A while ago, when Neil posted the sign-up sheet for his fourth annual Blogger Christmahanukwanzaakah Online Holiday Concert, I thought, oh how fun. And then, just for kicks, I signed my name up and bookmarked the initial entry and then completely lost track of when it was actually *due* until the email came in this morning that if I still wanted to submit something it would have to be done that evening, because good grief, December is now officially halfway over, gah!

It is a good thing Richard was going off to a writers’ group last night because I’m not sure I could have done this with him in the house. I get nervous enough just trying to practice my music for Vox when he’s in the house, so toss in the combination of singing and playing the piano and also trying to record myself doing it, and the only way that had a remote chance of succeeding was if I was all by myself.

I dragged out the music for the song I wanted to do, and I played through it a few times so I could at least do it without playing the melody line. I own another, nicer arrangement of the song, but it would have required turning pages, and that’s kind of hard to do when you’re all by yourself, so the simple version had to suffice. My initial thought had been that I could record just the piano accompaniment and then do the vocals separately but I wasn’t entirely clear how to mix the two together once I had them (because I am a web/database nerd, not a sound technician), so I figured my best shot was to do it all together and just cross my fingers and hope. Richard has a little digital voice recorder, but he’s long since lost the manual and I didn’t have time to try to figure it out blind, so instead I set my little camera to the video setting, turned it so it faced away from me, hit ‘record’ and then dove right in. And as fascinating as a blurry video recording of my piano might have been, I instead found a handy little download that let me strip out just the audio and save it to an mp3, so that’s what I submitted. It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was the best I could do while nervously trying to play, sing, and most importantly, distract the kittens (who kept wanting to attack my fingers / the music / the strap on the camera / my hair) all at once.

I should note in passing that if I am this nervous recording myself singing, when I am all alone and there is no one around to look at me, and just in audio, not in video as well, that the June concert, in which there will be singing of solos in public, in front of actual, live people, is going to reduce me to a quivering wreck. But we will deal with that little panic attack much, much later. In the meantime, the full concert is available for perusal here (I’ll let you all find my contribution all on your own).

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.