Quote Time

"You may burn my flesh and bones
and throw my ashes to the four winds,"
smiled one of them.
"Yet my voice shall linger on
and in the years to come
the young shall ask what was the idea
for which you gave me death
and what was I saying
that I must die for what I said."
-Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes

"Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and she wears tan shorts and sandals. No makeup. Nothing but the truth."
-from Peter Hedges' Novel What's Eating Gilbert Grape

"ENUF SED"
-a license plate on a lame white Hummer i saw today which looks like it should be called Toasty Ghosty or maybe Bummer.

"Whatever you are, be a good one."
-Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."
-Walt Disney (1901-1966)

"Crap! Where is that book?"
-Me trying to find another awesome quote i found

"??????"
-you adding your own awesome quote!

College is hard when you don't manage your time early on in the semester.

One ten-pager down
two essays to go
one is not short
and the other is so
The short one i'll finish
this night 'fore my screen
it will be the most rapid
busting out you've ever seen.
Lord give me peace
cause i need it right here
and whisper Your Love
right into my ear.
Let me sing Your sweet song,
pray to You, give You praise,
and serve You despite This for all of my days.

in other news: applesauce! (i know, it was SO hard to guess...)


also a favorite from Salzburger Land:

lesser representaion of HIS Love

Taken from:

"All I want is all-consuming, life-changing, heart-pounding, intellectually stimulating, totally forgiving, unrelentless, never ending, soul sharing, blood-pumping, utterly intense, utterly passionate, utterly unmistakable, forever encouraging, Can't Possibly Live Without You, perpetually connected, Your Breath Is My Breath, never ever looking back, unconditional two-become-one kinda love.

I mean, come on, that's not too much to ask for, is it?"

No, no. i don't think so. i won't be settling for any less anyway.

Politics and Ingredients

Not only does this woman have a funny name, she's also President of the League of Women Voters of California. Go JJ.


Guess what this is! (i know, it's really hard - i'll post the answer later)


An even MORE funny name! Who ever said reading the voter's general election packet was a waste of time?!?


ps: i actually did vote and i don't remember at the moment what i voted on these propositions, or even what they stood for, for that matter. Maybe i'll look them up when i post the answer to my clue game. Either way ALL of the propositions were defeated this election. Yay politics!

Some Facts

-i love thanksgiving.
-Family can be tricky business.
-Family can also be amazingly wonderful.
-Friends are fantastic.
-Over the break i visited the cave system at UC Santa Cruz with my brother, Travis and the Simms bros, Gregg and Dillon.
-My dad, brother, and i all helped around my grandma's house. My dad and i worked on some appliances and my brother took initiative and planted some bulbs. Yay flowers!
-My brother is applying to colleges, Arizona State, San Francisco and San Jose State, and Caly Poly San Luis Obispo are among the candidates. Yay college!
-Small group is tonight and that's great. i'm excited.
-i got the new Fighting Jacks demo in the mail from Mike today. i haven't listened to it yet, but i really want to. i just know that it will be very good.
-And lastly, guess who was on my flight from San Jose to Orange County? That's right. John Kerry. Seated in First Class.

a montage

urban autumn cactus


her distant cousin


4?


She Conquers Nonetheless


"Our house / in the middle of the street"


tribute to Aro


Excuse me, where is literacy night?


here.

two am, but i need this

-i do not understand what i do. For what i want to do i do not do, but what i hate i do. And if i do what i do not want to do, i agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer i myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. i know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For i have the desire to do what is good, but i cannot carry it out. For what i do is not the good i want to do; no, the evil i do not what to do--this i keep on doing. Now if i do what i do not want to do, it is no longer i who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
-So i find this law at work: when i want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being i delight in God's law; but i see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man i am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God--through Jesus Christ our Lord!
-So then, i myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

people from a different time warp

Level One across the bridge and over the tumultuous water

Level Two up in the trecherous mountainous regions

Level Three in the shrine at the inane dead end

blog hate

So here i am trying to blog and also thinking that i still need to fix my page so that non-Firefox users can view it error-free and i end up with this. NO real meaningful, analytical entry, AND my profile and archives are at the WAY WAY bottom of the page. And i still need to write! But i can't right now! Help!

this is a week. let's go.

