Aaron's Blog

Shakespeare Prepares to Travel

2011-01-15T00:11:00.009-05:00

Setting: Shakespeare is sitting on his bed with his laptop, eyeing the clothes, books, and gizmos spread helter-skelter about his bedroom floor.

Background: Shakespeare is about to travel to the Upstate New York home of his friend Sir Walter Raleigh (Ben for short), where he will add Ben and Ben's luggage to his vehicle's inventory before continuing on to resume his studies at Hillsdale College.

To pack, or not to pack? That is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler on my bed to ponder
The feeds and wall posts of outrageous Facebook,
Or to take arms against a sea of laundry,
And by much folding, end it. To stuff my bags,
No more; and in those bags to say I end
The quandaries and the thousand small decisions
That packing's heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To stuff, to haul,
To haul, perchance to cram: ay, there's the rub;
For in that car what cargo space remains
When we have shuffled off this icy drive
Must give us pause; there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long trip.
For who'd not bear the boxes full of books,
The hefty sacks, the suitcases so portly,
The need to be efficient--and the toll
That countless choices on the chooser take,
When he himself must needs decide to pack
Or leave his bodkin? Who'd not fardels bear
But that the dread of something in New York,
That well-beloved country from whose bourn
The journey stretches on, puzzles the will
And makes us rather stare at bags we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?*
Thus packing doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And schoolward journeys of great length and distance
In this regard their currents run awry,
And lose the name of action.

*Shakespeare is blaming his procrastination on a fear of being crowded once Ben's belongings and his are united. Really, though, he'd probably find something else to blame it on if he were planning to drive the whole way alone.

The Horrid Disadvantage of a Scientific Major

2010-09-26T15:34:00.005-04:00

As I was talking last Friday with the professor who teaches my Great Books and Rhetoric course, I was bemoaning my inexperience with close reading and digging into deep meaning within texts. I can do facts: I can name all the nations in Europe and most of their capitals, I can list the U.S. Presidents in order (I tried it just to make sure, and while I put Fillmore and Garfield in the wrong slots and actually forgot Cleveland entirely, the fact that I got them wrong will probably mean that I'll get them right in the future), I know most of the Periodic Table, and I can rattle off a pretty inclusive summary of yesterday's assigned reading from the Odyssey. I can do patterns, too. I am, after all, avidly pursuing the understanding of both math and music, and I think grammar is cool. But getting into the deeper structure of a work, understanding the mind of the author, finding the purpose behind the plot -- these are habits I have never formed.

Beyond the part that my personality plays in this unfortunate fact, I am largely to blame. As a homeschooler, I was basically in charge of my education throughout high school. My mom planned out my curriculum, bought my books, and checked on my progress, but it was up to me to make sure I was actually learning in my various subjects. Some courses were harder or more loathsome than others, naturally, but on one course and one only did I actually give up: Skills for Literary Analysis.

SfLA was a correspondence course that I took for about two or three months, during which time I wrote almost exclusively on The Call of the Wild (which I hated) and the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis. I got my first B on a paper in that class, and I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I had no illusions of grandeur--I didn't like the paper myself--but I could not figure out how to improve it. When I asked my teacher, he just told me that he "graded subjectively." I quit.

What am I finding most challenging in college? Literary analysis, or more broadly, critical thinking. Lesson learned.

I explained some of this in far fewer words and with far fewer details to my professor, noting that Calculus is my easiest subject.

"I got through Calculus in college, and that's about it," he replied. "I worked hard, and I did well, but I never looked back." Perhaps, he suggested, Rhetoric & Great Books will be like that for me.

But I do not think so. Although Calculus is a fascinating subject which increases one's ability to solve problems, to understand the way things work, and to appreciate the orderliness of creation and the genius of other men, outside of a math-related field, it is rarely used. Not many people are like my grandfather, whose job as the printer for our church's publishing outfit didn't stop him from spending his free time teaching trigonometry to his young grandchildren and forming theorems to go along with the one for which Pythagoras is so famous. No, most people either use calculus regularly or shelve it permanently, or they never study it at all.

Critical thinking is different. It affects how one views so many things: literature, news, philosophy, religion, other people... And I want to learn how to think critically and analytically. That's why I came to Hillsdale instead of going to some technical school where I could become a skilled engineer/musician without going through Hillsdale's famously rigorous core program. I want to challenge my thinking process, to improve my understanding, and to get the kind of education that improves the student himself instead of attempting to expand his internal database. And I'm pretty sure I have come to the right place.

So what is the "horrid disadvantage of a scientific major"? Well, it really isn't a horrid disadvantage at all. The "horrid disadvantage" is that everything I'm studying is to a purpose. Unlike the English and History majors, most of whom are studying math and science because they are required and will (I imagine) leave them behind when they graduate, I have to know the technical things and the critical thinking/literature things. Everything I'm studying is something I will need to know later; in the long run, I have to remember twice as much.

The flip side is that I get to remember twice as much. I love learning, and I love using what I learn. Being on track to be able to do a lot of both makes me pretty happy.

Virtus tentamine gaudet.

Perspective

2010-09-14T00:53:00.003-04:00

A gentle little thing, a sparrow,
Perched himself upon a ruined fence of stones
Beneath the summer sun,
Protected from its glaring rays by rustling leaves
That swayed above him,
Casting dappled shadows by his side.
It was the perfect day.

Along the wall, just up the hill,
A subtle movement caught the sparrow’s ever-watchful eye:
A lovely creature came, a cat
With fluid, captivating stride
And fur as black as night.
Without a thought of care
The feline strode with confidence and poise
Along the trail of rocks. She paused,
And with her paw, and sometimes with her tongue,
She smoothed her soft and silken coat of fur
Until it fairly gleamed.

The sparrow, head to one side then the other tilted,
Watched this spectacle with curiosity
Until the cat, herself detecting that her ritual was not unobserved,
Graced her neighbor with a warm, beguiling smile
Intended to disarm.
Ostensibly without a purpose other than continuing
Her happy, carefree afternoon excursion,
She approached.

The little bird upon the heap of stones
Now had two options, and he must pick one.
Either he must stay and meet the cat,
Whose green, enchanting eyes bespoke a chance
To know excitement, sport, and games
If only he would wait
And, doing nothing, see what pleasures chance might bring his way;
Or else, launched with a tiny hop,
He might propel himself into the air
And, flapping tiny wings, soar with the breeze
Away
From every hope of undiscovered fun.

The sparrow hesitated, but not long.
He flew.

Silly little thing! Now he might never learn
What gay diversions still remained behind,
Watching as he flitted through the air
And thinking of what might have been
Had not the sparrow been so wont to flee.

Silly thing!
What had he to fear?

Misguided Connections

2010-09-06T23:46:00.007-04:00

Miss Marple, the famous old spinster of a detective invented by Agatha Christie, had a keen knowledge of human nature. She could understand people's feelings and desires, see through their deception, and, of course, solve all manner of crimes because of her shrewd perception. And it all came because of her life in little St. Mary Mead.

In her little home town in the English countryside, Jane Marple observed the mechanic's hired hand elope with the minister's daughter; she saw her neighbor Gladys's dear niece move to the city to become an actress - which no one expected - and leave behind her job as church organist; she saw the vicar's maid (a very sweet girl) get caught stealing from the church treasury to pay for her nephew's hospital bills. And then, when she was in other parts of the world, her acquaintances would remind her of one or the other the people from home, and she could see right into their hearts.

I feel a little like Miss Marple. Younger, male, and possessing better fashion sense, it's true, but like her nonetheless. You see, here at Hillsdale, everyone (and I scarcely exaggerate) reminds me of someone I've known before. I meet someone, and I think, "Oh, he reminds me of so and so. She is so like Friend X." Like Miss Marple, I think of how Friend X would behave, and expect my new friend to do the same. Unfortunately, it turns out that this practice (in real life, at least) is less likely to solve mysteries than to breed confusion.

Case in point: when I was in line to have my picture taken for my student ID (a wait that lasted 2 hours due to technical difficulties), I was sitting with a guy who reminded me of Alan, an acquaintance from the music school I attended in NH, who was just about the ultimate musician. A quiet kid from a nice large homeschooling family, Alan played the piano for a chamber group, was the principal violist in the school orchestra, and is now getting his degree in organ performance. Well, the kid I was sitting with (I'll call him Marcus) was also quiet, also homeschooled, and also played the piano. He even looked a little like Alan. He must, I reasoned, also be the ultimate musician.

The problem was that he wasn't. Forgetting that my expectations of Marcus's musical knowledge were unfair superimpositions of my knowledge of someone else, I kept trying to make deep, intellectual conversation about classical music.

"What are some of your favorite pieces to play?"

"I like some classical pieces, especially romantic ones."

"Ah, yes, I like romantic, too. Do you know Chopin's Prelude in E Minor?"

"I don't know the name."

(Here I try to hum it, and finding myself unable to convey the feeling of the piece, I describe it.)

"It has a simple melody like that, and the accompaniment in the left hand is a series of chords that are descending chromatically, note by note, creating an impression of deep sorrow, or profound melancholia."

"Yes, well, I like Chopin. I play his stuff, mostly."

"Which of his pieces do you play?"

"I don't know any names."

Stunned silence. Can this be the Alan I know, the musical maestro who practically lived in the music school while he was in high school? Can it be? Oh, wait. No, it can't.

It keeps happening to me. I meet someone, he reminds me of someone else, and suddenly my mind is full of assumptions about his tastes, his abilities, or even his character. Chris reminds me of Richard. Veronica reminds me of Katie. Shannon makes me think of Hillary. Prof. Schlueter makes me think of Dan.

I don't always associate an old acquaintance with each new one. Sometimes I think of celebrities or fictional characters instead. Sometimes I don't think of anyone else at all. Sometimes I can't place my finger on who I'm reminded of; I just know there's some connection in the back of my mind, some bell quietly and indistinctly ringing. But even for the people who most strongly remind me of people I already knew before, the problem isn't permanent. As I get to know people better, their characters take a shape of their own. They become their own person. Sometimes the connections to friends from home remain valid, sometimes they don't. But in the meantime, my dear new Hillsdale friends, if I'm shocked that you don't know about Sarasate's Zapateado, or that you run cross-country instead of swimming, or that you don't already have your Ph.D. in geology your freshman year at a liberal arts school, forgive me. It's just my Marplean view of human nature kicking in. Give me a couple days, and I'll know you for yourself.

Possible Slogans for 2010

2009-12-31T13:00:00.000-05:00

I don't know if this is something everyone does or not, but in my family we sometimes come up with slogans for the new year. You know, catchy phrases like "Buy a new crate in 2008," or "Things will decline in 2009." Those were not our official slogans from the past two years; in fact, if we had official slogans, I can't remember them. But whatever clever jingles we did come up with, official or not, are in the final stages of obsolescence. It's time for some new ones. I have lots and lots of excellent suggestions.

Pronunciation note: For some of these slogans you have to say "twenty-ten" and for others "two thousand ten." You can figure out which works better as you go.

#1. Meet lots of men in 2010. Sorry, ladies, no offense intended. It's not that I don't like meeting you just as much those of my own gender; but, to be quite frank, "ladies" does not rhyme with "ten." Nor does "girls." Nor do "misses," "madames," or "those of the female persuasion." "Women" does come pretty close, but the meter is all wrong. So men it is.

#2. Listen to Glenn in 2010. This is not really one of my goals. Glenn Beck is a pretty good host, but I haven't listened to him much and I have no overwhelming desire to do so. If listening to talk radio is on your 30 by 30 list, however, this is the year. Do it.

#3. Eat a hen in 2010. This is for those non-vegetarians who want really easy New Year's resolutions. If you really want a resolution that would be hard to keep, you could change the "a" to a "no," but I don't know why you'd want to.

#4. Eat like a Karen in 2010. A number of the students at Bible school this year are students from the Karen (pronounced kə-REN) ethnic group in Burma. Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic these people exhibit is a strength of taste buds that is positively astounding. Nothing is safe from the cayenne pepper shaker when they are around. Want to develop superpower tastebuds yourself? Want to be able to eat anything? The only way to get there is practice. Eat like a Karen.

Quick recipe for those who decide to follow #4:
Make oatmeal - lots of it. Pour it in a bowl. Cover it with black pepper, salt, and cayenne pepper until the oatmeal disappears. Mix it all up. Add more spices to taste. Enjoy!

#5. Stay friends with Ben in 2010. This one is going to be really hard for me. Ben and I have only been friends for twenty years, after all, and, though I can hardly imagine a closer, better friendship, who knows what could happen in the next twelve months? Don't worry, Ben, I'll stick to you like glue.

#6. Take up your pen in 2010. This one is actually serious. I want to write more. Writing improves with practice, as a quick glance back in my blog archives will prove, and I want my writing to keep improving. College will help with that, I'm sure, but I want to get better on my own, too.

#7. Never again in 2010. Do you regret anything from your past? Did you make any mistakes in 2009? This slogan is for you. It's very versatile. You can use it however you wish. As a matter of fact, "again" is itself pretty much a wild card in 2010 slogans. "Wash the car..." "Make dinner..." "Read the Bible..." "Stop smoking..." Pretty much anything goes! Take it. Use it. No charge.

#8. Pray for peace in 2010. Okay, this one requires a little creativity. Running out of English rhymes? Pronounce the year in French! Deux mille dix rhymes with peace, and a whole slew of other words that would otherwise never make any New Year's slogans ever.

#9. Care for your chien in 2010. Another French trick. Chien means dog.

#10. Remember that God can in 2010. This is the best I could come up with for a real, pithy, worthwhile slogan. Nothing is impossible with God, and I want to live like I believe it. When big difficulties present themselves, such as paying $30,000 for college, or having lots of convention responsibilities, or even the constant difficulty of budgeting my time and arranging my priorities when I have a million things to do, that is when the recognition of God's omnipotence is absolutely essential. I need to remember that God can provide, that God can guide, and that God can inspire.

So there you go. All sorts of good resolutions for the new year, compacted into clever little rhymes. I hope they have motivated you to make this year a successful and glorious one. Happy New Year!

When We All Get to Heaven....

2009-12-26T23:53:00.004-05:00

...what a day of rejoicing that will be!"

That song goes on to speak about seeing Jesus -- the biggest, most important, and most wonderful reason that heaven will be a place of rejoicing. But there's another reason that has become increasingly real to me recently, and that is the hope of meeting and getting to know countless others in a way that is simply impossible in this life.

Last month, I went on a college tour that included visiting six different colleges in five different states and driving, along with my traveling companions Mr. H. and Ben, through a total of thirteen states. It was a very helpful trip that radically changed my opinions about a number of colleges and left me feeling very much more informed than I had been when I left. I enjoyed the enlightenment; I enjoyed the scenery; I enjoyed the amazingly delicious cafeteria food. But mostly I enjoyed the people.

I made a lot of new acquaintances on this trip: professors, admissions counselors, students, and occasionally other prospective students. In all probability, most of these will never be anything more than acquaintances, or even former acquaintances. In some cases I have absolutely no problem with this scenario. In some cases I welcome it. But I met quite a few people whose friendship I would love to have, and the majority of these people will be swept into the back of my memory along with everyone else.

I consider this to be a very sad thought. You see, I wish I could know everyone in the world who was worth knowing: everyone who could teach me something new, or who could learn something new with me; everyone with whom I could enjoy a good laugh, or a good story, or a good conversation. I wish I could know everyone who shares my interests, my passions, and my philosophy.

I wish I could know that professor at Hillsdale College whose passion, eloquence, and enthusiasm all combined to make him the perfect teacher. I would love to get to know those two students from Wheaton (one of whom was the oldest of five in a home-schooled family) with whom Ben and I discussed the origin of truth on the train into Chicago. I would really like to be friends with the admissions counselor at Bryan College, who emphasized that whatever college God leads me to will be the right one, and the visit coordinator at the same school, who gave her own testimony of how nothing is impossible with God. The list goes on. Those students at Patrick Henry, that professor at Geneva, that Admissions Counselor at Hillsdale -- I wish I could know them all.

The problem, of course, is that I can't.

I think one of the saddest things in life is the impossibility of knowing everyone who would be worth knowing. So many potential friendships must be sacrificed to mere earthly practicality. The friendships we do get to enjoy are wonderful, and I have no complaints about my own. But just as every friend is unique and irreplaceable, so no friendship is a perfect replacement for another, even if the seeds of the other friendship never turn into actual plants.

I have a theory: since everyone who accepts Jesus' sacrifice for his atonement will go to heaven, and since we will live there eternally, once we get there we will have all the time we want to get to know each other. No potential friendship will have to be set aside. Never again will we have to wonder what a relationship could have been. Not only will we be able to enjoy God completely, unimpeded by our fallen nature, but we will also be able to enjoy each other completely as well.

What a day of rejoicing that will be!

More From the Pond

2009-08-30T15:55:00.001-04:00

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Dragonfly on a Red Cardboard Box

2009-08-27T22:12:00.001-04:00

I took this picture with a new lens I just bought, a Tamron 70-300mm lens with a macro function. This photo is a composite of two different photos from the same perspective, using the better-focused part of each to make an in-focus whole.

My Wishlist Wishlist

2009-08-21T23:57:00.005-04:00

As I was doing some shopping on Amazon.com today, carefully comparing some similar items and combing their reviews for useful information, I remembered a time when I used to do such things more frequently, albeit for a rather amusing purpose.

Way back in the early days of my relationship with the World Wide Web, when we paid $25 a month to get super-slow service from America Online, when e-mail was something of a novelty, and when things like Blogger and Facebook were only mystical concepts in the minds of the technological avantgarde - back then, in the dawn of my online experience, Amazon.com was my primary attraction to the internet. Strange though it may seem now, I spent hours on that site. In fact, I probably spent a rather large majority of my internet allowance perusing the world's biggest online store. And the irony is that I had no intention of buying anything. I was the ultimate Windows shopper.

My commitment to honesty compels me to admit that the simple joy of comparing the latest merchandise was not my only attraction to Amazon.com, per se. It wasn't all merely about finding out what was the best, the cheapest, or the best deal. Nor was it about just having fun, though of that I had much. No, I was a selfish little lad, as a retrospective glance at my ideas, misconceptions, and consequent action from that time would make sadly apparent.

I first learned about Amazon.com when Evan and Jill came over for dinner shortly after they had moved to New Hampshire. It's one of those random little memories that sticks in one's mind from his childhood for no explicable reason. Mama and Jill were talking about shopping, I think, and Jill asked if we had tried Amazon.com. I had heard of it - I think by that time it was already a pretty big company - but hadn't realized that WE could use it. I don't know exactly who I thought generally used it - probably rich people with fancy computers or college students who could sit down with only Notepad open and design a whole website (imagine!) - but that's beside the point. The point is that if Jill could shop at Amazon.com, so could I. Suddenly online shopping was a possibility, and I took my first opportunity to check it out.

Some time in the next few days, I opened my very own Amazon.com account. What excitement! And what bliss! I had already become the first member of my family to open a personal e-mail account, and to add "first Amazon.com member" to my resume cemented my reputation as the most tech-savvy member of the family.

But this was back in the days when pride had less appeal for me than materialism. Imagine my absolute delight when I learned three separate but related facts: Amazon sometimes overstocked and sold things for cheaper; Amazon asked what your birthday was; and Amazon let you create a wishlist. Clearly, Amazon users had only to report their DOB and ask for whatever they wanted, and the philanthropic managers of the good website would send you presents (if, of course, they happened to have more stuff than they really needed).

Well, from that moment it was my ambition to place all the overstocked merchandise I could find in my wishlist. I particularly desired a CD boombox and a digital camera, I remember, and I would fly around the electronics pages searching for whatever I thought was nice but unlikely to be extremely popular.

"This one looks nice. Memorex CD and tape player... with remote control! I doubt it will be overstocked, but I'll add it to my list just in case. Oh, here's a nice Sony... same features but way more money! No one will buy this! I'll add it..."

Birthday after birthday came and went, and though I watched the mail around those times with eager expectancy, my hopes for a complimentary gift from the wonderland behind my mother's inch-thick laptop screen were never realized. Nearly ten years later, I'm still waiting.

What you see...

2009-08-16T00:23:00.014-04:00

…when you turn a 50mm lens around and, holding it face to face with your normal autofocus lens, look through the viewfinder of your Pentax K200D camera at the dead fly that’s lying on your bedside table:

The Joys of Painting

2009-08-11T23:05:00.005-04:00

I mentioned in a previous post some of the sorrows of painting - how it can be tedious, how you have to bend over and move your arm a lot, how it can be messy, and how the end sometimes seems unreachable. I didn't mention how bugs stick the paint when you are painting at night and leave the door open.

But in all that moaning and expostulating I only mentioned one of the things that makes me like painting - that I can do it well. I meant to go on to mention a couple other things that make painting much more agreeable. In fact, I rather like painting. It's productive. It gives me a nice sense of accomplishment when I have finished a job. And most of all, I can listen to audiobooks.

For years, I have had a long list of books that I knew I wanted to read "someday." I suppose it would be more accurate to say I had several such lists, for I never kept any one of them very long before it got lost, destroyed, or filched. I would rewrite it, and the titles would change, but the more absolute list of books that I had actually read would remain the same. I lapsed into despair ... until, like the glorious, golden sun rising over the snow-capped Caucasus mountains in a perfect Azerbaijani sunrise, the great discovery of audiobooks peered over my horizon and became a part of my life forever.

I made this great discovery last year during summer work at Fairwood. I had known for some time that the NH library website offers free audiobook rentals, and I had purposely bought an MP3 player that could play them and hold a lot of them. (I had been planning to make this discovery for some time.) Most of my time that week was divided between insulating the attic over the main house apartment and painting the dining hall, and both jobs are great audiobook jobs. I tackled them, a very talented British woman whispering the words of Tolstoy into my ears, and by the end of the week I was able to cross Anna Karenina off my list. (Fabulous book, by the way. Highly recommended. And Wanda McCaddon is a highly recommended reader.)

I have continued to take advantage of the opportunity to mingle work with entertainment and education throughout my painting this summer, and I have certainly enjoyed it. I love being able to listen to great stories and be productive - and earn money - at the same time. My list for this summer so far includes The Golden Key and Gone With the North Wind by George MacDonald, The Magician's Nephew, The Horse and His Boy, and Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, and The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. In just the past two weeks I've listened to The Great Gatsby, Prince Caspian, and My Antonia. And I have copies of Persuasion, Moby Dick, The Age of Innocence, War and Peace, and Wuthering Heights waiting for me when I want them.

The beauty of this - perhaps I should say "another beauty of this," since I have just enchanted you with the beauty of listening and working simultaneously - the beauty of this is that it's all free! Not that free is always a good thing - I must admit that some of the readers from volunteer-based audiobook sites like Librivox have obnoxious voices, and I know from experience that it is hard to pay attention to the story when you're paying attention to the narrator's ridiculous accent or monotonous tone. One Librivox reader I previewed would read with a kind of sawtooth intonation. At the beginning of the sentence she would speak with a high pitch, and she would gradually lower her voice as she uttered each word. At the end of the sentence or clause she would begin again, with the exact same tone as before. It is difficult to demonstrate in writing the soporific effect of this habit of hers. Perhaps if you ask me I will demonstrate it for you some time. In the meantime, I listen mostly to the library audiobooks: every one is professionally recorded, and I have not been disappointed by many of the readers.

Of course, real reading with a book is not without it's distinct charms and pleasures, and I really enjoy sitting down with a good book. The trouble is that I never budget my time with reading in mind, and I never end up giving myself the chance. There are a number of books on my list of which I can't get free copies, and some of the ones that I can get for free are read by people with horrible reading voices. These ones I will read myself...

... someday.

Of One Whose Driving Skills Are Poor

2009-08-10T13:40:00.012-04:00

When I was driving home the other day, I was behind a man in a nice SUV. The man in the nice SUV came to a stop sign before I did, as people who are driving in front of me are wont to do. Even though the road we were traveling ended there, and the man in the nice SUV must clearly turn either to the right hand or to the left, his turn signal was left untouched.

I always find it slightly annoying when people don't use their turn signals - especially when they haven't forgotten about it but have decided that it's unnecessary. The point of using your blinker is to show the drivers around you what you intend, and if you don't see any cars around you that's no excuse: it's the cars that you don't see that need to know what you're going to the most. Besides, it's just a flick of the wrist! If you think it's too tiresome, just pretend it's a Bop-it game, and whenever you're going to turn or change lanes, your car suddenly says, "Bop-it down!" or "Bop-it up!" That makes it fun. And besides, not using your blinker reveals a vacant mind. I rest my case, which has been logically and unanswerably presented.

Where were we? Ah yes, the man in the nice SUV had not used his turn signal. Well, I wasn't really worried about this gross lack of courtesy. I have seen too many drivers behaving similarly to think this instance remarkable. Anyway, the man in the nice SUV had driven to the far left side of the lane, leaving more than a car's width of pavement to his right. Clearly, he intended to turn left. I was going right, so I pulled alongside him and began to check for traffic... when the man in the nice SUV turned right.

"Silly driver," I said, rather loudly. But of course he pretended not to hear.

A Tearjerker

2009-08-10T00:16:00.000-04:00

I have been painting for work these days - painting my dad's new office space so he can move his business into a place with pretty beige walls instead of bare sheetrock. It's no use denying that I sometimes get tired of painting. No, seriously, I will not deny it! I do! The constant up and down motion, the constant bending over to get more paint, and either the constant vigilance or the constant cleaning of spills and spots - it just isn't something I think I'll want to do in heaven. And when you have over a thousand square feet of wall space that is frequently interrupted by wooden trim boards that have to be painted with a brush, the job can be very tiresome indeed. There's nothing like a full week of repetitive work to make you appreciate the Sabbath.

Painting does have several notable advantages for me, though; it's not all a trial and a bore. For one thing, it's something I know I can do well. Sheetrocking, which I was doing last week, is not.

If I have any sheetrocking skills at all, they're pretty thickly buried under a couple strata of inexperience. I started last week with a couple pieces that had to be scribed to fit a rather irregular wall that included a ledge, a sill, an electrical track, and a beam. I measured wrong somehow and ended up with a nice one-inch gap between the board and the wall for about six inches at the top. The next piece I cut was almost just right, but was just big enough that I had to keep trimming down tiny slices off the end to make it fit. At least it was snug when I finally got it into place. By that time I was quite tired (just as, incidentally, I am now!), and I almost quit for the day. Not really feeling like I had accomplished much, however, I decided to try for one more board, this one a simpler specimen. All it called for was a simple rectangular window cutout. I measured once, measured again, and set to work cutting.

Suddenly, I stopped myself. I had just been about to cut on the wrong side of the board! I sighed with relief as I settled down to doing it right. The cuts were clean and beautiful, exactly following the lines I had carefully delineated with a pen and a square. I was sure that in a few minutes I would have earned my rest for the day. As I picked up my opus (it wasn't really magnum; just an opus), I was confronted with the awful truth: I had been right the first time.

There I stood, grasping the mirror image of the piece of sheetrock I wanted and having no way to rewind the time so I could cut it right. It fit perfectly into the space for it if I held it against the wall backward, but that wasn't much comfort. I just left it there and departed for a long weekend. When I got back on Tuesday, the sheetrocking was almost done, and boy was I glad! I've been painting ever since.

The Tales of the Tired Mind

2009-08-08T01:14:00.003-04:00

If you look at the timestamp on this post, you will note that it is rather late. I was actually working on another post - a longer, more detailed one - until about ten minutes ago, at which time something happened that showed me I should probably go to bed.

I was writing about some of the work I have been doing lately, work that involved sheetrocking. And I was really tired. Slowly, involuntarily, my eyelids began to droop as I typed away, recounting how the other day I had been tired but had decided to put up just one last sheet of drywall before heading to supper.

Suddenly, I realized I had been drifting into that misty semi-unconsciousness in which one is neither alert nor slumbering. I hadn't quite fallen asleep, but I had begun to dream at least a little. I shook myself, unable to recall where my thoughts had just been wandering, and looked at the clock. It was past one.

"Maybe I should finish this later," I thought, and when I looked at the computer screen I decided that was a good plan.

"By this time I was very tired," I had written, "but I decided that I would lend my land to the farmer boys..."

The Other Side of the Coin

2009-07-30T01:37:00.002-04:00

You know how the squeaky wheel gets the grease? Well, sometimes the whining mosquito gets the slap.

Debunking a Myth

2009-07-23T00:53:00.002-04:00

We have all heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in some cases this statement bears a degree of accuracy. It is, for example, difficult to reproduce in words a facial expression portraying absolute shock, or joy, or anguish. The words we use, if used well, may evoke mental images that accurately represent what language is attempting to convey, but it is still pictures that do the trick. Show someone a picture of the beautiful view you enjoyed from a mountaintop and a thousand words of description are immediately rendered unnecessary. Show someone a picture of an adorable baby, and information that words simply cannot express is successfully shared.

Words, on the other hand, wield a kind of power that pictures would only dream of, had they the ability. A good book is far more likely to make me want to cry than the saddest of pictures – though I must concede that both pictures and words can make me laugh without great difficulty. Language can conjure thoughts, feelings, and emotions that photography cannot touch. If I let it, a good novel can toss my heart around like a hacky-sack. An encouraging personal note, though it be only ten words long, can mean more to me than all the pictures in China. Words can do things to me that pictures never could. That is why Microsoft Word is more used than Adobe Photoshop. That is why the library has so many books that are largely devoid of illustration. And that is why Edgar Allen Poe wrote “The Raven” instead of sketching a big black bird sitting on a statue.

So the question I want answered is this: to what words and pictures was the proverbist referring when he made his precise comparison of their value? Sometimes words are priceless, and sometimes pictures are; sometimes one is absolutely useless where the other is quite invaluable. It is all relative. There are instances where a picture truly is worth a thousand words, and there are other instances where a thousand pictures will not suffice for a simple word fitly spoken.

I am of the opinion that photography and writing cannot be fairly compared. They are apples and oranges, two different forms of expression that were created for different purposes. I take pictures because I like to capture visual beauty and to explore different perspectives. I write because I like to use verbal beauty to positively affect my audience, whether through humor, insight, or intellect. Both an essay and a poster have some degree of worth, but that worth is pretty subjective. Is this 500-word article worth half a picture? I think not.

A lot depends on the quality of the sample in question, by the way. A picture may be worth a million LOL’s, but no number of photographs will ever be worth a Dickens.

Some things never change…

2009-07-19T22:42:00.001-04:00

Found in an old school notebook that included such math problems as “136-59=77.” Note the creative use of X’s to show that the boy was NOT thinking about his dirty dishes and unmade bed.

East Inlet

2009-07-15T01:35:00.005-04:00

This is a loon. She is nesting . I thought about naming her Claire and making some fantastic pun along the lines of “Au Claire de la Loon,” but I couldn’t quite manage it without being ridiculous.

I took this picture a couple weeks ago while I was helping on the “Young Men’s Time” (more commonly known as “Guys’ Week”) trip up to Pittsburg, NH. On the second day we were there, we piled into the van and headed to East Inlet, canoes in tow. East Inlet is an official “Moose Sanctuary” or something like that, and we were hoping to see one of those legendary creatures in their natural habitat. Alas, we failed in that respect, but in several other ways we were most successful.

East Inlet is one of those spots in creation where you lose track of how many times you have said, “This is so beautiful!” The vista is breathtaking. Though shallow, the water is smooth and vast. The shore is thick with tall, vertical pines – a kind of tree that I have generally thought looked drab and scraggly compared to, say, a maple or a birch, but which by East Inlet somehow becomes the most beautiful of plants. And, of course, the wildlife is lovely, as wildlife generally is. I didn’t see any terribly exotic species, and nothing but birds, but when you have time to really look at it, even a crow is a miraculous creature. Fortunately for us, we had nicer animals than crows to gaze upon, and we had all the time we wanted to do so.

The beauty of East Inlet is not just skin deep, either. There's some kind of a beautiful aura there. It is so quiet – so peaceful. The kind of place where it’s easy to think about God and to be completely awed by His power and creativity. In that respect, it’s in the same category as mountain tops and secluded beaches. I love such places. They feed my soul. Have you ever experienced it? That feeling of just drinking in the glory, beauty, and serenity of your surroundings? If you haven’t, you’d better go climb a mountain right away. You’re missing out on one of the best experiences this planet has to offer.

“For the invisible things of Him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.”

Oh, by the way, going to East Inlet was also successful because we had lots of fun. When you get past the vast lake part of it, it turns into a winding maze of a stream that turns 180 degrees countless times. And, boy oh boy, it’s waters like that that separate the canoe men from the canoe boys. Craig and I shared a canoe, and we had a blast seeing how sharp we could make that thing turn. We got it down to quite a science, too. We even raced past one of the other canoes on the inside of a curve, though it passed us again a dozen or so switchbacks later.

Some of the other guys were having slightly less of a blast, and when they tried to remedy this by switching places in the canoe, it flipped and drenched the three of them. They complained long and hard when we got back, but I think secretly they enjoy having the memory, and some of them at least do enjoy telling the story.

“Well, I certainly wasn’t the one who stepped on the side of the canoe…”

We continued our labyrinthian voyage until approaching darkness and obstructive beaver dams bade us return. It was a fun time, a fulfilling time, and – for us photographers – a fruitful time. I’m going to go again some day. Count on it.

Try Harder! Stress Less!

2009-06-23T01:38:00.002-04:00

I played table tennis for a couple hours this evening, first with Ryan and then with my dad. I played appallingly poorly. True, the lighting in our basement is less than ideal, and if we showed our table to anyone with real ping pong skills and ambitions, he would probably stare at it icily or guffaw in our faces and our relationship would have to be discontinued. But if the playing field was not even, at least its unevenness was shared by both players. I could not complain that it was not fair. No, my big excuse for Ryan beating me something like eight times out of ten was tension: I wanted to win so badly that I would find myself straining every muscle in an attempt to be more ready for every shot. Then, recognizing my stress level and sagaciously remembering that I perform better stress-free, I would try to be calm and relaxed. Unfortunately, this usually resulted in my growing increasingly floppy and unfocused. I would try so hard to relax that I would not try to play. It was distressing.

It can be so hard to “try to relax.” That’s the trouble, really. Stressing out about not being relaxed is counterproductive, not to mention illogical. "Relax and try harder" is a different statement altogether, however, and paradoxical though it may sound, I would go so far as to say that, in many situations, relaxation and exertion must both be pursued for any measure of success to be attained.

When I played my dad later, it was a lot better. Something about playing someone who is not your little brother and who used to be a high school champion (though when he was a senior he came in second to a sophomore and still kicks himself about it) makes it matter slightly less that you win. And when the stakes are lowered, relaxing is easier. I lost every game to my dad, and by bigger margins than when I played Ryan, but I played much better and had more fun. And that’s really what the game is all about.

(Well, primarily about.)

Ping pong is not the only area where the principle of simultaneous relaxation and exertion is effective – it is merely the example that is most current in my mind. The other example that comes quickest to my mind is playing the piano. You simply can NOT play with great speed if you are not relaxed. And you cannot play with great speed unless you focus and apply yourself, too.

It’s also true for running. It’s also true for debating. It’s also true for singing, for web design, for swimming… Oh, good grief! It’s a universal principle of life! The Great Aaron has revealed it. Use it often. Use it well.

Fiddler Crab

2009-06-16T23:56:00.001-04:00

Dickens, Modernized

2009-06-11T16:45:00.000-04:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way …

Cape Cod Sunset

2009-06-08T23:30:00.001-04:00

The Rights of Man As Perceived By a Child

2009-06-01T06:30:00.002-04:00

I think I may have been a singular child. Certainly, I know of few boys who have so early developed and cultivated into maturity a sense of the rights of the father in the family setting. I was, as I say, quite young when I first recognized the man of the family’s greatest and most sacred privilege: the claim to the driver’s seat.

