Musings on Life and Living

Gretchen told me one day that it was my turn to post on our blog. And then she went and posted again. So now she is claiming that I have to post again, even though she is the one who posted out of turn. *sigh* Well, I guess there are worse things in life... I'm sitting here in someone else's living room, listening to music from a baby monitor, and hoping not to hear any cries or screaming, as I currently have the sweetest babysitting gig ever. I get to come over, use the Internet, occasionally watch movies, and see one of my most favouritest young married couples in the world on a weekly basis. Of course, I don't charge to babysit, since they are going to end up doing a lot of babysitting for me in the future (I hope). Anywho, I've been a member of an online community for about seven or eight years. Many of my friends there are from other nations, and therefore they use non-American English. But even before the intensive exposure to them, I developed a love for non-Amer...

About a month ago, my friend Noah went to Nauvoo, Illinois, and, while there, purchased a pretty cool pewter letter opener for me. I has the three celestial stones of the Nauvoo Temple on the handle. Well, more precisely, the handle is a pewter replica of one of the facade pillars. So it has a sun stone, a star stone, and a moon stone. It is pretty cool. It also cost about eight bucks. Now, while I am more than willing to allow my friends to make purchases as gifts for me, most of the time, I will repay them. Particularly if they picked up a letter opener for me. (For those who are not aware of it, I collect said openers, and own about 115 of them.) It is a not-too-terribly-expensive hobby, but I don't want to be the kind of guy who just assumes everything is a gift. Anyway, the whole point is that I told Noah that I'd pay him back. Fast-forward to last week. I still had not paid the debt, and we were discussing it. We were also simultaneously discussing the desire to go out an...

On rare occasion I like to show off some of the work I've done in my classes to other people outside of the bubble I live, sleep, eat and breath in. Most of it I'm not completely satisfied with, I usually hate it because it aggravated me or I accidentally slept on it and find it in the morning ruined, and then of course I find myself hitting my head against the wall for being such a dope. Either that I'm too shy, or modest, to show off my smokin' skills or maybe I'm being smart and saving everyone from being exposed to my dry humor. For the most part I'm just not satisfied with it, but I can live with the flaws. And then there' s an even rarer occasion when I like to share art that I totally had fun doing and had a great experience doing it and although it looks a lot like crap and I know I'll never go back and finish it or tweak it, I'm still proud of it. And it's because I've conquered something that is somewhat difficult that I like to s...