"It's Christmas time in the city..."

Governor Lynch of the good ol' Granite State may not be the greatest governor, but he sure can conduct. Well, OK, he can't really, but he sure knows how to try! Yes, I have seen John Lynch try his hand at conducting a full orchestra. Those of you who don't believe me can read Bria's blog and those of you that have already read her blog already do believe me, so I guess I'm pretty well covered. The fact is, Gov. John Lynch was invited by the New Hampshire Philharmonic to try his hand at conducting "Jingle Bells Forever" in front of a large audience: a nicely packed Palace Theatre-full of people. (By the way, did you know that John Lynch and his wife have attended the Palace Theatre since 1975?!?!?! Why, that's before I was born! It's before Bria was born! It's before Lisa was born! It's before Derrick, Chad, Lindsay....) Our illustrious governor agreed, and sure enough, he tried. But he did little more than that. He kept the beat almost perfectly, I must admit, but he occassionally seemed to get tired and would hardly move his hands until a sudden crash of a symbol would send his body back into convulsions (well, ok, that's a gross exaggeration).

On the whole, I enjoyed the whole concert quite thoroughly. The evening started off with a merry .... actually, I can never remember the name but it's the one that goes, "Outside the snow is falling and friends are calling, 'Yoohoo!' Come on, it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you!" After a couple pieces featuring the winner of the NH Philharmonic's youth competition as a soloist, the first half ended with some of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite." The second half started with something like "Brazilian Sleigh Bells" then went into a medley of American Christmas songs ("White Christmas", "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", etc.) I think my favorite part of the night was either the American medley or the carol sing-along that came after it. The sing-along was at least one of the top two best parts of the night, although some of the orchestra's intros were a bit hard to follow, and some people came in in the wrong place. It was especially enjoyable to hear so many people singing "Joy to the world! The Savior reigns!" and going right through the first verses of four or five other Christmas songs that contain such obviously Christian lyrics.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the songs played on the radio. Bria scanned throught the FM channels on the way home, hoping to find some good Christmas music to listen to. We listened to -- and enjoyed-- a fifties-ish rendition of "Here Comes Santa Claus." Then that station turned to rock, so we tried another channel. That channel was playing "Here Comes Santa Claus." It was fairly near the end, but we turned the radion off anyway because of the obnoxious voices of the singers. That radio station was playing songs by request, and apparently someone had requested "Here Comes Santa Claus", because the exact same rendition of that song was just starting when we turned the radio back on. We scanned again, and what should the next Christmas channel be playing but...."Here Comes Santa Claus!" Aaaaarrrrrrgh! We finally found a couple other songs, but the total count of songs we had listened to when we got home was still something like this: "Jingle Bells": 1; "White Christmas": 1; "Here Comes Santa Claus": 5.


P.s. In case anyone doesn't check the comments below, and would like to know who wrote "The Melancholy Pig", the answer is Lewis Carroll.

Poetry

It's interesting to note that, although I would not consider myself a fan of poetry, I have plenty of poems I like: "The Raven", "The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven", "Barbara Fritchie", "Paul Revere's Ride", "The Hunt"....the list goes on and includes a very wide range.

On the other hand I have a list of poems I don't like too, especially such sad ones--although beautifully written--as "The Wreck of the Hesperus" and "The Highwayman."

Here's one that I do like: "The Melancholy Pig."

There was a Pig that sat alone,
Beside a ruined Pump.
By day and night he made his moan:
It would have stirred a heart of stone
To see him wring his hoofs and groan
Because he could not jump.

Purely out of curiosity, I would like to know how many of my readers know who wrote this little beauty. If you don't know--and ONLY if you don't know--try guessing at it and see if you can get it.

P.s. I looked around online for a couple minutes to try to find a clever quotation to use as the title for my post, and although I didn't find a quotation that would fit, I came across this one:

If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.— Ashleigh Brilliant

Very good advice, especially for people like me who tend to get depressed after playing any sports (except Ping-pong and Badminton) for long with their closest friend who lives in New York and NEVER posts.

Straight out of Uncley Aar'n's

I'm loving it. Oh, wait, that would be McAronald's......

A Public Poll

Welcome to the grand opening of The Blog of Aaron's newest template: Alluring Autumn. Please hold all applause, cheers, and exclamations of disbelief until the end of the post. Thank you.

As a quick poll, who thinks the Vivaldi headlines are too hard to read (that is if you can see them; if you don't have the Vivaldi font in your computer you should be seeing Verdana)? I can't decide, but I'll leave it for now and open the door for complaints.