Blog?

Who even has time to keep these things up!? School is crazy, man, just crazy. Today i have a Weight Training midterm (ha?) and i get my Spanish midterm back which NO ONE in the class finished, so that should be fun...

Work is going fine, but of course it's hard to balance school work with work work and other less important things, like, you know, sleep and time with friends... And what if i need to play my guitar? i broke a string yesterday! At least i don't have to work on the weekends, though it feels like it sometimes. Kirsten and i were going to try to go to Seattle over Christmas break, but that's not going to fly anymore. Instead we are going up to San Jose, and Simms' Tahoe cabin for a week-ish. Plus New Year's will be in NorCal! Rock on!

Sometime i will figure out how to reformat my site so that people with Internet Explorer can view it normally--i hope.

i need Jesus today.

The Mail and more

In a final, much delayed installment of "From whence becometh Aaron Choate his books from amazon.com ... eth" here's where the last two came from!

1. La Vergne, Tennessee
2. College Park, Maryland

In other news, my father, Paul Choate, was born in DC and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, so naturally i have a special fondness for the state.

ALSO! KINDRED FALL'S SPECIAL EDITION PRE-RELEASE OF "SLOW SEASON" IS OUT!!!
i came home to a stack of them piled on my desk. Sweet. So yes, they are available for 10 United States Dollars, and i'll even ship it to you free of charge! So, if you haven't got one and would like one, buy one from me!

i am both sweaty from intramural basketball and supposed to be doing homework now, so bye!

September Eleventh

Here i was, sitting in front of my computer NOT doing my homework like i should, and i accidentally paused the cursor over the date and time box in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. "Sunday, September 11, 2005" it says to me.

And i think, wow, second anniversary of terrorist attacks and it's crazy how time has flown by and this hurricane in the south and it's damage are crazy and there's all these other tragedies, both national and international, and so many people die each year and people do horrible things to each other and gas prices are over three dollars a gallon a lot of places and people are probably getting shot at or raped or abused right now--all at once.

Aro and i were talking the other day about how in general we haven't experienced THAT many hardships or "crazy stuff" i guess was how he worded it, and we tend to think that, "Oh people are nice, and yeah they have their baggage, or personal quirks and idiosyncrasies, but so what?"

i was talking with Kyle last night about how i'm so blessed and also such a rarity since both my parents are still alive and married and together and in love with each other.

My cell phone got stolen this morning off my front driveway, since i accidentally left it there for a little while after i was reading for school. Terrible! It rings when i call it, so wherever it is, it's on and not broken. i hope it turns up!

i just got back from the Phoenix Club in Anaheim with some of the people who went to Munich. It's is a German place with a restaurant and also where they host Oktoberfest and similar events each year. That was pretty fun and also a bit strange. The waitress decked out in her dirndle asked me what i wanted to eat. In English. SO weird. "Man hat Deutsch erwartet," sagte meine Profesorin. Ja, stimmt!

So, these are my thoughts for this eleventh of September. Now i really ought to read for this skewl i'm going to.

More!

Today's crop was comprised of a book sent from McKeesport, Pennsylvania and another from Fayetteville, Arkansas. The latter i can say that i've actually been to whilst on tour with ye olde Fighting Jacks during the Month of January in 2004 Anno Domini. Cool. Now i must read some of these blasted books i've received. i'm off!

The cool thing about having to order books

Although having to buy books each semester at Chapman can get annoying and extremely pricey, i have developed a system to keep it cheaper and also to enjoy it.

First thing is, i usually buy my books from amazon.com, which not only keeps them much cheaper and saves me money, but it also saves me waiting in line at the bookstore. Sometimes i look on half.com or various other places and will find a cheaper book, but for some reason amazon has always worked out best. What's more is i get all these sweet packages addressed to me, pretty much like my birthday or Christmas in September or whatever (which in reality is more packaged items for me than i EVER see nowadays).