The father’s right to drive was something I long considered a certain unalienable right with which he had been endowed by his Creator. After all, whenever we went anywhere as a family, Daddy always drove. And, I suppose I reasoned, if something were always done a certain way in our family, mustn’t it be the supreme law of the universe? Indeed, I could think of few worse infractions against the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God than for the mother to drive the family anywhere. Of course, when the father was not around, the mother must inevitably sometimes assume the role of chaufferess. This was no sin. But for the woman to drive when the man was in the same vehicle was a dreadful usurpation of paternal authority, and I never beheld such an occurrence without grave fears for the souls of the reprobates in question.

I remember one particular time, long ago, when just such a scenario was played out before my eyes. We were leaving church, I believe, and I spotted some naughty woman driving her husband away – and in such proximity to the very house of God!

“Mama! Why is … (I can’t remember who the culprits were exactly, so I’ll make this generic) … why is Mrs. Smith driving instead of Mr. Smith?”

“Well, Aaron, maybe Mr. Smith is tired or doesn’t want to drive.”

Doesn’t want to drive?!? This was food for thought, indeed. What right had he not to want to drive? I was perplexed and baffled. A little crack opened up in the dike of my convictions.

“Well, if he’s tired, I suppose it’s all right…”

I stuck my finger into the crack. But it kept growing, growing, growing, through the years, and soon all my precocious ideas began to crumble and my youthful, imaginative dogmata were reduced to the ruins of real life. Just look at me now! Half a dozen women could drive their husbands by me and I would scarcely blink an eye.

The Hunt Begins

2009-05-31T01:10:00.001-04:00

I haven’t written in a long time. That I haven’t blogged in a long time is abundantly clear, but really writing of any kind has been on neither my to-do list nor my have-done list in months. I haven’t been keeping up my journal, and none of the last couple of classes I took at school required any writing beyond simple note-taking. I have written several letters to friends in the past several weeks, it’s true, but those only whetted my appetite for more. I’m hungry to write.

Of course, one of the biggest, most insurmountable obstacles that I face when I want to write is that I have great difficulty coming up with a subject. To continue my hunger analogy, it’s as though I’m all geared up to go hunting for my much-needed food but I never start because I don’t know what I am hunting for. So I get nothing, and that’s that.

But now! Ah, now things are different, for I have decided to hunt deer. And deer are whatever I want my subject to be at the moment, whatever story or idea it behooves me to share. See? Problem solved.

The deer of the moment is a simple little quote: “Never stay up late browsing the internet. It is a dreadful waste of time and sets you onto a dreadful cycle of fatigue producing fatigue. Beware!”

Determination

2009-05-30T16:03:00.002-04:00

Captions Welcome

2008-11-13T16:40:00.002-05:00

Spoils

2008-07-30T21:14:00.002-04:00

Mmmmm. Berry good. Har har.

Panaisafix

2008-05-28T22:03:00.004-04:00

This past year at Bible school, my fellow dormmates and I made a movie spoofing American Idol. It was funny, but probably the best part was the ads. This is, in my humble opinion, the best of those. It's one that my good friend Bobby and I put together one afternoon because we had nothing else to do. It's for this medicine - Panaisafix - which fixes all your problems. Seriously.

The Last Day of My Life

2008-05-21T22:30:00.000-04:00

It was the perfect day. My absolute best friend, Scarlett, and I were gaily zipping around the New Boston pond we called home, playfully dipping our feet in the beautiful stagnant waters and giggling as only female mosquitoes can.

"What a delightful day this is, Delicia!" Scarlett chimed in a high-pitched tone. She had a really cute monotonous voice, and never wavered from a perfect E-flat. Naturally, I was jealous of this talent (I was always wavering between an F and a G), but Scarlett was the soul of modesty. She never criticized me or boasted about her superior ability.

Scarlett's comment was very true. It was a gorgeous day. The sky was a brilliant azure, spotted with little clouds, wandering lonely and floating on high o'er vales and hills. The native birches and pines swayed gently in the warm breeze, and the tall grasses at the edge of the pond rustled softly. A few birds warbled off in the woods a little way, and a few frogs sat solemnly on their lily pads glistening in the sun, but even these rainclouds, to speak metaphorically, could not block out the sunshine of the day.

"Your comment was very true, Scarlett," I whined cheerfully. (As humans, you may not realize that it is entirely possible to whine cheerfully. I am told that happy whining is a very difficult feat for those of the homo sapiens species to accomplish, but we mosquitoes have long mastered the art.) "It remains true even now. Delightful is the perfect word to describe this day. Let us cavort."

The sounds of our laughter filling the air, we began to fly around the pond together. We chased each other through the rushes; we spiraled up around the trunks of the trees and pirouetted around the leaves. Suddenly, as we began to sail into one of those warm spring zephyrs that are just so much fun, Scarlett stopped dead in her flightpath. I nearly slammed into her, but thanks to my superb reflexes, for which I had long been known around the pond and even a couple yards into the forest, I missed her by a centimeter or so and hovered by her.

"Dearest Scarlett, what is the matter?"

"Do you smell that, Delicia?" Scarlett had a hungry glint in her eye, and as I sniffed the air I understood why. Carried along by the very breeze in which I had been so heedlessly playing was every girl's favorite scent: blood.

Incidentally, I will never understand why boys don't like the smell or taste of blood. I tried to get my friend Vladamir to try some once, but he seemed positively revolted. But this little observation has no real pertinence to the story at hand, and so I will leave it for better minds than my own to ponder.

Once we smelled that blood, Scarlett and I did not even to confer on our next plans. We both knew at once that we simply must follow the scent to its source. The instant we smelled that delicious fragrance we began to crave the ambrosia it represented, and mosquitoes never think twice about cravings. As the Great Culicidae once said, "To follow one's nose is to follow one's heart."

We flew into the wind at full speed, and it was not long before we passed through the forest and came out into some sort of human subdivision. There was a newly-paved cul-de-sac surrounded by fresh green grass. Big green metal boxes and partially completed sandy driveways dotted the sides of the road. Parked in the circle at the end was a gold van, and near it, digging passionately, were two men. Both wore jeans and workboots, but while one sported a white T-shirt, the other was decked in a blue polo. And while the white-shirted fellow had a bandanna on his head, the other was bare-headed, exposing his sandy hair to the northern sun.

"Goodness gracious, Delicia!" cried Scarlett, her melodious E-flat in a violent crescendo. "Look at those men! Aren't they handsome?"

"Yes, indeed, Scarlett," I returned, "and boy am I hungry!"

"Look at that younger one - the one without the beard. He's so tan! Do you think we could actually be so lucky as to have found a Floridian import?"

"I don't know... but he is tan. Oh, I can't wait to taste that sun-warmed liquor." I shuddered with anticipation. "For what are we waiting?"

Screaming madly with delight, Scarlett and I honed in on the youth with the bronzed complexion and sandy hair. I was flying so hard to get a taste of what promised to be a truly delectable treat that I could barely control myself. I was truly alive.

Suddenly, without warning, Scarlett once again halted abruptly, and it took every bit of my superb reflexes to avoid her this time. "Scarlett, darling, what's wrong this time?" I cried, my fleshly desire for indulgence deeply in conflict with the nobler virtues of my spirit.

"Look," whispered Scarlett, with uncanny vibrato, "look, dearest Delicia, at his hand!"

I looked, and I gasped. Covering the skin of this young man's hand was a yellow glove of leather. Instantly, my mind hearkened back to the days of my childhood (I think it was five days before, but it may have been only four; I have never had a good sense of time), when all of us fledgling mosquitoes would sit and bask in the wisdom of the Great Culicidae, history's greatest mosquito.

"Young skeeters," he used to say, "you are young and inexperienced. Beware of frogs, beware of dragonflies, and beware of birds; but most of all, beware of the Yellow Hand of Death."

Scarlett was very pale. "I'm frightened, Delicia," she said. "I don't think we should go any further."

I hesitated. Certainly, it was not every day that such a warning as that given by the Great Culicidae should be so applicable. This hand was certainly yellow, and it could be the hand of death foretold. Perhaps to attempt to eat from the banquet before me would be to irrationally tempt fate. Perhaps this was a golden opportunity for me to test my virtues of self-control, temperance, and restraint.

On the other hand, this was a feast like none I had ever seen! Every instinct in me cried, "Eat, drink, revel, be filled! Indulge yourself." (Curiously, this inner voice was low and deep, rather Darth Vader-esque; very unlike my high-pitched, nasal speaking voice.) How could I ignore my instincts? Everyone knows that mosquitoes are usually - though not invariably, I must allow - driven by instinct. I was not the exception to the rule, and so I turned to Scarlett with resolution in my heart.

"Dear friend," I crooned, keeping mainly to the lower note of my range, "I cannot ignore my God-given desire to be filled. The blood of this dashing young lad is calling to me, figuratively speaking, and I must obey. I will exercise the utmost of caution. I will look constantly at the Hand as I drink from the arm, and I will keep my reflexes ready. You know how good my reflexes are, Scarlett."

Scarlett, of course, could not deny that I had terrific reflexes, so she timidly agreed to join me. We buzzed down together to the tan, muscular arm that was so attractive and lighted on it with mosquitoey stealth. True to my word, I kept my eyes focused on the Yellow Hand and prepared to drink.

I cannot even begin to describe the pleasure that coursed through my entire body as I pierced the vein of that noble soul. The richness, the sweetness, the positive delectableness of that blood took my breath away. I closed my eyes out of sheer pleasure, but quickly opened them again as I remembered my promise of vigilance. I looked at the Hand, but it had not moved.

A completely unexpected - and indecently loud - whine from Scarlett startled me. "Look out, Delicia!" she intoned. "There's another hand!"

My eyes darted upward with a catlike swiftness, and I quickly beheld just how true Scarlett's warning was. Hovering a couple feet above my head was an enormous human appendage, this one also clothed in yellow leather. This was a crisis. My very life was in danger! Who could say but that I would nevermore see my dear pond, nevermore drink from its peaceful waters, and nevermore cavort above its lily pads? But I was the mosquito with the champion reflexes from the area. Mere human dexterity was no match for my insectival agility. The hand had not yet begun its descent; I would just pull my mouth out of the arm - like so - and....

Smack.

Crazy Weather

2008-03-28T23:44:00.001-04:00

A Somber Warning

2008-03-03T21:58:00.000-05:00

This is what happens to those who are careless; who pay little attention to their writing utensils; in short, who try to open their clicker pens by ramming the clicker end against their chests only to find that it was the writing end, and that it was open all along. BEWARE!!!! If it happened to me, it can happen to you.

The Straight and Narrow Way

2008-02-27T22:41:00.001-05:00

Pretty much the BEST group in the world!

2008-02-16T22:10:00.000-05:00

Weekends in Rhode Island rock!

Happy Valentines Day!

2008-02-14T00:01:00.001-05:00

This covers everyone. Hurrah for mass communication. :)

The Course of Pranking Never Did Run Smooth

2008-02-12T21:27:00.007-05:00

This post is actually written from a computer, for once. I guess you could say my phone has gotten me at least slightly more into the habit of posting, and when something too good for 1000 characters and 1 picture comes across my path, I must get me to the press room.

Just such a something did indeed come across my path in recent days. It all started last week. Since Rachel was publishing an article with testimonies from the seven first-years in TOR (our church magazine), she wanted pictures of each of us. We were to get them to her by the end of the week. Sadly, we did not succeed (at least, the guys didn't), but that is not the point of this post. Saturday evening we finally got around to taking the requisite photos. Craig got out Clyde's handy dandy Nikon D70S, and we all pretty much lined up for a photo shoot. We all got pictures. They were good.

But there is so much more to the story than that! You see, we didn't just want to send Rachel boring old portraits. No, we wanted something original and lively! With this in mind, we all settled down around my computer while I clicked and dragged and typed until our pictures looked like this:

Rachel was highly amused when she opened the folder. "They were too good not to share," she said, and they quickly found their way to the Fairwood kitchen bulletin board.

We all laughed, of course, but we didn't know just how far Rachel was willing to go to share our hilarious photos. The next evening, we were stunned when she showed us a copy of TOR... with our edited pictures!

Good grief! Imagine the embarrassment and devastation! I was pretty stunned, to say the least. What would the magazine's faithful readers think of Fairwood's first-year guys? Would they call us names? Would they complain to the editors? What about my reputation? I went to bed and sobbed all night.

Let me correct myself: I MIGHT have sobbed all night, had it not been for the fact that Rachel pointed out (after allowing just a brief period of unutterable anxiety) that this was only a rough draft, and the official copies - the REAL ones - would be published with the much less original - but, oh, so much more acceptable! - traditional portraits which we had included in a subfolder.

Well, relief was ours, and the end of the story was a happy one for all. We got our laugh, and Rachel got hers. But the moral of the story is this: never play a prank on someone without evaluating what he could do to get you back.

My New Skill

2008-02-11T23:06:00.000-05:00

I did something this evening that I don't think I've ever done before: I typed in my sleep!!! It all started when I was writing a historical fiction paper for Exodus class. I was telling the story of some of the plagues from the perspective of one of Pharaoh's Hebrew slaves, and boy was I struggling! The fact is, I was tired, and the more I wrote, the less I could think. Slowly, subtly, I felt myself drifting into slumber as I typed. I could not resist...

When I woke up a half hour later, this is what my screen said:

"Hark, Pharaoh, thou evil lord of an iniquitous nation!" Lifting his famed rod toward the heavens, Aaron spoke with assurance and power, his voice trembling with emotion."

Just kidding. Here is what my paper really said:

kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk....

Et cetera. Nineteen pages of et cetera. And to think I wrote nineteen pages in my SLEEP!!! Who knew I could multitask so well?

What I Love

2008-02-09T00:04:00.001-05:00

Singing John Rutter and Felix Mendehlsson in the library with Craig and Gretchen. That's what I did for several blissful hours this Sabbath evening, and I really can't think of anything I would rather have done.

Lest you think that experience insufficient to perfect a Friday evening, before that I spent an enjoyable hour or so listening to Mr. M. read "The Hobbit" and watching little Jamie be adorable. He (Jamie, that is), sat on my lap for a while, and that notched my joy up another level. Even had he not been there to charm with his cuteness, the reading itself was so good. I am sometimes amazed by how much I have forgotten of "The Hobbit" - a book I have read multiple times. The story is practically new to me now, and Mr. M. is a wonderful reader.

Also, we had chocolate cake for Sabbath treat.

All this is to say that my Sabbath has been nearly perfect so far. I feel incredibly peaceful and relaxed, and I hope this Sabbath brings you a similar experience.

Shabbat Shalom!

2008-02-07T18:41:00.000-05:00

A New Avenue in Bloggerville

2008-02-05T21:50:00.001-05:00

So, here is my very first blog post from my new cell phone. I can only write 1000 characters of text, so such posts won't be long; but I can send pictures, and everyone knows that a picture is worth 1000 WORDS!!!

I know this picture may be a bit painful for some, but I'm posting it anyway because I really like it. And I like Craig. He's great. He's so great that he gets to have his picture on my blog.

Well, I thought by this time I would pretty much have used up my words for the post, but no! There are still more than 400 characters available! Perhaps if I want to hone my phone-typing skills, I will actually start posting from my dear little dorm room in the middle of the night, but no promises. Blogging promises are excessively dangerous. I do now have that option, and the picture posting option, though, and perhaps - just perhaps - I will take advantage of it.

My Last Post of 2007

2007-12-31T22:56:00.000-05:00

I'm not exactly sure what this post will be about, but as the clock ticks toward the end of my Christmas break, and the end of my continuous access to Verizon FIOS, I feel that any failure to post would be a waste of opportunity. Furthermore, I've finally gotten back into reading David Copperfield after a woefully long period of reading nothing at all, and there's something about Dickens that inspires me to put my fingers to the keyboard and write away, [Merrill].

Maybe I should just talk about Dickens. Basically, I love him. He has such an amazing way with words! His characters are so colorful and enjoyable, and he conveys David's thoughts in such a clear and insightful, yet amusing, way. There's a tremendous thrill of satisfaction that comes from reading about Aunt Betsey Trotwood telling Uriah Heep to act like an eel if that's what he is, but otherwise to control his body. (At least, I personally was tremendously satisfied by that line, for it expressed precisely what I would have wished to say to that loathsome creature, had I the privilege of being one of the novel's characters.)

Even the most minor characters in the book have such depth. Mrs. Crupps, for example, is only David's landlady; yet her manipulative hypochondria, her careless attitude towards her duties to her tenant, her repeated use of the phrase, "I'm a mother, myself," her infantile habit of placing pitchers on the stairs in a vain plot to break Peggotty's legs, and myriads of other little, almost unnoticeable traits and idiosyncrasies make her into more than just some uninteresting foil. She, along with all the other personalities in the book (and they are many), is so alive that the story becomes alive itself. I have no trouble seeing why David Copperfield is one of the world's greatest classics.

In other news, we broke the December snow record. (I'm not sure why I say "we," since neither I nor any other human had anything to do with it, but I cannot think of an alternative that will leave the sentence in active tense.) I don't know any specific numbers for the amount of precipitation in my town, but Concord exceeded 1876's 43-inch record just this morning. Last year, we had 1.8 inches, according to the website I consulted, but I don't even remember getting that much. It would appear that all the snow last December deserved was donated to this year's December on top of a normal amount as a kind of consolation prize for the month that really ought to be white.

I can hardly believe that 2008 is now less than thirty minutes away. It will be interesting to see how long it takes me to get used to the new number. I don't think it should be hard: I hate writing 7's, and "2008" has fewer syllables than "2007" anyway. Pitiful though it may seem, I think I'm going to head to bed now, just minutes before the calender changes. I am quite tired, and there will be plenty of 2008 to enjoy come tomorrow (and the following 365 days).

