Cleaning House

Even though this is one of the laziest times of the year, I feel like I've accomplished something today, if only by default: My house is considerably cleaner, and I've hardly lifted a finger to get it that way.

Yesterday, I finally sold the old P.A. system that I'd had for about nine years. I haven't used it in forever, since the type of place I play these days tends to be a coffeehouse rather than somewhere that needs a big honkin' P.A. (you should've seen the size of the speaker cabinets). One of the guitar teachers from the store was going to buy it about a year ago, but he changed his mind; I finally sold it to a Sinfonia brother who has a band now. Mo' money during Christmas break and getting that big mound o' stuff out of my house...gotta love it.

And then today, my old roomie James came by to take the last of his stuff out of the spare room. Someone asked me, "didn't he leave a year ago?" Well, yeah, he did...but I've just been really nice about letting him use it as a storage facility. Now, with just a few remaining pieces of flotsam (or would that be jetsam?), the room is set to be a true guest room again, or I could rent it out to someone else. While I do have some real cleaning to do during this break, it was nice to see such a huge dent made in it before I even got started.

Other than that, it's been lazy, lazy, lazy since I woke up for New Year's. I did work with Halfling on setting up the program for his UNT jazz audition (he got his stitches out this morning and is not so much of a chipmunk anymore). He's not playing yet; we just kinda mapped out what he was going to do and started gathering the lead sheets and Aebersolds for it. I wish I'd had some sort of direction when I auditioned back in the day.

CLEANING OUT THE INBOX: I also caught up on emails today. One of the sites I subscribe to is snopes.com, the urban legends clearinghouse. They contributed a hilarious collection of people's misunderstandings of the lyrics of Christmas carols. Check it out. (I'll admit that, as a kid, I thought that one part of "Jingle Bells" said "a one horse, soap and sleigh." But my favorite of this collection would have to be "we want some friggin' pudding." Priceless.)

When you're done with that, the same site has the explanation of the physics behind Santa's journey with his reindeer. Be sure and read the rebuttal, which is just as funny.

WORD OF THE DAY: From the above link, we discover that the set of words resulting from mis-heard song lyrics is called a "mondegreen" (the story explains how it got that name). I say that "Mondegreens" sounds like either a posh restaurant or a really upscale drugstore...