AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!! Deadlines! School! Too much....(pant, pant)....work.... Sanding! Painting! Calculus! Physics! Powerwashing! Essays! Graduation planning! Lawn work! Invitations! Teeests! Oh my!
In case you were wondering what's up in my world...
Here's what I saw today about a quarter of a mile from my house:
A FORD GT!!!! It had the same paint job and everything. I was pretty dazzled.
Claire just caught me in a game of blog tag. I have to list seven random facts about myself, choose seven other people whom I have deigned worthy of being tagged, and state the rules so that said people will know what this tagging business is all about. Also, I must leave a comment on the respective blogs of the people I tag.
It's all rather neat, in my opinion. The biggest downside is that it won't be long before all my blogging friends have been tagged and the game will have to end. However, that won't matter to me because I have had the good luck to be one of the first caught! How fortuitous! Here goes:
1. I will be graduating from high school next month, and I am the valedictorian! My grades are, like, wicked high, lol, and that's why I totally deserve that title. Actually, for those of you who are unaware, which is probably none of you, I am home-schooled and therefore have no competition. I would be valedictorian even if I had D+'s and C-'s across the board. Fortunately, that is not the case.
2. I only say "lol" tongue in cheek.
3. I prefer prose to poetry, for the most part. I have been studying both English and American literature this year, and I can't say how glad I was when the endless poetry chapters (Victorian in one and Modern in the other) ended this week and I got to read good old regular writing for a change. Not that I don't like Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tennyson, and Keats, but it was so refreshing to switch to Thomas Hardy, Pearl Buck, Rudyard Kipling, and James Thurber. I can finally read more than three or four pages an hour without my brain going into either a daze or panic mode!
4. Hmmmm... what else? Well, I'd much rather differentiate than integrate...
5. OK, let's see if I can dig up a random fact from my childhood so that my facts will actually BE random and not a report on my progress and preferences in school. Ah, I know. One of my earlier memories is going to a party - probably for Christmas - with my extended family at my Aunt Lori and Uncle Lloyd's house. We were having turkey for dinner, and Uncle Lloyd was cutting it with an electric knife. I was VERY impressed. What an amazing piece of machinery! It did all the cutting for you! I probably came rather close to breaking the tenth commandment before I found out that we had one too. Anyhow, several days later, Mama was looking for a knife for something, and apparently there was none to be found. I exclaimed, "Aunt Lori has a knife!" Mama and Daddy were both quite amused with this helpful little statement, and perceiving their laughter, I proceeded to use the expression whenever the opportunity arose.
6. Someday I hope to be excessively wealthy and drive a Lamborghini - maybe even five! A couple Aston Martins or Ferraris would be acceptable alternatives...
7. I need to go to bed.
OK, now for the tagging: I hereby choose Stephen, Daniel, Lisa, Derrick, Wesley, Lindsay, and...BEN!!!! I know, the odds of Ben doing it are probably one in f'(x) at x=37 where f(x)=x(3ex). Those odds are pretty bad. Still, that leaves one more option for all the others who have been tagged and still enables me to fill my list of seven.
P.s. Cara beat me even though I had been working on my post for over an hour by the time she started. How irksome! And this was "just going to be a quick post", too.
As writer, designer, and editor-in-chief of "Aaron's Blog", I strive to achieve a fair balance of humor and meaning, pictures and text, and reality and fantasy. Of course, I don't strive very hard, necessarily, which explains the prevalence of fantastic pictorial attempts at humor throughout this publication. I would love to reverse this trend, but I keep running out of time and having too much school or work of other kinds on my plate to consider a serious post-writing session. For one thing, I have other things to write about for school if I feel like writing seriously, and for another, I'm slow at writing anyway. Sometimes I can design a new blog template in less time than it takes for me to write a page-long blog post. (I was going to say "full-length", but what's a "full-length" blog post?) Finally, how am I expected to find the time to write on my blog on Monday nights when I HAVE to watch 24?!?!? The question borders on inanity.
So, I am going to continue the trend.
This past weekend, I attended my cousin's graduation from the Bible school in Dublin. After the ceremony, I hung out with some friends on the front lawn and proved to them, once and for all, that I am not a light-weight, muscle-less, exercise-hating, athletics-shunning, geeky twerp of a weakling. I showed them, all right! I showed 'em my special flips! I twisted, turned, jumped, and glided, and when I had finished gamboling about, they had to admit that Paul Hamm would have nothing on me if I just worked out another thirteen hours a day and lifted weights while I did my school.
Of course, it is rather strange how my arms get so muscular and tan when I jump - perhaps even as muscular and tan as my friend Tony's (!) - while my face remains pale. Natural phenomena can be really perplexing sometimes, can't they?
Never, ever, ever, ever, ever touch your middle finger of your right hand firmly to the middle of a baking sheet that has just been in a hot, hot oven, especially if you play the piano. Trust me: it will hurt. I was reheating some pizza in the oven today, and, well, the rest is history. Don't EVER touch your middle finger firmly to the middle of a hot, hot baking sheet (did I already say that?). It may, just may, end up looking like...
...this:
Of course, it may also end up looking like that if you dip it in moderately hot wax just so you can take a picture of it and put it on your blog to try to fool people into thinking that you got a burn from touching the middle finger of your right hand firmly to a hot, hot cookie sheet...
I wasn't feeling well this afternoon. And as it often does when I am not well, school had exhausted me. I fell asleep on my bed after taking well over an hour to do just a couple pages of British Literature. While I was sleeping, I had an interesting dream. Now, I don't usually write about my dreams, but this time I was intrigued by how much the dream had to do with what is going on in my life right now.
I dreamt that I was going to a Christian school. That’s easily traceable: this afternoon, I was just thinking about and looking at the website of the Christian school my cousin Andrew attends.