EDIT: I got distracted and stayed up after all. It's now ~~2007~~ 2008!!!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Life's Frenzied Course

2007-12-27T00:01:00.000-05:00

Some of you may be interested to know why I so rarely blog. Others may wonder what my day is like at Bible school. I will now attempt to kill two birds with one stone, as it were, and satisfy everyone's curiosity. This is an outline of a typical school day at Bible school, with stories thrown in here and there. Please enjoy. I put a lot of time into it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I generally get up around 6:30. Mornings are usually the hardest time of my day, partially because that's when I want to be in bed the most and partly because my blankets are really warm and soft. Also, I have a tendency to stay up late working on one of the many projects and skills I have set as goals to work on (including, but not limited to, composing music, working on the school website, reading a book from my lengthy book list, and...um...sharpening my Minesweeper skills). Despite the hardship, however, I arouse myself as best I can, do my devotions, and get dressed just in time for the 7:30 deadline: work meeting.

Work meeting takes about fifteen minutes. We get assigned our morning jobs (things like cleaning the dorm, taking the trash, and random small jobs like raking leaves) and pray over the day. If we finish before the breakfast bell rings, I sometimes play the piano for a while.

After breakfast and chores, there are fifteen minutes before the nine o'clock meeting. There's not a lot to say about that time, other than that there is always a really good message and that, if it's Wednesday, I play the piano for the songs (Jane T. plays on Mondays, and the rest of the time it's usually either Mr. T. M., Craig, or Aunt Elaine).

Class is the next thing on the agenda, and boy do I have a thing or two to say about class! First of all, I really enjoy it, as I mentioned in a previous post. There is so much to learn, and, with this group, it's often easy to have a great time doing it.

My first class of any significant length was “A Harmony of the Four Gospels,” presented by Professor Dan. That class was just the first-year students together, and we had a lot of fun. The most memorable time of the whole class was when we had an SMD, or something like that: a Student Moderated Debate. We, the seven first-years, were given a couple questions on a sheet of paper and told to discuss them on our own. We were to debate on the meaning and symbolism of the parable of the ten virgins and on the meaning and application of the parable of the talents. Fifteen minutes was the time limit for the whole thing. Well, never having come to an agreement on the meaning of the oil, we didn't get very far with the application. We were enjoying ourselves so much that we didn't notice the time, and class was over before we were halfway through the discussion. We continued it on the way to – and throughout – our lunch.

Late in November, I finished my next class: Acts and the Epistles of Paul (aka Paul's Life and Letters). Mr. M. taught that class, and I enjoyed it (surprise!). The ENTIRE student body took this class at once!!! Well, almost the entire student body: we were never actually all there at once, due to sickness and traveling. Still, the vast, vast, vast majority of us usually made it. Which leads me to point out that the entire student body of the school numbers sixteen. Which leads me to point out that it's quality – not quantity – that counts.

Throughout the year, some of the students try to keep a record of the more humorous and/or interesting quotes. Interestingly, most of the ones I've written down have come from the A & E of P (P's L & L) class. For example, when Mr. M. was teaching us about the dead in Christ rising first (I Thes. 4:16), he described it thus: “There will be a great shout, the archangel will cry out, and the trumpet will sound, and pop poppity, pop pop pop, the dead in Christ will rise!” And when he was describing someone who was new at something (whether a biblical character or a former student I can't recall), he said he “had some green stuff behind the ears,” presumably meaning that he was green and a little wet behind the ears.

The last class we had before Christmas break was Beulahology (the study of Israel) under my very own cousin Craig. It was a fantastic class, and I now know so much more about the Holy Land. For example, the study of it is the chapstick of the soul.

Some background is needed here. When Ethan from RI (mentioned in just a couple paragraphs in more detail) was at the school for a weekend, he showed the guys a video of Andrea making an extemporaneous speech about lessons from Napoleon Dynamite. It's a tremendously humorous clip, and you should watch it some time; but the long of the short of it was that ND teaches the importance of chapstick, which can represent the chapstick of the soul. Now, Andrea was cut off before she could explain what the “chapstick of the soul” was, but Craig took the opportunity in his class to explain that it was the study of Beulah! I never would have guessed it. Of course, knowing the origin of the term, the guys all laughed uproariously. The girls tittered politely and looked with querying gazes to the other side of the room. We explained later.

Beulahology wasn't all fun and games, though. I really did learn a lot. I know what the Cardo is, and that there's a menorah there. I know that Petra was carved from rock and was the site of Indiana Jones: the Last Crusade. I know that En-Gedi means the Spring of the Wild Goats, and that it flows into the Dead Sea (but nothing flows out). I know the regions of the land, the major cities, and oh so much more! If only my teacher knew about my blog so he could see how much I know!

Back to the schedule...

After class and lunch comes afternoon work. That can be anything from raking leaves to chopping wood to installing sinks to making apple cider to painting trim to washing windows. My favorite assignment I've had yet this year was when Ben and I had to crawl around under the men's dorm installing a venting system for the dorm dryer. The aria “The People That Walked In Darkness” from Handel's Messiah went around in my head nearly the entire time.

Although crawling around with a headlamp in a two-foot tall room singing an oratorio was fun, the most memorable work time came another time. My friend Ethan from RI stayed an extra day after the youth weekend in early November, and he, Ben, Stephen, Andrew, and I were assigned to do a lot of leaf raking and hauling. Leaf raking is a fun job because you can work super hard for ten minutes and then goof off in the leaves for a bit before you get a nice quiet tractor ride up to the Designated Leaf Dumping Area; plus, you can talk while you work, and when you have a different friend than usual helping you, it makes the time even better. We whipped up several enormous piles of leaves by the apartment building and then got some awesome pictures and movies of ourselves jumping into them.

Then we moved to the lodge, and the fun only increased. The lodge is designed much like a two-story motel, with an outdoor staircase to the second level. We piled up a tremendous amount of fallen foliage near the stairs. Can you see where this is leading? Ethan was, I think, the first to jump off the staircase railing into the leaf pile. It was a perilous feat. Gritting my teeth with anxiety, I stood watching as he cautiously climbed the precipitous rail, evoking memories of an audacious Anne Shirley walking the ridgepole of the roof. I knew it wasn't 100% safe, but I also knew that Ethan wasn't stupid; or was he?

Suddenly, with a great cry, he vaulted himself into the air, cleared the hedge, and whoosh! Landed safe and sound in the pile. (Did you like my deceptive foreshadowing?) Stephen quickly followed, and then Ben, then Ethan again. Finally it was my turn. Now, for those of you who don't know, I would not exactly call myself an acrophobe, but I do have this...er...hesitation to throw myself from heights that are anything other than diminutive. I don't like rope swings, I (presumably) don't like sky-diving, and I don't like the idea of jumping off railings. I spent all of two minutes gathering my stupid nerve, but finally I took the plunge. To my relief (if not to my surprise), I didn't kill or even hurt myself. But to my embarrassment, I instinctively plugged my nose. I just lay in the pile of leaves laughing at myself for a minute or two. At least it made a good picture.

One of the easiest things to do during work time is radio. Fairwood has its own low-power radio station, and five guys a week get to sign up to run it for an hour of work time. It can be really enjoyable to sit and listen to classical music, turning on the microphone every so often to say, “Good afternoon, and thank you for listening. You just heard Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor, performed by Van Cliburn. Now we are going to listen to Isaac Stern play Humoresque no. 7 in G flat major, by Dvorák.” What is not so enjoyable is when you find that you left the microphone on during the song, and repeated those sentences over and over, practicing for when the song did end; and when you reach for the microphone switch to turn it on, you find that it was on in the first place and that you had been talking throughout much of a nine-minute piece of music. Not that that ever happened to me or anything...

Dinner generally comes after work, and after that is generally free time, which I generally use up by practicing the piano. The big exception to all these generalities is Thursday, when we have no dinner after work because there is no work. We have a few extra meetings in the early afternoon and then have an early dinner, followed by HOURS of free time. This time slot is when most of the students opt to go on the town trip to Keene to get whatever they need at Wal-Mart, Target, the bank, the grocery store, etc. This time slot is when I usually choose to remain at home and bask in the quietness and the lack of other things to do. I am the sort who is easily drawn out of reading or studying to sit around talking, and when there's no one to talk to it's so much easier to make progress on the things that are, in the long run, more productive.

With the exception of Thursdays, the only real variations of the schedule come in the evening. Monday evening we study; Tuesday we have sports; Wednesday we have “heart group,” Thursday we study, and Friday we relax and bask in the Sabbath peace.

The end.

Snow and Ice

2007-12-24T11:38:00.000-05:00

All I Want for Christmas...

2007-12-23T23:46:00.001-05:00

...is a roof that doesn't leak!

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. Since writing that first sentence I have spent half an hour in the dripping cold because my wish was not granted. At least not yet. Of course, Christmas is still twenty-three hours and forty-three minutes away as I type, so I can't complain too much for just a LITTLE bit longer.

But seriously folks, this leaking business has been pretty extreme over the past couple days. It started in the addition, where we had to cut a hole in the ceiling to let out the rivulets freely flowing through the insulation over our heads. ("We" are my dad.) There was a pretty bad ice dam on the rook, so "we" shoveled it off and I went to town in treacherous weather to get us some Potassium Chloride (or something like that, a.k.a. ice melting granules) from Aubuchon Hardware. Daddy and I (but mostly Daddy) have sprinkled the stuff on the gutters by the addition several times, and most of the leaking there is taken care of. Just in time for tonight....

As those of you in New Hampshire already know, it's relatively warm and quite rainy this evening in the Granite State. While this is good for our skating prospects (which excites me to no end), it is only the silver lining to a very, very dark cloud.

This seemingly harmless, gentle drizzle combined with the rising temperatures have sent gallons of water sloshing down our various roofs. With our gutters full of ice, we somehow ended up with leaks in our basement and laundry room. More shoveling and sprinkling of chemicals (by "us," of course) ensued.

Lest you think I was lazy, a certain influential member of my family would not allow me - or anyone else in the family except my dad, for that matter - onto the roof. I mostly shoveled the deck, found flashlights and chemicals, and emptied buckets.

Right now I don't know of any more leaking going on, thank God, but you can feel sorry for us all the same.

O! now you weep, and I perceive you feel
The dint of pity; these are gracious drops.
Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold
Our [household]'s vesture wounded?

Glad to hear it.

Quotes from Julius Caesar

Snow: Good or Bad?

2007-12-20T22:43:00.000-05:00

& OTHER VITAL SUBJECTS

I no longer press the "New Post" button on the Blogger Dashboard with the same freeness or frequency as I once did. That's a fact. Looking back, I am amazed by how much more rarely I undertake that nudge of the index finger. My blog used to be my LIFE! Now I'm a typical Bible school blogger: I post every couple of months. Or not. But I'm here now, anyway. And since I told myself I wouldn't indulge my habit of writing about how rarely I write, I will now cease to break my self-promises.

I actually did write a LOOOOONG post over Thanksgiving break: "A Day in the Life of a Bible School Student." I had fun writing it, and I think it could be interesting, but I lost my inspiration after writing for HOURS (don't worry, I'm a slow writer) and still having a number of paragraphs to go. I'll finish it later, but I decided recently that working on the same monolithic post forever and failing to actually PUBLISH anything was anything but productive.

There I go again. Writing about how I never write. It's an addiction, I tell you! On to something else:

This is a risky subject, because nearly everyone who still blogs at ALL and who lives in the glorious New England area has already said something about it. But risks are to be taken, and now is as good a time as any.

Snow. There is a LOT of it. So far, to my recollection, we've had three large snowstorms in New Hampshire. It may have been four or five, really, but certainly a minimum of three. And theses are no light dustings either. Mais non, mes amis: we're talking about the clouds dumping DECIMETERS at a time! Is this a good thing or a bad thing? That is the question.

The bad thing is that driving has been made far more difficult than it ever was last December (remember how we had no snow at ALL last December?). I've finished my shopping, fortunately, but not without my fair share of sliding about on the roads between stores. Right now I'm at Grandpa's, on the top of the famed Hill of Chestnuts, and that hill is not a hill for the light of heart right now. No sirree! It was all I could do to get to the top, and it was almost more than I could do to get up my grandfather's driveway! I actually had to get out and - get this - SHOVEL!

Speaking of driveways, my family's driveway is not really for the faint of heart right now either. Nor is it for the poor in driving skills, however stout the condition of their hearts may be. To successfully reach the S. abode, one must first back into the park across the road and then accelerate forward like Jehu. You see, a running start is unarguably necessary in order to reach the top of the first hill; one cannot get sufficient momentum turning into the driveway from the road.

EDIT: I managed it without using the park this morning, but LAST NIGHT it was impossible, and it still may be with some cars.

The rest of the operation is pretty straightforward: drive like Jehu the rest of the way, too. Once you get the hang of it, it's wicked fun. Some cars slide more than others, and those are the best, but even with AWD and snow tires it's great to have any excuse to drive in a manner that would be reckless any other time of year.

(This is not meant to imply that I am ever reckless. I am a cautious soul to the very core of my being.)

Snow also means shoveling. Lots of shoveling. And snowblowing. And leaky roofs. It is, in short, a maintenance nightmare, at least when so much comes at once. I was lucky in that I was sick for most of this last storm, which exempted me from manual labor, but now I'm on the mend and the snow's still coming down. Shoveling is starting to look like a part of life.

I must note here that I do not abhor shoveling, really. It's good exercise, and that means it's good for keeping warm despite the cold. It is also productive exercise, which I far prefer to "unproductive exercise": push-ups, treadmills... basically any exercise for exercise' sake. Shoveling, on the other hand builds your muscle and gets other stuff done at the same time. It's just hard to break the psychological barrier. You know, the voice that says, "You are warm and cozy inside. It's cold and uncozy outside. Cuddle up, be warm. Make yourself happy. That's it. You don't want to spoil the beauty of the undisturbed landscape, do you? So what if no one can get to your house? They should stay inside too; inside where it's warrrrrm, warrrrrrm, warrrrr...."

Yeah. That voice.

Now for the positive sides of the snow: beauty, Christmas spirit, and snowballs. That pretty much sums it up. No explanation needed.

Conclusion:
Snow is good. Snow is fun. Snow is beautiful. However, I believe we now have enough to last us until January at least. Meteorologists, take note.

I Lied.

2007-11-23T17:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, at our annual family Thanksgiving banquet (even "feast" is too benign a word for the comestibles procured each fourth Thursday of November by and for the S. clan. To paraphrase one cousin in attendance, "Every year, the food is so good that we're never surprised when it turns out amazing.") - OK, that parenthetical note really was a bit too long. If you kept beginning of the sentence in mind throughout those two sentences, I am impressed. I was saying that yesterday, at out annual family Thanksgiving banquet, I told someone that I was not working on any project for school. I meant it at the time but remembered today that I did indeed have an assignment: a Christmas slide show. I worked on that aaaaaaaaall day.

The reason I'm telling you this is that, had I not been tied up aaaall day, I would have written a similar post earlier, thus satisfying the inevitably painful cravings of the more voracious of my readers.

Ahem.

It's hard to believe how long it has been since last I took up my keyboard and updated the world as to my goings on. So much has happened in the last three months that I will not even try to tell it to you all. Even if I were willing to write it all out, I doubt any but the most patient and focused would read it. Having decided, therefore, to be selective in my writing, I will now proceed.

First of all, for those of you who don't know (whom I imagine to be very few, but who should not therefore be ignored), I am attending a Bible school in western NH. To use my memorized description, "It is a small non-accredited Bible college near Keene, NH." I love it. Several of my best friends are there with me in the same year, the classes are interesting, and even the work is sometimes fun (gasp!). I've really enjoyed contemplating the Bible more deeply than I had before. So far my class has covered the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles of Paul. The teachers have repeatedly stressed that we were just skimming the surface, but even skimming the surface of the meaning of the Bible yields so much good!

Well, now is the time when I reveal how much of a surprise post this really is: I'm not going to say any more!!! Often when I talk about not writing much is when I end up disserting and haranguing - in short, writing much. But not this time, boy howdy! I've got lots of stories jumbled about in my brain that I may try to transcribe over the rest of the weekend (no promises, though), but for now I'm going to give my eyes and fingers a break.

First, though, allow me to wish you a happy Christmas season (is it really here?!), just in case my next blogging hiatus is as long as the last...

P.s. Here's a little music video I made a while ago when Kimberly said something about guys in the dorm making music videos. I ended up being the only one really in it, but Ben did the camera work. Perhaps someday I will manage to rope some of my other dormfellows into a more elaborate production, but for now I trust you enjoy what I am able to offer on my own.

Willful Misinterpretation

2007-09-02T13:21:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I did a LOT of driving. Daddy sailed with a couple friends from Portsmouth to S. Darthmouth, MA, on his friend's boat. I'll call the friends Abner (the boat's owner) and Frank (Abner's friend) simply because it can be so much fun to come up with aliases that have some very slight connection to the originals. Anyway, I was supposed to meet them in Dartmouth, drive with them to Portsmouth, and then drive home alone while Daddy followed in his car.

For the sake of fun and convenience, I spent several hours at a friend's house in Rhode Island, a mere half-hour from the marina where Daddy & Co. were to dock. I had a great time there, and my being so near to Daddy's destination enabled him to more accurately estimate when he would need picking up.

Daddy called around eight, and I headed off for Dartmouth with a flair in my shifts (driving a car with a standard transmission's version of walking with a spring in one's step). I came to the marina with very little trouble and was introduced to Abner and Frank.

Abner was (and presumably remains) around fifty-five years of age. I believe he is rather wealthy, but my only supporting evidence is that he owns a $200,000 sailing yacht. As to physical appearance, he reminded me of King Cole, from Wee Sing's immortal classic, King Cole's Party. Those who are familiar with that movie will have a better idea of how he looks than I could probably ever conjure with my own words.

Frank was about ten years Abner's junior. While this may not be entirely fair to him, the movie character that almost immediately jumped to my mind upon seeing him was none other than the infamous toy reseller (Al?) of Toy Story 2 - the one who steals Woody to sell him to a museum in Japan or something crazy and immoral like that. He described himself as part-time massage therapist, part-time chef, and, at one point in the trip, he moaned for about five minutes about serving 220 people "all by himself."

