Straight out of Uncley Aar'n's

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

A Public Poll

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

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

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

(NOW you may applaud, cheer, etc.)

Not Your Ordinary Sunday

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

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

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

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


P.s. Happy birthday, Cherilyn and Duncan!

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

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

Buon Compleanno!

(Happy Birthday!)

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

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

Un Posto Corto

(A Short Post)

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

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

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