I lived in Boston. This probably has something to do with the fact that I visited Boston just a couple weeks ago, touring Faneuil Hall and the financial district with my cousin Doug, who works there.
I had a nice literature teacher. I was struggling with the meaning of some poetry today and wondering what it would be like to have a teacher to explain it all to you; specifically, I wondered what it was like to be in Andrea’s literature class. The teacher in my dream wasn’t Andrea, but she was nice anyway. Interestingly, my class was all boys, and the classroom was my bedroom.
I dreamt I was in love. This would seem to be totally unrelated to my life except for that I’ve been reading Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…”) 
One of the more bizarre aspects of my dream was who I was, and who was the father of the girl I loved. I just watched the hilarious movie Night at the Museum a week ago, and the father-of-the-girl-I-loved was Ben Stiller. I was the kid who was his son in the movie (see photo).
Back to the literature class: Aunt Sharon interrupted our class discussion to give us all a little sermon that sounded suspiciously like a prose version of Robert Browning’s "Prospice." This is related to my day in two distinct ways: first, Aunt Sharon called yesterday, and I answered the phone; second, I read that very poem today! What are the odds?
When I thought Aunt Sharon's talk was almost over, I went downstairs listening to the rest on my cell phone. We just got a bunch of cell phones fixed yesterday.
Derrick was in the kitchen. No clue what that was about.
Then my dream jumped to the ALCS, and the Red Sox came back from way behind to destroy the Yankees… and yet no one cared! The commentators were like, “Oh, I guess the Red Sox are going to the World Series. Interesting.” I was really pretty distraught until I woke up and realized that, when the Red Sox do win this year, there will be a multitude of people cheering them on!
I have a rich uncle. Actually, he's really just the husband of one of my mom's second cousins, but we have always called him Uncle Martin.
Uncle Martin wasn't always rich. When he was born in Tallinn, Estonia's capital, in 1943, his family lived in a slightly cramped, albeit well-kept, apartment in the outskirts of the city. Although it was really too small for the family, they could not afford anything larger.
Uncle Martin's parents, Rasmus and Anna Tamm, were not considered poor by many of their fellow citizens. At a time in what was then the U.S.S.R. when the average worker had to give up fifty-six hours' pay just to buy a pair of jeans, being able to afford an apartment at all was a sign of affluence (or at least thrift). Uncle Rasmus was the manager of a major textile factory where he was paid the same salary as newly-hired workers. Aunt Anna worked as a seamstress for a slightly lower rate. They both worked hard, and managed to keep the household income above the national average. Nevertheless, the faulty Communist economic system kept them from attaining the level of wealth they deserved.
Uncle Martin realized all this, and he did not want to put up with it. A rather adventurous type, he somehow managed to emigrate to Australia before he had graduated from high school. He had almost no money left when he got there, but he soon found work on a cattle ranch and quickly caught the attention of his superiors with his skill and industry.
After several years, he had earned enough money to buy his own ranch. His household was prosperous. It was not long before the Tamm ranch was well known throughout his area for both the quality of its beef and the amazing amounts of profit its owner was able to achieve. The truth was that Uncle Martin was a genius with money. He could take a dollar and convince someone to give him two dollars for it; when that failed, he would work until his money had expanded some other way. He invested well, he worked hard, and he raised his livestock properly. All this would have been enough to make him rich, but there was one more reason for his wealth. I will expound momentarily.
One day when Uncle Martin was out riding, his dog Klimpi fell into a large hole in the ground with a piercing yelp. Uncle Martin quickly dismounted and tried to see if he could reach him, but this was not a possibility: the hole was too deep. Just as he was about to ride back to his barn to grab a shovel and perhaps a few of his workers, however, Klimpi came trotting up from another direction. Uncle Martin was quite pleasantly surprised - the thought of another entrance to the cave had not occurred to him.
Uncle Martin determined to find the entrance, and it was only a matter of half an hour before he had found it. Behind some briers on a hill not far away, there was a hole about three feet high and five feet wide that led to a uphill passage. The passage was about the same height, but it was significantly narrower. Armed with a flashlight from his saddlebag, Uncle Martin crawled up it, carefully watching for signs of hostile wildlife. There were none. The tunnel continued on in the same way for about ten feet, after which it suddenly turned downward. Another twenty feet later, it widened into a sizable room. Uncle Martin was thrilled. As a boy, he had always dreamed of finding an exciting cave, and now it was reality. And furthermore, the walls of the cave were sprinkled with gold. That fortunate fact was beyond his wildest childhood dreams.
It was not long before Uncle Martin took full advantage of his situation. He had a professional mining company excavate the cave, and his reward was in the millions of dollars. He continued to invest wisely and soon became one of the wealthiest men in Victoria.
Uncle Martin moved back to Estonia in 1995, not long after the nation had regained its independence. The rest of his family, with the exception of a younger sister who never married, had died, but he quickly became a successful businessman in Tallinn. He invested heavily in the country, and as the Estonian economy flourished under its capitalistic system and flat tax rate, Uncle Martin's wealth only increased.
I suppose you may be wondering why I'm giving you all this information. Well, it seems that Uncle Martin happened to be perusing blogs one day when he came across my post about Glimpy Soup. Since that is a family recipe, he figured we must be related, and a little bit of research convinced him. Both affluent and generous, he decided to send me a little present. Imagine my surprise when this showed up at my door:
OK, I admit it. This was all made up. I came up with the idea a while ago when I was thinking about Agatha Christie's novels: it seems that each of her characters who becomes suddenly wealthy explains it as "a legacy from their uncle in Australia." Besides, very little in the way of newsworthy material has come my way in recent days. Anyway, writing this was fun, and I learned some stuff about Estonia that I hadn't known before.
