Buck unplugged.

They’re all unplugged, of course, but this one’s a bit more unplugged than the others.

This version might not have been the first time the song was sung, but it probably is.  I wrote it last Wednesday night, just on paper, and on Thursday morning turned on the computer recording gadget thing and played the song for the first time.  I played it through four times, saving each version, and tonight (Sunday) I went through them resolved to go with one of them for this week’s entry regardless of how bad it was.  I think this was the first one, because I screwed up and said “youngest one’s daddy” when I meant “oldest.”  So this is just one track, played directly into the computer’s built-in microphone, and you probably couldn’t even tell the difference between the recording quality of this one and the ones I’ve spent sometimes hours messing with.  I can’t anyway.  Tell, that is.  None of my sentences today make any sense so far–it’s like I’m having one of those, how you say?, English-as-a-second-language days.

I did the same thing, recording-wise, with that “Sad Day at the Carnival” song, which I’ll probably use next week, even though it’s not much of a song.  I like this one better.

This one is called “Quintana Lake” because I need to get the Q covered in song titles. Ironically (and I’m using that word in the way that professional athletes use it, by which I mean I need a transitional word that signifies an upcoming statement I find especially noteworthy and that, based only a flicker of instinct that arises from a place in my brain I have not explored with much detail, I sense bears some remarkable connection with the thoughts that preceded this sentence), I already have a song that starts with a Q, and it came by that title naturally (“Quirky People”), but I’m almost certain I will never use that song, for reasons I talked about way back around Week 9 or 10, I think.  Thank you!  We have a wonderful time staying in hotel!  Waiter, we would be liking a glass of orange-ade!  (That’s for any of you who learned Italian from the textbook Prego, which for some reason I kept, along with way too many of my other college textbooks.  Today I speak English like I learned it from a combination of textbooks and watching Charlie Chan movies. I completed my Italian course with nothing so much as the impression that in Italy people drink a lot of orange-ade, which is one of a few dozen Italian words I still remember:  “l’arianciata.”)

For video for this song, I searched Quitaque and Quitman, just to amuse myself.  I was looking for a still image of a road, something bleak.  I found it by searching Archer City.  No need to ask how I got there; I don’t remember anyway.  I went to first and part of second grade in Archer City and went to the rest of the grades just one county to the south of there.  That picture of the road is a pretty good representative shot of the whole area.  The Last Picture Show was filmed in Archer City.  It often gets singled out for its black and white cinematography, which is yet more irony, because the picture was actually shot in color.  There just wasn’t any.

Opera’s still not done.  Lots of rain recently, as if that matters to anybody but farmers and baseball players.  Also, this weekend was the Pack 30 campout at Sam Houston National Forest, which went well.  Janet and Rona didn’t go.  They were planning to go to the convent outside of Brenham where the nuns raise miniature horses.  Or so it’s billed.  We went a few years ago and were disappointed and bewildered that the horses seemed to be just your regular, normal-sized horses.  Then we saw the giant nuns.

But they didn’t go to see the horses and instead went to Joseph’s party.  Thomas and I went camping with the Den 7 Cub Scouts.  It was fun.  Pleez ramember to put flowrs on Algernon’s grav.  (I’m ripping off my own Facebook entries now.)

P.S., I ‘ve been screwing around with the WordPress templates again.  I like this one a lot.  Don’t steal it.  I wish I could figure out a way to get all the songs onto the lyrics page and not have them strung out on their own separate pages, but it’s not so bad with this new template.  It’s incomprehensible to me that people will spend so much time developing things like this template and then make it available free.  I emailed the guy and told him I thought his template was fantastic.