"All alone? Are you serious?" Abner queried with some incredulity.

"Yeah, seriously! I only had four people to peel and cut vegetables, four to serve, two to run the grills, three guys to help set up the tables, and the rest I did all alone! It was ridiculous."

Much of the trip I was rather put off by their conversation, which consisted mostly of bashing policemen and teachers, and which was unfortunately often crude or profane. Daddy changed the subject several times. I tried to absorb myself in my current book, Northanger Abbey, but I could not ignore the steady stream of words from the back seat.

Not all of the conversation was obnoxious, however. The discussion of politics made me laugh quite a bit - even out loud once, although I'm not sure either of the two passengers noticed. This conversation made such a good story that it was actually my impetus for writing this blog post. It all started with Abner talking about the presidential candidates.

"I STILL think that Romney will blow everyone else out of the water!"

"Nah," replied Frank. "Have you seen him up close and personal? He's too much of a slick frat boy."

"Well, I still think he'll win. He's got the most money."

"Yeah, if that's what it comes down to."

"I don't know, I bet Thompson will change things pretty quick," Daddy interjected with a laugh.

"Oh yeah," Frank replied. "Isn't he the guy who isn't really a politician, but acts one?"

Here I put a rare word into the mix: "No, he was a politician before he was an actor." That was probably one of only two or three sentences I spoke the entire journey from Dartmouth to Portsmouth, NH. Abner and Frank probably thought I was a very taciturn individual.

"What's this world coming to when we elect actors for our leaders?" Frank mused. I was going to point out Reagan's magnificently successful presidency, but Frank's next sentence checked me. "Schwarzenegger has been OK, but REAGAN! Reagan was a DISASTER!" Ummm, right.

I don't remember the immediate details that followed in the conversation, but I think Abner was criticizing one of the candidates when Frank replied, "At least he's not from Texas!" He chortled at his joke.

A short pause ensued. Then Abner asked, "Where was Jimmy Carter from?"

"Georgia," Daddy replied.

"That guy - that guy was the most paTHETic president in history!"

"No," Frank replied with meaningful tones, "I don't think HE can hold that title anymore."

Silence once again reigned, but only for a moment. "Yep," countered Abner, "Bill Clinton deserves every bit of that title!"

It was here that I let out an audible, albeit quiet, chuckle.

I think Frank was slightly taken aback. How could his meaning have been so misconstrued? Did anyone in his right mind really believe there could be ANYONE worse than Bush, or was his friend insane? He decided to take things from a different angle.

"Well, maybe things will be different with a new attorney general."

"How so?"

"Well, if someone who's actually interested in JUSTICE gets in there, there are going to be a ton of investigations!"

I'm afraid I don't remember any more of the conversation beyond this point. It may be that some random circumstance, such as the truck that almost ran us off the road, changed the subject back to the rudeness, pride, cruelty, etc., of the nation's police officers ("They all think they're above the law!" "Mmm-hm."). Or it could be that the mention of the justice system turned the conversation to the incompetence of "that court in South Carolina" ("They're all jerks there." "I know: I've BEEN there!"). At any rate, the talk lost my interest, and I decided to learn more of the adventures of Catherine Morland instead. But not before I had had a good laugh.

For Kimberly

2007-08-27T15:17:00.001-04:00

In Kimberly's recent post, "You Gotta Love Paul and His Sentences," she suggested writing out the sentence from verses 3-14 of Ephesians 1 "if you're bored someday, or want a challenge." I decided to give it a whirl. Not having done any diagramming in well over a year and a half, I'm not sure I got everything quite right; however, I don't really care. It was a fun late-morning activity, and I present it to you, my audience, now in all its black and white glory:

I'm not sure how much that will make you understand the sentence structure, KJ, but feel free to study it all you like. :)

Someone get a senator on the line, quick!

2007-08-19T22:01:00.000-04:00

Washington ought to pass a law against poorly manufactured technology. It causes so much hassle.

On the night of Saturday, August 11, I purchased myself a brand new desktop computer: a Compaq Presario with 2GB of RAM, a DVD-RW DL drive, 250GB of hard drive space, and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ dual core processor, for those who understand such specifications. It also came with a 19-inch LCD monitor and a printer, and it runs Windows Vista Premium. I like it very much.

Don't worry: I plan to clean my desk this week!!!

As I was adding some of my music to this wonderful new piece of technological equipment Friday morning, I was surprised by the computer crashing.

"That's odd," I thought to myself. "Brand new computers with Windows Vista and such fancy specifications as this computer has are not SUPPOSED to crash, at least not before they've been purchased a full week."

I restarted and continued with my work - at least, I tried to. It was not fifteen minutes before the computer crashed again. In fact, it continued to crash every five to fifteen minutes for the next hour while I ran diagnostic tests of every variety (Compaq desktops with Vista have a LOT of diagnostic programs). Well, I was running a test on the memory in my computer when suddenly - pffft. The whole machine breathed what appeared to be its last and lay lifeless on my desk. No matter how many times I tried to resuscitate it with the power button, all my efforts could elicit were a few mournful beeps. I was sad.

I called the computer hospital (a.k.a. HP support) and explained the situation. (Oh, another law should be keeping Spanish speakers from operating English support lines. I had to ask the support guy to repeat himself so many times that it was not even laughable.) To make a fairly long story short, he figured out that one of my memory cards was bad. I took the bad one out, and voila! The computer roared back to life, and all was well.

All, that is, except for that I now have to wait for a box to arrive; then I have to send my PC's bad memory away; then I have to wait for another box to arrive; then I have to put the new memory into my PC. THEN all will be well. But all this hassle could have been avoided if it were not for POORLY MANUFACTURED TECHNOLOGY!

Judd Gregg? John Sununu? I DEMAND a change!

Oh, and while you're at it, enact a Comprehensive Rebate Reform Bill, please. Thank you.

Sincere Flattery

2007-08-16T01:12:00.001-04:00

Have you ever thought about how easy it would be for someone to impersonate you on Blogger? I mean, the sign-in is quite secure and everything, so your blog is safe; but what about your comments? It occurred to me a while ago that anyone can easily impersonate a blogger on comment pages that allow the "other" option. Just look up the impersonatee's profile link, type it into the webpage box, type their display name in the top, and presto! You have a comment that looks completely authentic. So if your best friend comments on your blog to say they hate you, or if someone you admire calls you fat and stupid, or, for that matter, if someone who is usually vehemently nasty says something unequivocally nice, you might want to take it with a grain of salt.

This danger is not limited to Blogger. Did you hear about the lady whose house was put up on Craigslist as having a free moving sale? I think I read about it in World magazine, but it might have been online. Anyway, she came home and found her abode in complete disarray, with most of her belongings AWOL.

Stories like that, combined with good old logic and common sense, have convinced me to take all my comments with ample grains of salt.

For instance, should I receive a comment on this post from Ryan saying something like, "You stupid, fat, bucket of lard! I don't see YOU making any high school Soccer teams! I am so much better than you! Hahaha!" I would not be mad at Ryan because Ryan is too nice to say something so degrading. I would simply think, "Some weirdo is impersonating Ryan on my blog." Then I would sigh and forgive that person because of the wonderful spirit of kindness that is deeply ingrained in my personality.

Self-Analysis

2007-08-09T17:28:00.000-04:00

Have you ever felt that your life was monotonous but at the same time not wanted to do anything about it? Have you wanted your room clean but not wanted to clean your room; wished something exciting would happen but not been especially active in bringing anything exciting about; felt that you really should be doing so much more but at the same time felt utterly apathetic? Have you sat for minutes at a time just looking at all the work that surrounds you, knowing that it must soon be accomplished, reminding yourself of the time, and making lists of what else needs to be done, but quietly refusing to apply yourself to the task?

Because that's how I feel right now.

The Wind

2007-08-08T19:02:00.000-04:00

Today's weather has been rather too hot and humid for my taste, but as evening approaches, things are starting to cool down and a delicious breeze has picked up. There is almost no sound I prefer to that of the wind rustling the leaves of the trees. Right now especially, it reminds me of the approach of another cool, crisp, beautiful New Hampshire autumn, and that makes me very happy indeed.

They don't make books like they used to...

2007-08-08T16:05:00.000-04:00

Strong though the temptation was, I resisted the urge to, once again, entitle my post with some variation of the announcement that I had returned to the blogging world. Saying "I'm back" implies that I have seen the error of my non-blogging ways and am now strenuously striving to mend them. This, however, is not the case. I have returned, but I offer no guarantee that I will remain.

I have not been neglecting my blog through any previous resolution or self-denial. Simply put, I have not recently satisfied the urge to blog because no such urge has existed.

Now, however, is an exception. I miss writing out my thoughts and sharing them, and, rather unexpectedly, I miss writing in general. As a matter of fact, I have rather wanted to write for a week or so, but I have been utterly unable to come up with a good idea for a post. I'm sure many interesting incidents have come my way this summer, but I have lost my habit of viewing every happenstance through the lens of blog-worthiness.

It now amuses me, when I think of it, how much my life once centered on my little web page. My first thought each morning would be, "What can I blog about today?" Every time I could snatch a few minutes between school subjects, I would make a frenzied dash to the computer to make sure I had not missed any new posts on my blog list. And since my days were far busier then, I often stayed up late writing a post or editing a photo since there was no other time I could do it. Describing me as obsessed would not have been far from the truth.

As I have already intimated, obsession with blogs is no longer a fault of mine, whether it was before or not. I have spent most of my summer doing other things. I wrote in my last post about working at Grandpa's, redecorating and renovating his upstairs apartment. That has now been completed, and I have been instead occupying my time with whatever happens to be convenient. I have been reading more, playing the piano more, and working on school some (I still have to finish Calculus).

My expectations for reading over the summer have been rather high. I have often regretted the brevity of the list of books I have read, and this summer seemed the perfect time to lengthen it. Sadly, I had the misfortune to start with a book that I did not enjoy at all: The Last of the Mohicans. I spent nearly all of July with this as my official current book, but I could not bring myself to read more than one or two chapters at a time. Upon analyzing the situation, I decided that I had several good reasons for this hesitation.

1. Few of the characters were likable. In fact, Heyward was the only major one for whom I had any sympathy. Although the Mohicans were described as "bold," "handsome," "noble," and many other favorable adjectives, I found them cold and a bit uncongenial. Hawkeye was simply obnoxious, though not so much as David, the singer ("I have never profaned my lips with any song that was not taken directly from the Holy Psalms."). The girls were not bad, but I felt no connection with either "happy, beautiful Alice" or "somber, noble Cora." Since I certainly could not sympathize with the enemies, I was basically left with a tale of people for whom I cared absolutely nothing.

2. I could not discern an overall plot. I felt as though I were reading a collection of semi-related stories that went through a constant cycle of conflict and resolution. This can be done successfully, I'm sure, but at the end of each chapter I found myself wondering why I kept reading when all the immediate problems had been solved. Perhaps I had not looked for it hard enough through my apathy, but I could not find a connecting plot thread or an overall conflict to bring unity to the book.

I hate to leave books unfinished, since I never get back to them. Case in point: Lord of the Rings. I have not finished that series, despite having seen the movies more than once and read The Hobbit multiple times. I have even read the Silmarillion, but I "took a break" from the main series a quarter of the way through Return of the King and have never stopped that break. Someday I will pick up that volume and read it right through to the end; but until then, it will serve as a warning when ever I want to stop a book partway through. "Remember the Lord of the Rings!"

In this case, however, I permitted an exception. Having logically proven to myself that I could legitimately stop reading a book I was so little enjoying, I switched to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. That book is incredible! I do not think I exaggerate when I say that it is one of the best-written books I have ever read. I love all the characters: sympathetic or not, they are colorful and interesting. Jane herself is the best of all, with all her various emotions and ideas clearly explained and described. The plot is unified, too, and the descriptions are moving. I consider a book to be very well-written when I find that it makes me at various times angry, amused, worried, excited, and sad. (No, Charlotte Brontë's publisher is not paying me for saying this.) Jane Eyre does all of this, holds my attention, and does not leave me with any sense of regret for how I have spent my time. Long live Jane Eyre!

Back From the Depths of Obscurity

2007-07-19T22:51:00.000-04:00

Rejoice, all ye connoisseurs of blogs: I have a sudden urge to thrill you all with a post. Isn't that nice?

I proved to myself today that I am not just an ordinary cook, nor am I just a good one. I am, to be precise, exceptional. How so? I made a recipe BY TASTE! Sauce à fraise d'Aaron, I call it. (That's French for Aaron's strawberry sauce.) Here's what I did: I heated up frozen strawberries with sugar and water, cut the berries up, and continued to heat until the sauce thickened. And guess what, mon ami? It was a success!!!! Je suis un génie, n'est-ce pas?

Oh, yes, I almost forgot: the blueberry pancakes were good, too, boy howdy!

(I'm not sure of the origin of "boy howdy," but I know a bunch of cool people who say it, and I wanted to show that I am cool as well as exceptional.)

Anyhow, cooking has not been my primary pursuit this summer. (Would that it were!) The cold fact is that I have been working, working, working, and not all of it for pay. I have to finish Saxon Calculus by the end of the summer (16 lessons to go), I have to fill out my transcript, and I have to earn money on top of all of that. From this flurry of industry comes my lack of recent posts. I have been slaving, slaving, slaving.

Much as I hate to admit it, I am exaggerating here. Busy I am, but I have not been without my idle moments, nor without my hobby-consumed moments. Blogging takes fourth place in my list of hobbies, so the extra work has had the effect of bumping it off my schedule.

One of the more interesting things I have been doing is redecorating the upstairs apartment at my grandfather's house. I have spent a good amount of time the past week or two painting, sanding, scrubbing, and washing. The bathroom has basically become Cara's and my project, and it needed work desperately. The thing that made it hardest to fix was that the brownish linoleum floor with the geometric patterns did NOT match the yellow and blue tile walls, and the floor and lower walls were not going to be replaced. Along with our knowledgeable-in-graphic-design mother, though, Cara and I managed to work around them. After Cara removed the blue and white wallpaper (which didn't match either) and picked a new paint color, I sanded the bathtub (it was covered with some sort of epoxy to hold the now-removed glass doors), washed wallpaper paste off the walls, primed, reprimed, painted, and repainted. Then, yesterday I spent about six hours on two separate shopping trips, looking for necessary accessories. I bought curtains, curtain rods, shower hooks, shower curtains, trash baskets, and drain plugs, and it was all so much fun. Redecorating can be a very fulfilling activity.

One thing I found amusing today was that a clock Mama and I bought at Wal-mart for $3 broke. Hahahahahahaha!

Just kidding, the funny part is that the back said, "If this clock breaks before the warranty runs out, send postage paid with $5 for handling and we will send you a new one." Any child can see the thrilling logic there: pay $6.50 for a $3 clock so that you can wait for the long, slow shipments to and from the company warehouse. Riiiiight.

The other amusing thing was Daddy asking me to place the butter in "neutral territory" so that he could reach it, too.

Well, there's a brief update on my life. It was fun. I should do it again some time. Just don't hold your breath...

Aaron and Me

2007-07-05T16:19:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm back from Guys' week and the Fairwood youth convention. It was terrific fun. We camped, hiked, swam, had "special activities," watched Facing the Giants, played volleyball, sang, and worked. We played ping pong and volleyball. The food was delicious. Not all my friends were there, but I made some new ones and had a great time anyway. The meetings were excellent, with subjects ranging from putting on the armor of God and being clothed in humility to revival to being in the White Cavalry. That's about all I'm willing to tell you for now. There's just way too much to recap.

A few days before I left for the time at Fairwood, a little blogworthy incident came my way but did not make it to the internet...until now!!!!!!!!!!

I was sitting at the piano playing some classical piece when a little dark object on the carpet caught my eye. I glanced over to the left, and what should running around in little circles but an eensy weensy mousy!

I jumped up and tried to find a way to capture the little rodent without harming it. There were no jars or containers around, so I grabbed a tennis racket that was handy and half-heartedly tried to scoop up the little varmint. To my delight, the critter clung to my racket with a vehemence, even trying to crawl through the strings. I took him over to where I knew I could find a jar of some kind and made him a little house. I soon moved him into a much larger and more mouse-proof vase. He had everything a mouse could want: paper towel, cardboard, seeds, water... but it was not long before we noticed that he was not eating.

"Aha!" I said, "This mouse is not yet weaned!" So we fed him milk from an eyedropper. He crawled in a baby-mousish way across my hand, lapping up his dinner, and often sitting in it as well. It was great fun.

I had great dreams of the mouse becoming a sort of adviser and bosom companion, like the famous mouse Ben of "Ben and Me." Unfortunately, the mouse would not eat enough, or we did not feed him enough. The cold truth is that he died after a short two days of happiness. We hadn't even named him! We had discussed what we should name him, to be sure, but nothing was agreed on by all sides. Now that he's dead, it doesn't really matter. I think I'll name him Walter anyway.

This is Walter:

Good News

2007-06-24T01:03:00.001-04:00

Le graduate, c'est moi.

Cape Cod!

2007-06-11T11:11:00.000-04:00

Blood and Guts - edited and toned down

2007-06-09T00:15:00.000-04:00

Finally, finally, finally! I have a foot injury to rival the one Stephen got back in February. May this picture serve as a warning to any of you who would not hesitate to run like a barefooted Pheidippides along beautiful sandy beaches in the middle of the night. One never knows where cinder blocks might be lying about...

EDIT:
My apologies to those who were grossed out or shocked by the photo of my bleeding foot. I have removed it for their sake. Those who missed it and are prepared for a gory sight may still see it by clicking here, but for the rest of you here's what my foot looks like now.

In other news, Cape Cod has been fabulous. My family is here for a two week vacation which is going swimmingly (hahahahaha!) except for that I split my toe. See above.

