Musings on Life and Living

I have a beef with the way people in our society use certain words. More specifically, I have a beef with people who choose to ignore that words have specific meanings. Now, my friend Ryan has frequently chastised me for bringing up this beef, saying that I need to recognise the dynamic life of language, and that, as a result, a word that meant one thing may evolve into meaning something different. I do recognise this, but my beef continues with some things. This beef is somewhat shocking, as I generally misuse words, and I frequently aim to contribute to the body of neologisms that exist in our language. In fact, I long for the day when a word's etymology is traced back to me, rather than some archaic German form from the 12th Century AD. Notwithstanding, I wish to make public my beef with the way one word, in particular, is used. The word is anniversary. As with many words in our language, it was brought to us from Latin, from the two roots "annus", meaning "yearly...

So... supposedly Gretch and I were taking turns with our blogging... and it was her turn ages and ages ago... and she hasn't posted... which means it is time for everyone to email, call, or send smoke signals to remind her that she needs to do her part! Which leads me to some of the disjointed thoughts of my Tuesday afternoon... There are lots of conventions in the world... spelling... speaking... comic books... uber-nerdy... and, of course, family, among many others. And when one is getting ready to get married, one is suddenly exposed to the harsh reality that other families are not like your own! *gasp* Even harder to accept are the facts that a) other families do things differently, 2) what you have always done and what your future spouse has always done may conflict, and d) randomly appropriating bits and pieces from movies rarely actually solves the conflict. But conflict is resolved as compromise is made. And it is still fun to think about and identify the idiosyncrasies I...

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...

Ok so this morning after our wonderful IHOP breakfast Alex and I finally finished our gift registry! Well, almost. We still need to take care of a few things online, but otherwise we're done. So let the fun begin! Everyone can now go to Target, Wal-mart or Bed Bath and Beyond and begin searching, or, in the case of my best friend, gape at our inability to match our silverware with our dishware. Little did she realize that the maroon dishware set that we picked at Target totally just made my jaw drop and make me drool, which is really hard to do since I'm not a big fan of nice, fancy, flowery dishes. But I saw these and fell in love And yes if you go look at our registry, it's very themed, you'll notice the colors maroon (or anything close to it), silver (and grey) and white (or off white in many cases), and then there are the frogs. Yes, I like the frogs, they are cute and make me giggle like a little school girl- no actually Alex and I have been looking at this set for...

So, Gretch and I have started our gift registries. We decided to start at Wal-Mart, for no other reason than we happened to be nearby Wal-Mart one day and we decided to head over and start the registry fun. We spent about an hour or so in the housewares department, and registered for 153 items. Then I had to go to work, so we had to call it quits for the day. Later, Gretch suggested we finish registering on Monday before FHE. So we went, and we registered for the rest of the housewares we wanted, and then we went into home furnishings and a few other random departments, such as hardware (for a plunger), and household cleaners (for a broom and a mop). We are now registered for a total of 350 items. Of course, a lot of these things are duplicates, just because we haven't actually decided on colour schemes and designs. Nor do we know which vacuum we'd actually like, so of course we've registered for six or seven. Next week we are going to start registering at Target, I think. ...