Musings on Life and Living

It is no secret that I like to read books. Correction: that I love to read books. What does seem to be a secret, though I can't for the life of me figure out why, is that Gretchen also loves to read books. Contrary to popular belief, the 1,900-some books we have in our living room are not all mine. In fact, not a few came from Gretch's collection. Now, to be fair, I did have a lot more books than her. And I do talk about reading more than she does. And, yes, I do tend to refer to our book collection as my book collection. That's just an odd quirk of mine. After all, I refer to the intermediate hallway in Wiley Elementary School as "my" hallway" in "my" building. I think I started claiming things as my own as a mental reminder to treat them with the utmost care. Pretty certain it goes back to the days of operating the spotlights in high school and running the sound equipment for the jazz ensembles. Anyway, back to books. Gretch and I both love re

Champaign is an interesting city. Three hours to the north, we have Chicago, Illinois. Three hours to the east is Indianapolis, Indiana. Three hours to the south is Louisville, Kentucky. And three hours to the west is St. Louis, Missouri. We have friends in Chicago, so we've been there from time to time since we got married. We've never gone to the east or the south as a couple. But we have two things in St. Louis that bring us to the west several times a year: one of our church's temples, which we are encouraged to visit frequently in order to worship and contemplate, and one of my older brothers, who lives there with his wife and children. We are always meaning to visit St. Louis more often than we do. It is hard to get away, and it is hard to spend the money for gas. So we are also always looking for a good reason to make sure our birds have plenty of food and water and hit the open road. Earlier this week, I got a call from my brother wanting to know what we were do

I finally got around to updating our blog last week and, as those who read it hopefully figured out, it was quite the marathon writing session! It took me over an hour and a half to write the 2,900-plus post! I told Gretchen that I wanted to start updating our blog at least once a week on Sunday mornings. We have church in the afternoon this year, so it means we have a lot of time in the morning to prepare and plan and spend time together. (Somehow this doesn't seem to work when we have church in the morning or in the middle of the other two congregations with which we share our building.) The funny thing is that I am not at all opposed to blogging. As many of you probably (hopefully) know, I blog every day about my adventures in teaching fourth grade. (If you didn't know, the blog is at http://teachingfourth.wordpress.com. It is updated every day I have work, and occasionally on weekends or holidays if I have something to write about.) But for some reason, Gretch and I jus

This is the blog post that I have wanted to write for several months. Since the end of August, in fact. I have delayed and hesitated and drafted then discarded and doubted and planned and drafted and discarded so many times that I find myself wondering why I didn't just get it done with. The quick answer to that last bit is that I was hoping for the last piece of the puzzle to show up and fit in the right place so I could put it together. But recent events have made me realise that I shouldn't have doubted and struggled with this post; that I should have just written it. First some background. This is mostly going to be information that close family and friends already know but I want to share it for the benefit of those who may be visiting this blog for the first time, or just stumbled upon it while searching for information. Gretch and I got married in 2008. This was right after I had graduated, but about a year before she did. For the first year of our marriage, we