Finally, although it has very little to do with the rest of the post, other than the fact that with cable and loads of time, we get to watch a lot more baseball, I would like to add this little note:

CURT SCHILLING IS THE BEST OF THE BEST!!!!

For one thing, he just pitched a whole game without allowing a hit until the bottom of the ninth, not letting the A's get a single run. For another, I can appreciate his contribution to the fabulous 2004 Red Sox season even more now that I, too, have a bloody sock.

Crrrrrruuunch.......

2007-05-30T14:49:00.000-04:00

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...

My First One!

2007-05-24T22:50:00.000-04:00

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.

I'm IT!

2007-05-22T23:13:00.000-04:00

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(3e^x). 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.

I Am NOT Impuissant!

2007-05-14T22:16:00.000-04:00

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?

A Word of Advice

2007-05-12T21:09:00.001-04:00

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...

Somnithoughts

2007-05-04T20:27:00.000-04:00

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!

A Little Legacy

2007-05-01T23:08:00.000-04:00

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.

Un Post Senza Un Titolo

2007-04-28T22:19:00.000-04:00

As this picture should make clear, green is quickly becoming - as it should - the dominant color here in New Hampshire. Spring has absolutely and irreversibly arrived! Of course, it isn't yet late spring here, as evidenced by the fact that Eagle Wings remains placidly parked in the driveway.

Other signs of spring: peepers, beavers, open windows, open doors, sprouting lilies, later sunsets, and (gulp) mosquitoes. (Say it isn't so!) Fortunately, the last item in that otherwise happy list has not yet become a nuisance. So far I have seen about ten of the little bloodsuckers and have killed about five. If I can maintain that ratio of mosquitoes killed to mosquitoes seen (or is it the other way around?) throughout the summer, I will be very, very pleased with myself.

One of the ways I have been taking advantage of the relatively, and sometimes indescribably, beautiful weather we have been enjoying of late is to go rowing in the morning before I do school. As you can see by Exhibit B (at right), the pond is currently clear, glassy, and full. Alas, before long the algae will have significantly marred our view to the west, but so far so good. Several times now I have been in our boat when one or more beavers have come out of their lodge and swum around the pond. One time, while I was enjoying the breeze and reading American Literature, I tied the boat to a tree at the end of the pond. I was just lazily studying (there's a paradox for you!), when two baby beavers swam out of the swamp, right by my boat, and into their lodge. After a while, a big one came out, swam around for a while, and then returned.

The more exciting time was when I was actually rowing. As I went from one side of the pond to the other, the beaver would swim to the opposite side, swim around for a bit, and then dive under with a terrific smack of its tail against the water. 'Twas cool.

And now for a confession: after writing my last post, I have only read about seventy-five pages of Les Mis, and most of that today. At first it was from lack of time, but as the week went on and the book remained untouched, I was struck by this observation: sometimes the less you do of something, the more tired of doing it you feel. Now I have resumed reading it and am enthralled once again.

A Long, Long Book

2007-04-18T22:16:00.000-04:00

Maybe I'm too obsessed with blogging. It's been only five days since I last posted, but I feel like it has been an eternity. For the last couple days, I have been watching in horror as my then-newest post sank lower and lower on the list of blogs, until I simply could not stand it any longer. Plus, I didn't like its title. Time for a new post!

The reason I have not been blogging much recently is that I've been spending most of my free time reading Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. It is a FANTASTIC book! True, it's almost as long as the Bible (in pages), but it is worth it. I have found it to be simultaneously profound, gripping, and stirring.

One thing I've noticed is that Victor Hugo tends to expound more than some readers might think is necessary. In the beginning of the book, there is a fifty page biography of a character who promptly dies once the action actually starts. When another character is known once to have looted some dead soldiers on the battlefield of Waterloo, Hugo deems it necessary to write a sixty-five page dissertation on the strategies of Napoleon and Wellington, the various circumstances that changed the course of the famous battle, and the philosophical and international ramifications of the outcome. Fortunately, I found it intriguing. Finally, when the main character hides from his pursuers in a convent, the description of this action is quickly followed by a thirty-seven page section covering every aspect of this specific convent, from its location and layout to its inhabitants and history, and expounding on the philosophies, appropriateness, severity, ambitions, correctness, and results of monasticism, its followers, and its opponents.

As you can see, I am beginning to acquire Victor Hugo's propensity to use long, complex sentences.

I am currently about 500 pages into the book, and I can hardly believe I still have 750 more to go. I can't understand how anyone can write something that long without losing the reader's interest (at least, without losing it often). Whenever I try to write fiction, my stories end up far short on substance. I'm not sure I'd be able to come up with enough storyline to write a novel. Yet even if I had the plot of Les Mis to start with, I would probably have written it in one hundred pages in a very boring way. Victor Hugo transforms it into a twelve-hundred page tome that is fascinating! That is just unfathomable to me. HOW DOES HE DO IT?

A good quote from the part of the book discussing monasticism:

There is, we are aware, a philosophy that denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, classed pathologically, which denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness.

To set up a sense we lack as a source of truth, is a fine piece of blind man's assurance.

And the rarity of it consists in the haughty air of superiority and compassion which is assumed towards the philosophy that sees God, by this philosophy that has to grope its way. It makes one think of a mole exclaiming: "How they excite my pity with their prate about a sun!"

Beautiful Nature

2007-04-13T16:27:00.000-04:00

Before I say anything else, let me assure you that I did NOT take this picture. (Click here for the source.) Neither I nor my camera are capable of producing such a work of art. Nevertheless, I have been excited and blessed to see that our pond is the current residence of no fewer than five equally gorgeous wood ducks. Whether they intend to make this their permanent residence I don't know, but I have been enjoying them while they last. They swam around in the pond throughout all of yesterday's snow, and they're still here this afternoon.

The inclement weather actually seems to have been good for naturalistic purposes. My feeders have been alive with goldfinches, chickadees, cardinals, sparrows, and juncos. It is amazing how beautiful wildlife can be. God is amazing!

Panic is...

2007-04-10T23:39:00.001-04:00

...let me TELL you what panic is!

(Spell check says I should say "what panic are", but I didn't go through eleven years of A Beka Book Grammar and Composition just to lose my reputation for great noun-verb coordination by deferring to a computer! No, siree!)

Oh, yeah. Panic. I'll start from the beginning.

Well, first of all, as most of you know, I am a member of Chestnut Hill Chapel, a nice little rustic church in one of the prettiest parts of the prettiest state. (That'd be New Hampshire.) I have attended Chestnut Hill my entire life, and it is a wonderful church for many reasons. One of the least important is its tendency to produce superb bloggers. These bloggers include current members such as Bria, Cara, Ryan, Evan, Jill, Lindsay, Susan, Melody, Jenna, and Wesley, as well as former members such as Claire, Liane, Karena, Derrick, Carrie, and Darren.

Back to my story about panic:

Well, since last Sunday was Easter, Pastor Evan asked if our family could do any special music. In honor of a great family heritage of spontaneity, I quickly replied in the affirmative but put off the decision on what we would sing until the night before. By that time some of us had decided it was too late to do anything, and declared that they would not become involved in a musical piece that would bring shame to the S___ name by its obvious want of preparation. (They didn't say that exactly, but I'm using the Dan Rather approach. To paraphrase, "I know that's not what they really said, I know the evidence doesn't exist, but the spirit behind it is certainly, beyond any doubt, true.")

Despite all objections, however, Daddy and I looked through all his music books (I had exhausted mine of possibilities) for an appropriate song that we wouldn't have to learn. We settled on an old favorite: Michael Card's Love Crucified Arose. I'm never quite sure how to punctuate that title, but, as punctuation does little to affect musical pronunciation, I did not panic about THAT. (I'll get to what I DID panic about later.) I looked over the chords and decided to change some of them. Actually, I changed a LOT of them. As a music theory student and ardent fan of frequent and violent modulations, I implemented no fewer than four key changes in a two-verse and three-chorus song: C to D to E flat to F. It was SO MUCH FUN! I've always wanted to sing "Wonderful Grace of Jesus" raising the key one step per verse, but I can rest somewhat more easily having used pivot tone modulation in church by ear!

After the church brunch on Easter morning, Daddy, Ryan, and I went upstairs to practice in the sanctuary. Practice seemed fine, although we didn't do the whole song because people were starting to come in for the meeting. I wanted to check one more key transition before I went to sit down. Wanting to be unobtrusive, I placed my foot on the soft pedal of the piano. As I tried to press it, however, I was perplexed to find that the whole pedal assembly was wiggling more than the pedal itself. "How very strange," were, I am sure, the words which ran through my head. Curious as to the source of the problem, I dropped to my knees and looked at the apparatus. For some strange reason, I decided to press the sostenuto pedal with my hand and see what would happen. Well, what happened was that the entire pedal stand separated itself from the rest of the piano and fell to the floor with a crash.

PANIC!

At first I was afraid I had ruined Easter for everyone. How can Easter be happy without a good Easter service, and how can there be a good Easter service without music, and how can their be music without piano pedals?!?!?!? Then I looked at the end of the assembly, and lo and behold, it was not broken! It had merely come out of its socket, and in a matter of two or three minutes, my uncle and I had reunited the two pieces of the piano.

And that's how the boy saved Easter.

Quote of the Day

2007-04-09T22:38:00.000-04:00

"You know, Tom, I'm not David - I never will be! - but today I found that who I am is pretty good."

(President Wayne Palmer from 24, as remembered by Aaron)

Um, good, Mr. President. I'm glad you have such good self-esteem!

An Obiter Dictum

2007-04-07T15:24:00.000-04:00

As my last post made clear, snow has returned to the hills of New Hampshire. Once again the familiar crystalline white is spread over the surrounding countryside like vanilla icing. The sun has returned, fortunately, but it smiles not on budding flowers but on ubiquitous white. As an autochthonous New Hampshirite, I cannot be very surprised; nevertheless, I had no presentiment of this foreboding doom, and I have an animadversion to obnoxious surprises.

As the dour clarion calls of the pessimists reverberate throughout the land, I must allow that their lamentations have not completely convinced me that winter has become perdurable. Although I was disillusioned by the return of the hiemal weather, I am something of a realist. The return of favonian weather is inevitable, so if I simply exercise my longamity all will eventually be satisfactory. In the meantime, I have often found music to be a roborant when the prophesies of the clerisy are less than roseate. Therefore, allow me to present a little song I wrote to alleviate the pain of those who are suffering (including you in Georgia, where the temperatures last night were in the twenties!), to ameliorate, as I was saying, the discomfiture of any who both endure psychrophobia and read my blog.

Neither the sound quality nor the nor the stridulous tones of my voice in the nether regions of its range are outstanding, but I hope you found this diverting anyway.

P.s. Can you tell I was trying to get Claire to comment? :)

Upon the Return of Winter

2007-04-05T14:31:00.000-04:00

Wherefore, once we the taste of spring had known,
Didst Thou, O Lord, deem right another storm?
The snow, whose ceaseless falling does transform
The scenery, has over flowers blown;
The vernal sun, which just so brightly shown,
Is hidden: sunshine is no more the norm,
And infant buds, perplexed it is not warm,
Must once more wait for south winds to be blown.
Is it to make the springtime fairer still?
I truly yearn for verdancy the more
Now that the white of winter has returned;
If this surprise was sent by Thy pure will,
‘Tis worth the wait; the spring for which I yearned
Will come, and I'll be gladder than before.

- The brilliant Eric Snadforth

What I Heard On the Radio Today

2007-04-02T23:42:00.000-04:00

I don't listen to talk shows very much, but I do enjoy them when I can. It's always nice to get a more conservative perspective of the news, especially when there's some humor mixed in. One thing that makes me really happy is when the shows broadcast parody songs. For instance, the December before last, Glenn Beck ran a song entitled, "Happy Hanna-kwanza-*beep*mas" (to the tune of "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas") that ridiculed the commercial emphasis on "the holidays" instead of Christmas and the acceptance of Kwanzaa as a legitimate holiday. On the other end of the spectrum, I heard another one that was supposedly President Bush singing, "Bomb, bomb, bomb....Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann." Stupid, biased, misinformed, and/or wrong? Yes, but it made me laugh anyway. I'm sure I've heard others, too, but they just don't spring to mind....

...except for the one I heard today, which I think made me laugh harder than any I had heard before. It was on the Rush Limbaugh program, and it was supposedly Al Gore singing to the tune of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." The lyrics went something like this:

The earth is a lovely thing,
But it is .... warming.
The temperature has risen half a degree,
Soon we'll all be burning.

The earth's becoming a burning ball of fire;
Polar bears drown, drown
As the seas creep higher;
And it burns, burns, burns,
The earth on fire,
A ball of fire.

There were more verses, too, but that's all I remember. If you were lucky enough to be listening to the EIB network around 2:10 this afternoon, you know just how hilarious the whole thing really was: specifically, EXTRAORDINARILY hilarious.

While we're on this subject, did you know that in 1975 some scientists actually proposed MELTING the polar ice cap to avoid global cooling? (Link found on GlennBeck.com.) Ha! Maybe that plan for saving the earth will be back in vogue in another twenty-five years.

Prepare To Be Shocked!

2007-04-01T00:45:00.000-04:00

I showed Brad and Claire's self-portrait to Daddy, and right away he said, "You know, what they SHOULD have done is make a picture of them together as one person."

It is Biblical, after all: "[Therefore] a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one." (Gen. 2:24) Now technology has made it more possible than ever before!

Strangers!

2007-03-30T11:10:00.000-04:00

As I had anticipated, Friday's photo challenge proved to be the most difficult for me. I forgot to bring my camera when I went to Manchester on Monday, I only got a fuzzy picture of the back of the UPS delivery man when he came, and I didn't anticipate going out again this week. Yesterday, however, Bria wanted to do a little shopping and felt too tired to drive the standard transmission. I snatched at the opportunity, and, with my camera close by, we set out for the city blaring Le Nozze di Figaro.

Unfortunately, I forgot about actually using the camera until we were almost on our way home. Then I was driving, and Bria couldn't get up the nerve to take a picture of the dude with the Honda Civic who tried to pass us on a very narrow and very definitely NO-PASSING road, and then, as we came to a light, ZOOMED by us so he could stop at the light first. So there we were, side by side, he thinking himself ultra cool, and Bria and I thinking him ultra stupid. We had a clear view of his face, and he wasn't looking, but Bria didn't want to find out what he would think of us taking his picture if he DID see.

I got a very sneaky picture of the side of a cashier at Hannaford, but it wasn't the best quality, and besides, his hair covered his entire face.

SOOOOO.....

I dug up some stranger photos from from my Italy trip, which just happens to have happened EXACTLY one year ago! Ben took most of them (he's a lot less timid than I am), but I did get a couple.

Venice, March 24, 2006 - Ben H. photo
(I got a picture of the same girl, but mine didn't come out as well.)

Florence, March 26, 2006 - Aaron S. photo

Pisa, March 27, 2006 - Ben H. photo
Note the two incredibly cool guys walking off into the distance...

Rome, March 29, 2006 - Ben H. photo

Rome, March 30, 2006 - Ben H. photo

Rome, April 01, 2006 - Aaron S. photo

Netherlands, April 04, 2006 - Ben H. photo

Inside, Looking Out...

2007-03-29T13:48:00.000-04:00

...this is what I see.

Black and White

2007-03-28T12:11:00.000-04:00

A Very Quick Note

2007-03-27T23:20:00.001-04:00

Opera is the best.

Myself

2007-03-27T11:17:00.000-04:00

I was not sure I wanted to participate in today's photo challenge, since I am suffering from a mild cold and look rather haggard, but then I thought, "What better way to hide baggy eyes and a red nose than to scrunch up most of your face and hide the rest with a tissue?"

My other idea was to take a picture of myself at night with a slow exposure, keeping my head still but moving my eyes around. Bria said that was too gross.

My Corner

2007-03-26T19:45:00.000-04:00

For those of you who aren't aware, Liane started another photo week, and today is "Corner of my home."

This picture shows a corner of the skylight directly above my bed. It was taken with a six-second exposure. Are you impressed with how still I can hold my hand?

Actually, I used a tripod.

A Bit of Historical Fiction

2007-03-24T23:56:00.001-04:00

A portion of the story of Joseph from the perspective of his brother Judah

Tired but mirthful, I walked home with my brothers. The work of the day had been long and exhausting, but the joke we played on that Midianite family almost made up for the fatigue. Never before have I played such a successful practical joke! I'm sure the whole group was certain they were being hotly pursued by wolves. If Asher hadn't started laughing, they might still be running.

Chatting merrily, our minds still on our adventures of the afternoon, we entered the main tent and nearly barreled directly into Father. He was standing directly inside the entrance with his arms folded over his chest, staring at us sternly. We were instantly silenced.

"My sons, is it true that you left the sheep alone today?" he queried with an expression and tone of voice that belied the affectionate address.

None of us were eager to answer, but finally Reuben, being the oldest, replied, "Yes, Father, we did; however, it was only for a short time, and we counted the sheep when we returned. None were missing."

Father's wrinkled brow did not relax. "It has been the will of the Lord this day to protect me from loss. However, all of you are no less guilty of neglect. Return to your tents."

Sullenly, we headed to our shelters. As I turned to follow the others, I caught a glimpse of a smiling Joseph reclining on the thick rugs of the pavilion and watching us with despicable glee as we were banished from our father's presence. Instantly, I felt a surge of anger swell up in my heart. So that was how Father knew of our roguery! No doubt Joseph had related every detail of our mischief with great accuracy except where exaggeration would seem credible.

I spent the night lying awake in my bed, staring at the sky. I could not get over my fury. What had been an unusually enjoyable afternoon had turned into a nightmare of an evening, thanks to Joseph. I had always known that Father loved Joseph more than he loved the rest of us, but I was beginning to believe that he hardly loved his other sons at all. Certainly, the affection he bore for the rest of us was inconsequential relative to his love for Joseph.

