Musings on Life and Living

It has been a while since I've posted a good old fashioned rant on here. And since ranting is part of what this blog is all about, I thought I'd share a recent email I sent to the good folks at County Market in Champaign. For those who are not aware, County Market is a grocery store located throughout the upper midwestern states in America (with some stores in Louisiana and Pennsylvania). I went to County Market this morning to buy milk and cereal. While shopping I overheard a customer asking an employee for help finding an item, and was shocked when she blew him off, muttering that she was doing her own shopping. She was wearing her work uniform at her place of work. I registered the encounter, but didn't think too much of it until a few minutes later. After making the purchases, realised I had grabbed the wrong brand of milk. County Market has an on-going program in which customers who buy 9 gallons of milk will receive a coupon for a free 10th gallon. These purchases are...

Gretch and I were blessed to spend our Thanksgiving holiday with both sides of the family. This is one of the things for which I am most grateful. We live close to both sets of parents, so it is possible to see them often, although we don't get to travel to Washington quite as often as we would like, it is still nice to know that Mum and Dad are only an hour and a half away. We went to my parents' house on Thanksgiving Day and stayed until Saturday morning. While there, we spent time with many of our nephews and nieces, worked on teaching our niece Liberty how to throw her head back and cackle and then utter the phrase "foolish mortals" (still a work in progress--she doesn't talk yet, and the throwing her head back and the cackling parts haven't quite synched up with each other), and we hung out with some of my brothers and their wives. And, of course, we ate. Oh, goodness, how we ate! Mum and Dad made salad, pies, and provided a home for the meal. Tom and Tab...

I participate on an interfaith blog that focuses on LDS and Evangelical issues. Those of us who regularly contribute to the blog (either as blog post authors or as commenters) have teamed together to do an interfaith study of Paul's Epistle to the Romans. I was assigned to review the fifteenth chapter. What follows is the review which I gave. It is divided into two parts: a summary of the chapter and the application of some of the teachings. Summary Romans 15 continues on from the advice started in chapter 12, giving practical advice to how the Saints can “present [their] bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is [their] reasonable service.” Having discussed a variety of aspects of practical Christian behaviour in the previous chapter, Paul starts off by admonishing the Romans to “bear the infirmities of the weak” and to “every one of us please his neighbour for his good to edification.” Paul then gives counsel that we be “likeminded one toward another” that w...

As many of you are surely aware, I am a long-time supporter of drug prevention programs that focus on teen leadership training and empowerment. Most notably, I am a volunteer drug prevention specialist through Operation Snowball, Inc. and the Illinois Teen Institute. I got involved with these programs in 1996, when I attended a Snowflake event at Washington Community High School. Snowflake is a prevention program aimed at middle school/junior high students. I attended my first Snowflake as a 7th grader, through the influence of two of my older brothers, Anton and Adam, who were both involved in the high school's Operation Snowball chapter. I remember being bewildered at first, but quickly coming to enjoy the atmosphere. I could not tell you a single thing we were taught during that evening event, but I can tell you that I was there with my best friend, Carl, and we met a girl there named Colleen. When we got to high school, we became friends with Colleen (or Co, as we came to know ...

For the first time in the eight and a half years that I have been voting in the state of Illinois, I missed an opportunity to vote in an election. And I am going to be perfectly honest: I am very upset. And not with myself. You see, I have been registered to vote since I turned 18. I have never, since that time, not been registered to vote. I have always been registered in the state of Illinois although, in all this time, I have lived in at least six different precincts. However, my registration has never ceased to be in this state, and, for the past five years or so, it has been in Champaign. So even though Gretchen and I moved in August, we both knew that we were still registered to vote. Or so we thought. It turns out that Illinois has what I am going to call the stupidest voter registration rule ever. I didn't even know about this rule until about 20 minutes ago, when I arrived at my polling place to get my ballot for what I believe was one of the single most important election...