...but that's not the best part. The best part is getting them and seeing where they came from and looking up the cities on mapquest. i know, i'm a freak about maps, but it's so fun! i get to learn a little of our nation's geography that i would have otherwise been uninspired to research (most likely) and i can dream about one day travelling there and i'll always secretly know that i have my own little connection with at least one citizen there, even when the books aren't always shipped by individual sellers, but rather larger companies. Today's round of books came from:

1. South Bend, Indiana
2. Iowa City, Iowa
3. Bloomington, Indiana
4. River Grove, Illinois
5. Eugene, Oregon
6. Fife, Washington

A nice spattering of middle America and the Pacific Northwest. Washington in particular has been calling my name a lot lately. Must travel.

And! Another round of 'em is probably going to come tomorrow! Yay!

Microshaft

So apparently, along with writer's block and thus a lack of new postings, my site is also experiencing some sort of html code errors which makes the whole site load improperly in Microshaft's "Internet Explorer" browser. It loads perfectly fine in Firefox. i usually never endorse products, and when i do it's not really that enthusiastically, but this is an exception mostly because i'm pissed off. Well, perhaps just annoyed, as pissed off is a little, shall we say, strong language. i spent a lot of time working on my site's new look, and most of the general population can't even view it error free! This is just one of the many reasons why Firefox is infinitely better than Microschaft, and i'm not saying you should go download it right now, but you should go download it right now.

Many thanks to Aro for pointing out the problem, and no thanks to the rest of you for not telling. Ha! Ok, i love you all. Really!

In actual news: Went to Ed's Nana's house tonight in Compton with the whole crew and it was loads of fun. Some selected highlights include:
-playing Blackjack with chips and Uncle Eliot as the dealer, who apparently really deals in Casinos? Not sure of that last bit.
-building with Lincoln logs
-eating an orange off the tree in the backyard (quite delicious)
-listening to Ed, Kyle, and Brandon jam with guitars and Kyle's mandolin and trying to learn dueling banjos.
-eating food. GOOD food, including catfish.
-Singing songs in battle.
-You know those cool viewfinder, or view-o-rama, or whatever they're called things where you put the disc in an look up to the light to see the images and flip the lever to rotate to the next one? Yeah, those. SO SWEET!
-Saying 'sayonara' to Ed's mum who is flying back to Japan tomorrow! :(
-lots of fun.

Ok, i'm tired.

Writer's Block

The past week or so has been relatively normal as far as summer life in Orange goes. i've logged in to my Blogger account several times with the intention of writing something, but for some reason just had writer's block. i thought to myself, "self, what is it that's troubling you? What's interesting? What's boring? What's going on in your life?" i just never came up with any answers to these questions and i still don't know why actually. Things are happening, but nothing was coming out onto the page. But anyway, now here's something.

My new roommate has moved in at the 714, so all the rooms are filled except one, and i'm not sure when it will be, though it should be soon. School starts on Monday which is both ridiculous and slightly surreal. Kirsten is going to move up to Orange this weekend i hope, and that will be quite a relief for her after such a long search, and a relief for me also. Kyle Warner is back from ambiguously noted but somehow generally understood "the island" and it has been quite a pleasure to hang with him. Just for old time's sake:


And the gum wall at SLO:

Aro always thinks my shirt says "Footloose"

In other news my Grandma sent me a care package today. SOSWEET!

Perhaps my next entry will be more focused and less random. Love you all.
-ac-

"Always have an escape plan."

After much anticipation, it's finally here!

My blog got a makeover today.

i:
learned some HTML

<--put some fun links over on the side there

decided to stop being a computer nerd for now and do something more tangible and productive, such as play my guitar

Gummi Bears and me

"Haribo macht Kinder froh und Erwachsene ebenso."

theinfintesimallyminuteme

Spreading the love:


create your own visited states map

...which is a lot more impressive than this:


create your own visited countries map
...reminding me of how little i actually have seen of God's Earth (< 7%!). They even highlighted Alaska, and i've never been there, which adds a disproportionate amount of red to my map.