My conclusion was confirmed the next morning after breakfast. Before the other family members began dispersing to prepare for another day in the fields, Father arose from the meal and presented Joseph with a gorgeous coat. He must have paid a tremendous sum for it, for it was woven from the finest materials and dyed many magnificent hues. I admit I was a bit envious of Father's generous gift, but what most bothered me was Joseph's smug expression as he accepted it.

As the other brothers and I trudged out to the fields for yet another day of watching sheep, we argued relentlessly. Why had none of us ever received such an amazing gift? What was the occasion for such a treasure being given to Joseph? We spent the day bickering and returned fatigued and bitter.

Several weeks passed, and my resentment of Joseph softened somewhat, and I began to learn to tolerate – or at least ignore – him. Before my bitterness could completely disappear, however, Joseph ensured that it returned in full by relating a couple of his "dreams." Apparently, each of us was a sheaf of wheat and he was the most important one, for we all bowed down to him. I nearly lost my temper when he related it to us, so condescending were his tone and manner.

Joseph must have been deliberately trying to provoke me, for although I am sure he had seen how angry his story made me, the next day he made up another one. This dream was similar to the first one, except that this time we were all stars bowing down to him. He even had the audacity to include Father and his mother, represented by the sun and the moon, among the heavenly bodies making obeisance to him. Father quickly put a stop to that, but I noticed that he didn't go so far as to reprimand Joseph for inventing such preposterous tales.

Several days later, I left with my brothers (except Joseph and Benjamin) for Shechem, where we were to pasture our flocks. The fields of Canaan were worn down from constant grazing, and the sheep needed fresh grass. As we tramped along the road, a sickening thought struck me. What if the dreams were not imagined? What if Joseph really was going to rule over us all? The idea seemed absurd, but I could not put it from my mind.

The pasture land at Shechem was not as good as our servants had reported. The ground was dry and dusty, and the grass was far from lush. One of the residents of Shechem, a merchant with a shop outside the city gates, told us that the fields of Dothan, which was not far away, were quite verdant that year, and that there might be plenty of grazing land for all our livestock. Thanking him for his kind advice, we guided the flock in that direction. Dothan was just as the merchant had described it. We reached the fields tired from the journey, but it was not long before we had set up camp and retired for the night.

The next morning was beautiful. The dewy hills sparkled in the sun, the twittering birds sang joyful songs, and a fresh, warm breeze blew in from the east. Nevertheless, I was almost oblivious to the surrounding loveliness, for even then my mind was still dwelling on Joseph and his dreams. Imagine, therefore, my vexation when that afternoon Naphtali shouted, "Here comes the dreamer!" Joseph was coming toward us over the fields.

I could not contain my anger any longer. "What is he coming here for? " I shouted. "No doubt Father has sent him to check on our work. Well, I don't see any reason for enduring Joseph's condescending reprimands anymore. What's the use of enduring him, anyway? To see that he gets a chance to irritate us more later?" My impromptu speech was met with general approval among my brothers, and we decided that Joseph would never again return home. I wanted to dispose of him immediately, but Reuben had different ideas.

"He is, after all our brother. Let us leave him in that pit." He gestured toward an old, dried-up well that lay several hundred feet away. "That way we will be rid of him, but we will still be innocent of his blood."

I was hesitant, but Reuben's logic could not be denied. Surely we would not regret losing Joseph, but our minds would rest more easily if we were not guilty of his murder. We decided to follow Reuben's plan, and it was not long before Joseph came strutting over the top of the hill. He greeted us in his usual cocky way, but we did not return his salutation. Puzzled by our silence, he sauntered down to us, a questioning look in his eyes. As soon as he was within reach, Simeon and I grabbed his arms and dragged him to the pit. He pleaded with us, begging us to let him go, but we were resolved. We tossed him mercilessly into the hole and left him still begging for his release.

With the exception of Reuben, who went to buy us a lunch in the city, each of us returned to his chores as though nothing had happened. The same sun was still shining, and the same birds were still twittering, but now I noticed them in a fresh way. My frustration of the morning melted, for now I had the upper hand! Admittedly, I felt a sharp pang of guilt, but I overlooked it and allowed myself to dwell solely on my triumph.

As I was sitting on the grass, watching the herds and enjoying the beauty of nature, I spotted an Ishmaelite caravan heading toward the south. Immediately a thought struck me: why not sell Joseph? That way there would be no chance of his return. Furthermore, we would be free from guilt, for if any harm came to him, it would not be our fault directly. Most importantly, we would enjoy significant monetary gain, for obnoxious as Joseph was, he was both strong and handsome. I was sure he would fetch a good price. Cheerfully, I laid my proposition before my brothers, and they all agreed that it was the best plan. I hailed the leader of the caravan, and within a few minutes the deed was done. Joseph was on his way to Egypt for a new life, and our life at home would be drastically different as well. I was ready for the change.

Horseflies

2007-03-21T00:16:00.000-04:00

I've been spending a lot of the past week or so at Fairwood for the Feast of Passover, and hence my time for blogging has been decimated. I'm not sure that's the right word, but it gets the idea across and it's too late to go to thesaurus.com, right? It's even too late to come up with a relevant title!

The Feast has been great: full of good fellowship, good fun, and good - nay, excellent - meetings. I would right a synopsis of all the different meetings, but it is past midnight.

So, then, why am I writing at all? I am writing because my number of visits has plummeted. (Heeeeelp!!! It's the end of the world!!!) I don't really blame the non-visitors, though; no, I pity the poor, poor bloggers, having to put up with days and days of Aaronlessness!

Aaronlessness is a big big word which means different things to different people. To some it is mild frustration, to others total despair. For some it means mild boredom, for some it means EXTREME boredom! It is not good! (For some it means nothing at all, but that's just too bad for them.)

Speaking of horseflies, I learned how to say "the man runs" in Hebrew today! I am so proud of myself. I feel like a regular linguist. "Ha eesh rahtz." That's what it sounds like.

Che Bella Giornata!

2007-03-13T22:41:00.000-04:00

...as we who are almost fluent in the Italian tongue are wont to spout on days such as this; for today was undeniably beautiful. Spring arriveth!

I enjoy a merciful amnesia throughout the winter months that permits me to enjoy the snow and the cold without actually realizing that I am simultaneously enduring them. Once I get a taste of spring, however, I look back on the months and realize that winter isn't so hot after all. The sunshine, the smell, the sounds of water and of birds - all these and more take the days of spring and set them in a different league from the days of the rest of the year.

Today was such a day. As I walked down to get the mail, it struck me that I had forgotten how much FUN it is to be outside and comfortable at the same time! I had to do school, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the great outdoors. On the contrary, I simply moved my classroom! (The joys of homeschooling...) I did most of Calculus outside, enjoying the relatively warm breezes, the cooing doves, the radiant sunshine, and the tinkling of the melted snow running into the gutters. I had a great perspective of all these things from my perch on the roof.

Yes, on the roof.

Kids, don't try this at home.

The skylight made a terrific table, but I must say whoever invented roofing shingles wasn't thinking about comfort. It's not bad on some roofs, I'm sure, but ours is a bit steep. Nevertheless, the fresh air and the view were nice while they lasted.

Now I'm off to cogitate on the symbolic role of the one female character in Call of the Wild...

The Famous Balancing Wood Chip

2007-03-10T15:00:00.000-05:00

Long regarded as one of the Seven Wonders of Chestnut Hill, the Famous Balancing Chip is now being displayed on the internet for the first time! Now you can join the select few who have seen this incredible spectacle - this marvelous phenomenon. How does it remain balanced, you wonder? Those who know the answer to this question are few indeed, yet balanced it remains. Defying gravity, puzzling the populace, mystifying many - my friends, allow me to present to you the Famous Balancing Wood Chip!!!!!!

Why School Should Always Come First

2007-03-08T21:46:00.000-05:00

Because you never know when you're going to have trouble with your first Calculus problem and spend an hour on it, only to have your Dad look at it and say, "OK, let's see; first thing to do is make sure everything is in radians...." Oops. And if you were planning on taking an hour doing Calculus, and the first PROBLEM takes you an hour, you know you're in pretty bad shape.

Therefore I cannot blog tonight.

I'm not always that neat with my Calculus...

A Sagacious Perception

2007-03-06T23:42:00.001-05:00

I have been reluctant to write a new post recently because I have been doing so much writing for school anyway. (Or at least THINKING about writing; half the time has been spent dealing with technical difficulties.) Every time I sit down to write a post I feel like I don't have a clear enough outline. I don't have organization of thoughts. I don't have a clear purpose. But then, a blog doesn't have to be purposeful and organized, does it? A blog can be random! A blog can be about my incoherent personal thoughts and experiences! Suddenly I feel free! I will update! I will not be considered a blogger manqué!

Disclaimer: From here on, the rest of the post is not necessarily sagacious, although perceptions continue to abound.

Speaking of technical difficulties, I'm sure most of you have noticed that my Link Gallery has stopped working. (I know that Claire, Jenna, Andrea, Derrick, and anyone who reads Andrea's blog have noticed, and that probably covers most of you.) I assure you I had nothing to do with the problem and I've spent enough time trying to fix it to write seventeen or so posts so glorious that you could not but dance for joy. However, all my efforts have been to no avail as of yet. Perhaps the website (feedblendr.com) will remedy itself. Maybe I'll find some other way to blend a new terrific sixty-two-blog feed. But until then, I'm sorry for all the suffering you'll have to go through: the grueling agony of adding to favorites, the tortuous clicking of the mouse, link after link.... but, as some wise pirate once said, "Life is pain, Highness."

Those of you from the South may think that just because it's spring down there, and Andrea said it was spring up here, that it is spring up here. However, you would be wrong. I mean, it was spring up here, but it is spring no longer. Au contraire! It is fr-r-r-r-eeeezing! After a record warm start to the winter (and cries of, "HEEEEEEELP!!!! GLOBAL WARMING!!!!") it has now come to a record cold middle or end. You never know how much winter is left in NH; spring could be here tomorrow, or it could be put off until late May. Who knows? All I know right now is that the numbers the meteorologists are showing are in the single digits – without the major wind chill. And there isn't even any good skating! Ah, well, "If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant…." (Anne Bradstreet)

I... love…

Microsoft Word 2007! (You thought I was going to say "celery root," didn't you?) I haven't bitten the bullet and paid the hefty purchase price, but I did download a free 60-day trial and I love it! It's so easy to use and so graphically pleasing… and it comes set up for posting to blogs!!!! How cool is that? The best thing of all is that my trial doesn't end until I graduate, so I get to spend the rest of my grade school days writing in style! I feel so CTU.

Of course, if I really were that advanced, I would probably be able to fix the feed problem myself, but who said I felt like an O'Brien? I'll just content myself with being a Buchanan. Or maybe Josh Bauer. Except He wasn't in CTU. And my dad is actually quite nice, as is my grandfather. So I guess the analogy – if it was an analogy – really breaks down there. Sigh. Good thing this whole discussion is completely irrelevant.

Thus concludes my heart's outpouring to all ye, the faithful readers. I hope I provided you with a hearty boff or two, but whether I did or not I must now popple off to finish my Calculus.

Question of the Day

2007-03-04T21:41:00.000-05:00

Why do we say, "Never mind," when what we mean is, "Don't mind me this time," or "It's not worth repeating"? I mean, if we got taken literally when we said, "never mind," that would be EXTREMELY annoying. Can you imagine?

My New Philosophy

2007-02-26T16:00:00.000-05:00

I have decided that saying "...or my name isn't Aaron," as in, "I will get some comments on this post or my name isn't Aaron," is too risky. Therefore, from now on I intend to say "...and/or my name is Aaron." It's much safer, and still gives me a nice colloquial way to say that I'm pretty sure of something.

"I will get some comments on this post and/or my name is Aaron."

I Am Related to Prince William!

2007-02-24T22:08:00.000-05:00

For all those of you who are so scared by my profile picture, I suggest getting Firefox and installing the Adblock add-on that I mentioned in a post last week. It will enable you to avoid being forced to look at Aaron van Beethoven while simultaneously affording everyone else the pleasure.

Now on to other and more important things:

This week was full of sickness and school. I'm glad it's over. At the same time, however, it would be nice if I could just keep repeating Thursday or Friday until I was completely finished with all my schoolwork so I wouldn't have all this blasted pressure. (Why can't I just graduate without doing any work?!?!? WHY!?!?!?!?) Of course, we all know what happened to the man who asked for a month of Sundays (supposing we all have read the Book of Virtues), so maybe I'd better be careful what I wish for. Plus, if we had a whole month of Thursdays, there would be no Saturdays on which to relax, and - possibly even worse - no Tuesdays on which to turn eighteen! Horror of horrors!!! I think I'll stick with the good ol' 365-day year.

Now, please humor me as I skip back in time for the rest of my post.

I had an OUTSTANDING time at the last youth weekend! It was terrific fun, and I don't know why I didn't think to write about it before now. Actually, I'm not sure I want to outline the whole weekend for you, so maybe that's why. I would still like to point out that it was a great time, with great meetings, awesome games, fun sports, and grueling competition. I still think that my team's snow church was better than Cara's team's snow "fruitbowl," but I had a good time anyway. One of my favorite parts was creating a TV commercial for Bruce's Canned Yams. Such fun! I'll have to try to get the video and post it.

Now I'm going to skip even further back in time to the game time on Friday night: one of the many fantastic games Andrea thought up was... the game where you have a label on you where you can't see it and you try to guess who you are. (If that game has a name, it is not in my vocabulary.) I took a while with Rush Limbaugh, but I took even longer with my next one. I had narrowed myself down to a member of the British royalty, but I still couldn't figure it out! Was I Prince Charles? Prince William? Prince Harry? Prince Andrew? Prince Phillip?

"No! What gave you such highfalutin' ideas?" laughed Andrea gaily.

But what other princes were there? Was I actually a duke or a lord? I was beginning to run out of male royalty when my dear friend Ben said, "DO YOU EVEN KNOW YOUR GENDER!?!?!?"

Oh, right...

I asked whether I was Queen Elizabeth, and know what? I WAS! I had never known it before.

Because Valentines Day Is So Last Week

2007-02-19T22:14:00.000-05:00

I haven't had much to write recently, other than "I hab bed bery dired ad sduffy because I hab a code." But since I have said something to that effect once before, and I'm already recovering anyway, I figured I should write about something else. Yet nothing presented itself! Not, that is, until this evening, when I was scanning FoxNews.com.

BIG NEWS!!!! ONLY ON FOX!!!! YOU'RE NOT GOING TO FIND THIS KIND OF REPORTING ANYWHERE ELSE!!!! It's so exciting! You'll never believe this!!! Good thing you've got Fox News to keep you updated!!!! Anyway, here's the big only-on-Fox bit of news:

[If Hillary is elected,] Bill Clinton could be First Man for first woman president[!!!!!]

Ummmmmm ... duh. How exclusive! Just the sort of thing you'd never know without the good old news to fill you in. (last sentence = sarcasm in the extreme) Nevertheless, it is a bit of an interesting thought in one way. What would Bill Clinton's new title be? First Man? First Gentleman? Of course, Hillary won't be elected, so we don't need really to worry about it, but still... First Husband? First Knight? (Hahahahaha...)

P.s. Can you believe that after watching all this 24, there are still 14 more hours to go? Ay-yi-yi. (Or I-yai-yai. Or aye-yaye-yaye. Or...how do you spell that, anyway?)

Happy Valentine's Day II and MORE!

2007-02-14T22:30:00.000-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day again! Don't worry I didn't eat more than one chocolate bar, although I did have a number of marshmallows, some angel food cake, chocolate-covered strawberries, whipped cream-covered strawberries, and ice cream.

Ahem.

Speaking of Valentine's Day, what better day is there in the year to play through a book of old "classic" American love songs? Some of them are really quite funny. It seems that sentimentality was pretty popular back in the nineteenth century. Some of my favorites are "I Love You Truly" (the very same song that was sung by Bert and Ernie in "It's a Wonderful Life"), "Just A-Wearyin' For You", "Down By the Old Mill Stream", "In My Merry Oldsmobile" (yes, the book is old), and "Gypsy Love Song." They're all so...so old-fashioned! And funny! Maybe some time I'll try recording a couple of them, but it's too late to do it tonight.

On to other, more modern, less soupy, and probably more interesting subjects. ADBLOCK! I love Adblock. If you have never experienced it, you don't know what you're missing! It's an add-on for the browser Mozzarella Firefox (as it has been recently dubbed by a member of our family who previously called it "Maxamilla Foxfire" but broke that habit), and it lets you right-click on any picture on the web and Adblock it. BOOM! No more ads from THAT website! It's so much fun ("Feeeeel the power!" "Whoa, I feel it!"), and there are hardly ever ads on the websites I visit anymore, at least after I've been blocking things for a while. Life is good again!

My final subject:

The Inaccuracy and Fickleness of Weather Forecasting

Recently the weather forecasts have been all over the place. First we were going to get a huge huge huge snowstorm. "At LEAST twelve inches, probably even TWO FEET!" cried the meteorologists. But they soon changed their minds: Weather.com declared yesterday that we would get two inches before the precipitation turned into sleet or rain. Fortunately, they were wrong. Then this morning it was "eight inches, or maybe more. Some sleet around noon." Good thing they inserted that little disclaimer: they needed it. We have at least a foot. Oh, and the sleet didn't show up until 2:30, and it lasted about thirty seconds.

The meteorological community managed to keep from being totally wrong with the morning forecast, but they just couldn't stop while they were ahead. "The snow will taper off throughout the evening. It won't end until midnight, but we will get only one to two inches between 4PM and then." They may be right about the midnight part - the snow is coming down quite softly now - but it still is falling pretty steadily, and there is less than half an hour left before February 15th arrives - oh, wait, they just changed it to "light snow until 2AM, with some freezing drizzle." (Maybe it will end at midnight after all!) At any rate, I'm pretty sure we've had more than two inches since four.

I don't want to bash the weather-people; I'm sure they're all very nice, and I assume they do their best to get it right. But as Mrs. Banks would say (or sing), "Although we adore them individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid..." :)

Here's how our property looked like around 3:30 or 4:00 this afternoon:

Happy Valentine's Day!

