Erm

As I survey the challenge my ego has yet again gotten me into, I can't help but feel a certain amount of pride - you know, that I actually accepted the challenge and all.

What happened was this: For the first four years of my homeschooling experience, I was in a girls' choir. It was quite good by the end, but the first year, bleh. Just bleh. The high notes we sang would make listeners wish for a very nice pair of noise-canceling headphones. ...Yup. The first year, the choir was planning to sing on the Christmas ships the next Christmas, and to do that, we needed a recording of the choir in action. This is where my Dad comes in. He is, after all, a former disc-jockey on radio, sound man for a band, and he now works in acoustics. In other words, he was uniquely qualified to record our choir. Which he did.

Five years pass. The recording sits, undisturbed, on my Dad's hard drive. And then, over Christmas break 2009, he pulled it out, did some editing, and came out of seclusion with our choir's very own recorded album. Which would be a whole lot more impressive if we sang all of the notes in key, not just most. Anyways, Dad and I were listening to this album as we made the rounds of the local game stores on New Year's Eve, and I was making snide remarks (much like this post, in fact) as we listened to the choir squeal out the high parts of 'The Softness of My Mother's Hands." Sentimental title, eh? Actually, it wasn't as bad as the one following it. It was titled something like "Love, Joy, Peace" and the lyrics were something as follows:

Peace, peace, peace, neverending
Joy, joy, joy, overflowing.
Love, love, love, everlasting and true.
This is our gift for you (our gift for you-ou-ou-ou-ou)

You know, I may have been harsher on this song than "The Softness of My Mother's Hands" because I very vividly remember *trying* to learn to sign the lyrics to the song as we sang them. And there was dancing. Which I cannot stand in choirs, but that's another issue for another time.

It's a soft, lullaby like song that continues on, blatantly stating that we hope you have peace, joy, and love for the whole of four more minutes. I pointed this out to Dad, and (foolish me) added an "even I could write something better," which is when he threw down the metaphorical gauntlet. In hindsight, it was probably to shut me up, but at the time, it was quite exciting.

So, being the headstrong young person I am, I eagerly picked up the invisible gauntlet, and now Dad is expecting a song expressing the same sentiments in a much better form. Haha! This is my first serious song-writing request. And I'm going to savor every minute of it.

B