The story of my Theme Song

Well I wanted to get down here the true story about how I came to make a certain youtube video. A couple weeks back my brother in law and his son came up to see us from North Cacalacky. (I love saying that and I know it's probably lame to say, like I always thought folks from SF hated it when people said "Frisco"). Anyway, we had us a great time and they stayed overnight in our basement. We went out for dinner to a BBQ joint called Urban BBQ which is pretty good. I've made better ribs though, true fact. As it happened we ended up eating quite late into the evening. Later on I gave my nephew Nick a Seiko I've been wanting to get rid of but not doing because it's only going to raise ~$80 or so and the hassle is too great. Here's a photo of that:

Yeah, that is one orange mother but it's also got the oem bracelet to swap on which tones it down and I think Nick was pretty jazzed, specially when he saw the display back and stuff. So in the end I went to bed later than normal for a Thursday and with all that protein in me, no surprises, slept a little fitfully. In fact I had a bit of a nightmare. Not that scary for me but enough to wake me up. In the dream I was late for our monthly all employee meeting at work and I slipped in the back door. That's a real monthly meeting where we cram both shifts into our lunchroom and give out longevity awards and have presentations about various company stuff. I typically have to get up and do a safety minute presentation to keep the people focused on safety. So in the dream the lights were off like there was going to be some PowerPoint show or something and this friend of mine was up in front and had just said "Now Howie Boyd will sing us all a song about his engineer Alex and what a great employee he is". I took the mic he handed me and said "Thanks Ray". And just as it hit me I had no song to sing I jerked myself awake. Now I was wide awake and burping and stuff and I got up to hit the head. When I got back in bed and tried to get to sleep I got hit with chronic insomnia. I get that now and then, especially if I haven't exercised the day before. So as I tried to get back to sleep a song composed itself in my brain. Before I knew it I had a verse, chorus and tune. It sorta rhymed too. I was going to turn on the light and write it down because I knew otherwise I'd never remember it in the morning and I thought it would be funny. So I called my desk phone at work and very quietly (so as to not wake up anybody else) sang it into my voice mail. By the time I hung up (snickering) I had another couple verses in my mind. So I repeated the process. Three times. It wasn't a song about my guy Alex, but more so about my whole department and what we do. So the next day I used my iPhone to get that audio and MS MovieMaker to produce the youtube video you can watch below. This past week was the next all employee meeting and I volunteered to make a presentation about my department. That was cool with my boss so I got up and showed this video after relating the background stuff above. If you can make it all the way through this video, you are pretty curious. Or nerdy. Or a Mfg Engr yourself. Or related to me. I think it turned out about one verse too long but it got a lot of laughs. As presentations go this one was a phone in, haha. It's not really setting the youtube world on fire but it got a good number of hits due to my wife Robin's excellent blog where she gave me a shout out. I love her so much! Howie Boyd