2007-02-14T01:48:00.000-05:00

Here's what I'll be doing today:

(Just kidding... to some extent...)

Ambiguity Revisited

2007-02-12T13:19:00.000-05:00

I just remembered what my "ambiguity" post was going to be about: the relativity of the word "long" in reference to blog posts. Some people in my family think everything I do is "long," and others don't. Some think "long" is anything with more than one paragraph, others don't think it's too "long" unless it both has 37 paragraphs and is boring (or at least dry). An interesting subject, to be sure, but I don't have the time to write a disquisition on it now. Schoolwork calls.

The Work of a Feverish Mind

2007-02-09T17:35:00.000-05:00

I caught some sort of sickness yesterday afternoon that left me feeling tired and weak. I can’t usually fall asleep in the daytime when I’m well, but I had no problem then. I think I must have had a fever, too, because I woke up covered in sweat even without any covers. Mama thought I had one today, too, although the only symptom I still exhibit is a general feeling of fatigue. Further supporting my theory that I had a fever, I dreamed some interesting dreams yesterday afternoon, dreams with more plot than any I’ve had in a long time. Here they are for your benefit:

My first dream began with me driving Bria along some street in the commercial section of some town. I don’t think it was a real town, for I cannot conceive of its location in reality. I have all these perplexing “memories” of places suddenly popping up in my head, too, that were either long-forgotten real places or the fruit of my feverish imagination. Anyway, to return to my dream…

I was driving along some road a bit like South Willow St with shops on only one side and hills on the other. There was not much traffic, and the road was smooth and long. As I turned right to go into a large shopping plaza with Ames on one side and some other building on the other (at least it wasn’t Caldor or Bradley’s or Rich’s), I was excited to perceive Diane R. following us into the place in her red SUV. I wove around the parking lot looking for a good spot, although I ended up parking right in the middle for no clear reason.

The parking lot was unusual in that it was, shall we say, inhabited. In fact, there was quite a community! There was a “lot overseer” and many people just living in the parking lot. It was very much like the trailer park in “The Long, Long Trailer,” except that people lived in cars. One fellow asked if he could park there “until Tuesday”, and everyone shouted his joyful assent. (“Welcome to the best parking lot in New Hampshire!”)

I got out of the car and looked for Diane, but I had been mistaken: it was not she. Instead it was a teacher from the Christian school where I took the Stanford Achievement Tests in every grade from first to eleventh. I walked over toward the building into which she directed her steps, and it turned out to be the schools new location! And it was time for the tests! I was rather peculiarly unsurprised to find that Bria was no longer with me and that Daddy and Cara had taken her place. The three of us walked into the building. Interestingly, the first floor was the basement of the church (CHC), and it was full of preschoolers painting at two long tables that took up most of the width of the room. Cara and Daddy forged their way through to the door leading to the stairs, but in the hustle and bustle of the crowd, I could not keep up. I even tried diving between the backs of two long rows of chairs, but all I got was paint on my new white jacket (which I don’t really have). I did make it through, but my family had disappeared.

I continued to climb level after level in search of the “Executive Office,” as I called it. People laughed at me when I asked where the Executive Office was, but I didn’t know why. I finally reached the second-to-last floor (I think there were four stories in all, including the basement) and found that the stairs to the final floor went in a circle getting increasingly narrow without rails. It all looked rather perilous. I can still picture it clearly, although I cannot describe it well. I was in the middle of trying very, very hard to gather enough courage to go up when Mama called me on my cell phone. I don’t remember what she said, but I think she was angry that I wasn’t home yet. I thought that was strange, since I was at tests, and just hung up without answering (an action I would never consciously consider, I assure you).

I headed down the other way just in time to see Cara go into a classroom and close the door. I didn’t want to interrupt her tests, so I explored the building looking for someone who could tell me where to go. I knew the principal of the school could help me, but he was giving tests to some of the younger kids, so I just hung around waiting for light to be shed from some other source. When Cara emerged for a break, I was just starting to talk to her when I suddenly remembered that twelfth-graders do not take this kind of SAT, and that I had no reason to be there. I left feeling both relief and embarrassment.

Then I was Spider-man watching Cara’s store for her while she ate dinner, and I stopped a bunch of robbers by making a cool web, but that’s another story for another day.

By the way...

Click here to discover the secret source of the soundtrack for The Gigantic Amoeba at Medfield College! In case the audio doesn't work, or you don't want to take the time to check, it's the second movement to Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 21 in C: Elvira Madigan. It's a fantastic piece, and if you don't have it in your music library, you should definitely add it.

Video: My Nomination for the Oscars

2007-02-07T22:29:00.000-05:00

"Best Short Film: The Gigantic Amoeba at Medfield College"

I think it's a winner, don't you?

Click here to view in Windows Media Player.

Big bonus points for those who can identify the soundtrack!!!

Ambiguity

2007-02-02T22:33:00.000-05:00

I wrote the title of this post a day or two ago when I had a terrific idea for a post. I didn't have time to write the actual body of the post then, so I wrote the title thinking that the word "ambiguity" would of course be sufficient to jog my wonderful memory. Well, folks, it seems I overestimated myself. I opened the "Manage Posts" page without even the faintest recollection of what I was planning to write, and the single title word is doing nothing to resolve my perplexity. Therefore I will now move on to other things.

Such as...Samson. Have you ever thought about how many elements of that story are truly bizarre, especially in the context of modern culture? The first thing we hear about Samson (besides his birth) is that he took a trip to the land of the Philistines, nemeses of the Israelites, and came home saying, "Hey, Mom and Dad, I saw a girl while I was in Timnah. Go see if she'll marry me. She looks good." I don't know about you, but I can't imagine saying that...even if the Timnah part were replaced with Manchester!!!!

Samson ended up marrying the girl, but he didn't stick around after the wedding for more than a week, and the impression I get from the Bible is that he spent that week celebrating with a bunch of guys who weren't even his friends. Feasting buddies, or something. Then he went off who knows where, so his father-in-law said (of course!), "Well, there goes Charlene's husband, off who knows where. I guess I'll just have to give his wife to his best man."

I must admit that I do not know that her name was, in actuality, Charlene.

Well, Samson came back "a while later, in the time of the harvest," for his honeymoon. Rather poor prioritizing, in my opinion. In fact, he lost his wife because of it. As his father basically said, "Oops. So you did want to marry her after all. [nervous laughter] OK, hmm, how can I resolve this situation peacefully? Do you want to marry Darlene instead? She's actually even more good-looking that her sister." But Samson would have none of it. He was so mad he burned down the entire wheat field, and in the time of harvest, too!

"Who has done this?" cried the Philistines, and then again they cried, "Samson hath done it! He did it because his father-in-law gave his daughter, his wife, to someone other than him, who happened to once have been his friend." Then they all got confused because of the ambiguity of the pronouns. Which pronoun went with which antecedent became a matter of great conjecture among the lot of them. Some argued this, and some argued that, but eventually they determined that the fault lay with Samson's in-laws, so they killed them.

This turned out to be a big mistake. "You have gone too far!" cried Samson. "I will get revenge again, but then I'll stop." He was wrong (about stopping), but that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is that people weren't always that level-headed back in the good old days.

Here's another example to back my point: the story of Samson with his second wife, Delilah. I will never understand why on earth Samson gave the secret of his strength away to his wife. After all, every time he bluffed, she tried to take advantage of him. "Just tie me up with seven new cords, and I'll be helpless," said Samson. Delilah tied him up with seven new cords." Just tie me up with new ropes, and I'll be helpless," said Samson. Delilah tied him up with new ropes. "Just weave my hair into a cloth, and I'll be helpless," said Samson. Delilah wove his hair into a cloth. (I know Samson had inhuman strength, but how he disentangled his hair is beyond me; maybe he just kept it like that and used it as an umbrella when one was needed.) Every time Samson told Delilah a false secret and she proved it false, she cried, "You don't love me!"

I would have shot back, "Well, hello!!! You obviously don't love me either! Why do you think I don't tell you the truth when you keep trying deliver me over to the bad guys who happen to be your relatives?" But I was not Samson.

Samson had different ideas. He said, "OK, I know you have tried to deliver me over to the bad guys (who happen to be your relatives) again and again and again each and every time I pretended I told you the truth, so I guess I might as well tell you the truth and be delivered over because, um, because, um... just because." So he did.

Sometimes I think Samson had more brawn than brain.

What Shall I Say Then?

2007-01-29T23:30:00.000-05:00

The answer to the question which entitles this post has recently managed to escape my grasp. As someone in the musical version of Anne of Green Gables, I believe (I haven't seen the play for at least four years), so aptly puts it, "I just can't find the words." It is rather annoying. Here I sit at the computer, desperate to pour out my heart to a yearning public, and yet words fail me. With the occasional exceptions of sighs and expostulations, nothing comes to mind. Nothing at all.

I have tried multiple times to come up with a blog post recently, but it has all been to no avail. (Or do you say nothing was to avail? It availed nothing? Nothing was of any use? I trust you get my meaning, and I will now move on to finish my thought.) For instance, last week I took a "before" picture of my deplorably messy room, both for blog-fodder and for inspiration, but when my room was only reduced to the level of "lamentably messy," I was forced to cross that idea off my list.

One topic that seems a bit more promising is our skating, which has been terrific. Nevertheless, it would hardly make a good, interesting, long post considering the facts that there is no real story involved and that I lack Claire's or Craig's gift of making every anecdote/non-anecdote incredibly intriguing. Therefore I will content myself with saying that the ice is good, I have been having a great deal of fun on it, and the "skatable" area extends farther into the swamp than ever before. Oh, and I beat my Dad in a race for the first time EVER! (Actually, I could probably write a spiffy little post about that, ending it with "The flush of victory was on his cheeks, betraying the agony of his aching lungs," but I don't really have the time.)

Hmmm... our lunches have not been as interesting these past few days, fit for a kuningas though they may have been. (Everything we have here is fit for a kuningas.)

I've been enjoying a number of my subjects this year in school, but that topic was already basically covered at the beginning of the year. Of course, there is no harm in reiterating that I have been enjoying all my subjects to some degree, particularly Calculus and Italian, but that fact is hardly worthy of a blog post in itself. Who wants to read a post about the definite integral of sin x on the interval from 0 to π being 2? Who cares that [∫^π₀ sin x = 2] means the same thing? Who labors to type in my URL or click my link just to hear me tell them that "Stai attenta! Le strade sono sdrucciolevole! Non guidare velocemente!" means pretty much the same thing as "Be careful! The roads are slippery! Don't drive fast!"? I do not check other people's blogs to learn such things, and I do not wish to presume that others are any different. Besides, I've heard somewhere that, deep down inside, we're all the same.

I could tell you that my retainer makes my mouth dry; I could tell you that torque is the force applied perpendicular to the arm of a lever multiplied by the length of said arm; I could tell you that I now have a graphite tennis racket; I could tell you that I do not have a microSD card; I could even tell you that I have a little bottle of 70% isopropyl alcohol on my desk and that my printer is not currently plugged in; but would any of these subjects succeed in conveying anything interesting or of note to those who wish to hear interesting and notable things? I think not!

Dear me; I am undone.

A Lunch Fit For a Kuningas

2007-01-23T22:36:00.000-05:00

"What," you may ask, "is a 'kuningas'? And furthermore, what is that delectable-looking luncheon?"

I will tell you. First, a kuningas is a king. It is not any special kind of king, merely a different translation of the same word. The language is Estonian.

"Where," you may ask, if you aren't up on your geography or just aren't the sharpest nuga in the sahtel, "is this wonderful nation of Estonia?"

This I will also tell you. Estonia is the northernmost of the Baltic states (Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia), and lies on the Baltic Sea just across from Finland. Russia neighbors it to the east and Latvia does so to the south. Although its population of 1,324,333 is just slightly larger than New Hampshire's 1,235,786, Estonia's landmass is about twice the size of the Granite State's.

Enough of the geography. My connection to this country is that I am exactly one quarter Estonian by ancestry. My great-grandmother immigrated to New York from Estonia just in time for my grandmother to be born an American citizen. She brought with her the recipe for Glimpy Soup, a photo of which you have just had the honor of viewing. I'm not sure of the spelling of the name (the dictionary I used to translate suggested "klimp" should be the actual root), but it means dumpling soup.

Glimpy soup, as I will continue to call the dish for the sake of tradition and Americanization, is simply superb. It is also simply simple. It is dumplings in a milky broth, seasoned with salt and pepper. Everyone who's anyone who's had it LOVES it (except Kate, who is someone but nevertheless strangely abhors the soup; fortunately, I believe her sister Lisa's opinion is quite the opposite). It has always been a family favorite here and is beyond a doubt the best thing since sliced bread. You should try it sometime! You just might feel more like royalty than ever before.

(Glimpy soup is actually better than sliced bread, so if you want to REALLY compliment something, you should say it's the best thing since glimpy soup.)

Ryan sometimes gets so excited to eat his glimpy soup that he forgets his manners entirely.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!

2007-01-21T22:18:00.000-05:00

Defeat. So painful. So hard to believe that I actually have nothing to do with what's going on in Indianapolis when so much of my happiness seems tied up in what just happened there. How could this have happened?!?!?!? My despair knows no bounds.

It's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game.......

(Actually, writing this post made me feel a little better.)

Football Time!

2007-01-21T19:05:00.000-05:00

The Patriots' BIGGEST GAME YET is going on right now!

It's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game, it's just a game.......

Blog Scavenger Hunt!!!!

2007-01-18T13:43:00.000-05:00

Here is my entry for the D&S J Official Blog Scavenger Hunt!!!! I must say it was a lot of fun...

* A Shoe
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them, and you have their shoes. ~Frieda Norris
- From the blog of Cara S.

* A Tooth
"News about teeth!"
Everyone's favorite subject, I'm sure. Teeth just seem to fascinate everyone. Anyway, I'm losing a few on Tuesday (1-25-05)--my wisdom teeth, in fact. All four. My Oral Surgeon says that if he makes a mistake with the bottom, I could lose all the feeling in my mouth--possibly (though not likely) permanently. If he makes a mistake on the top, there is a small chance my mouth could be connected to my sinus cavity, and I could shoot water out my nose from my mouth! Sounds fun. I will be taking a TON of medications: Prescription Advil, Vicodin, some sort of steroids, and a special type of non-stinging mouthwash. Unlike most people, I don't consider this the opportunity of a lifetime.
- Me

* An Odd Name
Interesting name watch:
1. Hammer
This guy had a foreign accent which I couldn't place, and which was very difficult to understand. Our conversation went like this:
"What name do you want on the order?"
"Hamma"
"What was that?"
"Hamma, like the tool."
Katie looks confused. "Could you spell that please?"
"H-a-m-m-e-r"
"Oh!" Katie looks embarrassed.
2. Clover
3. Odelia (actually one of the employees)
4. Athena
5. Tiberius
- Kate A.

* A Car (fancier the better)
What could be fancier than a Lamborghini?

- Me again

* A Frightful Dilemma
SUDDENLY The Creature BURST through the grass about 20 feet in front of me, and my legs began to tremble. I stood frozen on the road, not sure whether to

run into the church,
stay frozen,
wait for a car to come by and rescue me, (and pray it wasn't scary stalker man who gives out flowers to people on walks)
scream loudly and draw all the attention of the neighbors,
faint,
or give chase! (Yeah, um... that one never crossed my mind!)

- Lindsay J.

* A Discussion of Childbirth
Jackson Josiah decided to make an early appearance yesterday afternoon. We're all thrilled he did, especially his mother, since he was 9 pounds 2 ounces--15 days early! Somehow my midwife had a sensing he was an extra big baby, so she took measures on Monday to help things along. I went into labor on Monday evening and he was born Tuesday at 3:42 p.m. A long, fairly hard labor, but we're so happy he's here. He's wonderfully healthy and so far very easy.
- Jill J.

* A Theological Discussion/Debate
After extraordinary personal struggles, and questions of life and death and God, and then after a soul-searching experience in which he deals with man's mortality, Hamlet finally arrives at this truth: "There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all..." In other words, I cannot control my life or death, that is God's province. And He has it perfectly planned out. It is just my job to be ready for, and to accept, whatever He brings to me.
- Andrea M.

* A Funny Line, Joke, or Short Post
Guess what I just realized? Cara is a four letter word.
- Cara S.

* A Train (the engine and cars kind)
....It just struck my funny bone. To be precise, it struck my roll-your-eyes-and-marvel-at-the-weird/needless -attention- to- detail bone. It's kind of like when we're watching a movie that is supposed to take place a hundred years ago, and a train comes along in some scene, and [Brad] says something like," That's totally wrong. That train wasn't made for another forty years..." So now, whenever I see a train in a movie, I automatically shout, " That's not real! Anachronism!"
- Claire P.

* A Hairbrush
You wouldn't believe how long it took me to find this picture. I looked EVERYWHERE for some mention or picture of a hairbrush, and after a couple hours of searching, this is all I found. Notice the handle of the brush on the table in the far right of the picture.
- Picture from the blog of Jenna B.

* An appeal for money
All you will have to do to purchase this wonderful product from the evil older brother is call 1-800-DISAPPEAR or visit www.invisibilityworldheadquartersnh.com! Please make sure you have $758,220,700,000 on hand - cash only - in order to purchase your first dose!
- Ryan S.

* A Hobby
What you see before you is approximately two years' worth of fingernails and toenails. In all the time since I began the collection, I have not failed to add a single clipping to the egg. To be fair, my freshman year roommate and the kid across the hall contributed a few finger and toe clippings apiece, before they withdrew their support from my endeavor; in fact, last year my roommate (same one) tried to throw the collection away and once held it for ransom. It has also survived spills on several occasions, but is largely intact.
- Pat R.

* Green
While driving past a river near my house I told my mom quickly to pull over yelling "I need a green photo!" well this is what came out after a few tires it has some yellow in it but this is my green photo.
- Alex B.