I got the leaf picture off the web, but I took the logs myself! I lined about six up on the lawn and took a picture with a digital camera. Then I twisted, cropped, and tweaked the resulting photo as necessary to create a seamless image. So if YOU want logs for YOUR background, too, just ask.....

(NOW you may applaud, cheer, etc.)

Not Your Ordinary Sunday

Church was good in every way today, with about thirty-five exceptions. Well, OK, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but we had so many difficulties today that it was funny! Allow me to explain. The first disaster came about in the congregational music, for which I was responsible. Someone had requested that I do All in All for one of the songs, and I rather ambitiously decided to do it as a round. I divided it up into parts and put it on powerpoint, and had Daddy and Ryan lead. Unfortunately, we didn't have much time to practice, and the song kind of fell apart. Nevertheless, it was hardly much better than I had expected.

Next we did the song Saved, Saved! which went almost without a hitch (I made a small mistake in the second chorus). The third and final song that we put together was Thank You, Lord which went fine on my part; however, after the second of the three verses, Daddy's laptop decided it was tired of changing slides and refused to respond to any keys at all, with the exception of the Ctrl-Alt-Del combination. I was slightly startled when I started the third verse and nobody sang. I have counted the verses wrong once or twice before and either stopped or continued at the wrong times, so I just kind of finished the verse off right in the middle. I felt rather embarassed until someone explained that the slide hadn't changed. We skipped the last verse and finished off with a final chorus, and I was all done with the leading. Whew!

The service was then turned over to a lady from Bedford named Meme Stephens, who shared a number of songs she had written and recently had put on CD. She sang a couple songs with guitar, and then started to sing one with a track from her new CD. About halfway through the song, the CD stopped. Just plain stopped. We could find no explanation for why it stopped, but it did. She played it with her guitar instead, but the sound wasn't working very well, once again without explanation. The volume was coming across very quiet, but every time the volume was turned up, the sound was distorted. The crowning touch came immediately after the congregation watched a DVD put out by the Christian organization World Vision. When the five-minute clip finished, Uncle Alden opened the player to take the DVD out--and it slipped down into the machine. After church we got out a screwdriver and took half the sound system apart to get it out.

The last glitch in the service was when the pastor asked for a hymn. I went up to play since Lindsay wasn't there today, and found that the song was one I had sung perhaps once or twice in my life and had certainly never played. It was fairly easy, though, and I managed to make successively fewer mistakes with each verse. Then church was over for the week. The end.


P.s. Happy birthday, Cherilyn and Duncan!

P.p.s. I recently read an article online that began something like, "Police said the murderer escaped from prison last Thursday and began a thorough investigation of his escape as soon as his absence was discovered." Hahaha.

P.p.p.s. I was listening to Sean Hannity as I was about to drive out of a parking lot today, and some ad came on with a loud honking noise that really startled me because I thought someone was honking at ME. Then, on my way out of a gas station getting onto 101, it happened again, and I was just as startled and not a little annoyed. Grrrr. (Sean Hannity was great, though!)

Buon Compleanno!

(Happy Birthday!)

Speaking of birthdays (see post below), Bria's was yesterday. She is eighteen!!! We celebrated her birthday with her here on the weekend, but it wasn't until yesterday that she actually became eighteen. Now she is an adult! She is no longer eligible for cheaper tickets for a myriad of events, but hey! now she can legally get married without parental permission! Woohoo!

Just in case you're wondering, Bria (if you're reading this, which is not all that unlikely, folks, because my posts are automatically e-mailed to her), I didn't forget to send you a present. I put it in the mail today. Happy anticipation! And may you have 363 happy un-birthdays for the remaining 99.45% of your nineteenth year!

Un Posto Corto

(A Short Post)

Well, here I am again, after about two weeks of being too busy to blog. Truth is, I'm still to busy to blog, but I'm blogging anyway, which shows you how straight I have my priorities.

In case anyone is wondering WHY I'm too busy to blog, the two main reasons are school and birthdays. I (obviously) have to do schoolwork every day, and I often don't get enough done in the week to be able to take the whole weekend off. Birthdays are, fortunately, only here for the next four days, and after my parents' 19th anniversary on Nov. 8th, all our family holidays will be over for the year! Of course, there are still plenty of national holidays to come....

Here's a little story that happened recently at my house: Mama was talking at the dinner table about a woman she overheard in the store saying something like "I can't STAND that 'Life is Good' stuff." Mama went on to talk a bit about how we as Christians can truly enjoy life, and someone said in a joking manner that she should have just given the lady the gospel right then and there. "Yeah!" one of my younger siblings exclaimed. " 'Where are you going when you die tonight?' "