Question of the Day

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

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!

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

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!

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

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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: