For a long time, I didn’t really like Sunday. I mean, religiously we’re supposed to put down all of the things we’ve been working on and rest. You know how hard it is for me to rest? I’ve been making a study of it for a little while now, and I can tell you that now when I get the chance to rest, I take it. And I love setting aside Sunday to blog, to love my kids, to hug and kiss my wife more than on other days, and to make dinner.

I love cooking. I cook just about every Sunday. Way more often than not, we share our Sunday meal. Tonight is a family we’ve known for years. Sometimes it is people we don’t know well, other times we have family or close friends over or a mix of all of the above. We love it. We love to have parties. We love having people over. Especially since my wife and I fell deeply in love this year. It’s not that we weren’t in love before, but since the beginning of this year we’ve both had to grow and change and fight to keep together, and I testify to you that through our work and fight and growth and change the Lord blessed us and we are now more loving and in love with each other than we ever have been. I’ve struggled to complain. Seriously. I have no complaints right now outside of being too busy. That is largely a function of school, work, church, family, etc. Other than being busy, I have not one complaint right now.

I’ve been biking since my big fall. I’m a little more…I call it “squirrelly”…than I used to be. Some would call it cautious. I call it nervous. I occasionally have thoughts of falling like that again….it wasn’t very fun. That’s ok though…tomorrow I am going to try to get to the top of Mueller Park in less than half an hour. It should be a feat.

I was at the Zoo yesterday and we saw all the fun stuff that you see at the Zoo, but I was in the small animal house and looking at the Meerkats and I remembered a dream I had earlier in the year. Bright green glowing alien Meerkats were coming to take over the world…how? By mating. I laughed at the thought of it again.

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I don’t know why. I’m just not sleeping well. Sometimes at night it is hard to wind down after an action packed day. Other times I just don’t stay deep.

My dead father has been hanging out at our house again. He comes every couple of weeks. He seems to think that Rebecca and I are the only ones in the family that are paying any attention to him, which is kind of funny. We chat with him when he shows up, as weird as that may sound. He’s doing much better now than he was a year ago. Interestingly enough, he was instrumental in helping Rebecca and I through a lot of our relationship crap this year.

Friday night he showed up at about 9:30 to tell us that he is worried about Allie, my little sister. Now, since some misunderstandings last year after Dad died, I haven’t actually talked to my sister at length. She had made it clear that she no longer wanted a relationship with us, and we decided to love her at a distance. Well, Dad wanted me to go visit with her. I did. It didn’t go well. It left me pretty frustrated and sad. I miss my little sister.

On a lighter note, I finally got my Vespa inspected, registered, and insured. That means it is finally legal. It hasn’t been legal for at least 6 years, even though I have ridden it every summer. Now I don’t have to worry about it. It’s nice to just hop on and go. And it’s fun to ride in the open air.

l guess that what you need to know is that we are well. Life continues to present opportunities for conquering or being conquered and we are choosing to conquer, even if things don’t always go how we plan them. We’re just grateful for the ride.

Dude, one of the best things about riding the train is that I finally get to blog…what do I have to write about?…

I’ve been pretty handy lately. I’ve had this list of projects to do around the house for about fifty thousand years and I finally started. What’s been interesting is finding out just how cheap a lot of them are. For instance, it’s not terribly expensive to paint. Most basic interior doors are less than 50 bucks. So, I painted all of the trim around the outside of the house two weeks ago. Last week I hung a door in our entry way, which is going to cut our heating and cooling bill in half I swear. First try too. I was pretty proud of myself. They say it is pretty hard to hang doors. I had a good time with it. I’ve owned a set of chisels for about six years and have never had any reason to use them until I got to hang a door. Totally exciting. I chiseled out the holes for everything but the handle. Way fun. I think when school is done I am going to get a block of wood and carve something. I think it would be fun. Then this last weekend Becca and I busted out a magical dining room paint job, two tones, three coats all over. It took most of the day to do it, but we got it done. Good on us. Then I learned how to use a string trimmer to make my lawn look really stinking good.

Overall, this summer is turning out really cool. If only we could take a trip to Disneyland before the end, I think it would be complete. We’ll see.

I’ve been waiting for someone to comment on any of my posts, but apparently my blog is just boring enough that no one wants to say anything about my stupidity.

Do me a favor…if you read my blog, leave an amen. Just click Add a Comment and write Amen. That’s it. I am just curious if anyone even reads this….

To all of you out there, I am going to depart from my normal poop about me and say a couple of things. Sometimes life’s circumstances are such a disappointment and a dismal representation of what we wanted our life to be like that we are tempted to do stupid things. If you are one of the people, like me, that have thought about doing stupid things when life gets ugly, I have a couple of words of advice: Don’t.

Just don’t.

Put your stupid petty complaints aside and start asking some new questions. Ask who you can help today. Ask what you can do to make the world a better place today. Ask who you can lift up today. Most of our problems are based in self-centeredness. If we let go of ourselves and really do follow the advice of the Saviour of the World, losing our lives in the service of others, those stupid petty problems we agonize over so much will fade in to a rich background of love, commitment, and peace.

I learned something a long time ago. At the time I was living alone, weeks from coming home from Italy. I was lonely. I was feeling unloved. I thought I was suffering a lot. I wondered what other people were doing. I wondered why they didn’t love me. I wondered what the crap I was going to do with myself. But mostly I wondered why I was feeling so unloved. Then I caught a glimpse of wisdom. I was asking how I could feel more love in my life and the answer came to me like a magical ton of bricks. If you want to feel more love, give more love. If you are feeling no love in your life it is because you are completely withholding that love from other people. You have to give love to receive love.

So when you feel like doing something stupid like getting a bottle of scotch and shooting yourself in the chest with a revolver, don’t. Instead, ask who you can give love to, and go give some love. You’ll feel much better.

On a lighter note, I am on the train again and across the table from a dude with a beard that is completely rocking out, air drums, air guitar, air bass, and all. It’s pretty cool. You certainly don’t get this by driving your car.

It’s another train day, and I found more reasons to love riding in on the train.

When you drive, it’s really sterile. You are protected from the world. You can avoid the humanity around you. You can shut people out. You can feel isolated and alone. It’s like some funky protection between you and the world.

Then you get on the train. Immediately you are assaulted by with the humanity of those around you. And I mean an overload of the senses, not that people assault you. There’s the guy with the long grey mullet and the Kiss tattoos. There’s the students on their way to school or the U for classes. There are the moms with their babies. There are the lawyers in suits. There are more people. It’s sooo refreshing to be among different kinds of people. Farmington, heaven love it, is homogenous. Little or no variety. The people you meet are like yourself if you are me. But being on the train gets me in touch with people again. It’s magical. Our lives intersect on the train.

I even saw the branch president from the singles ward I used to go to on the train…

The other magic these days is Craigslist. We’ve been talking about getting rid of a bunch of junk for months. We put it on Craigslist for free and it magically disappeared from our yard. Thank you all those people who got our junk from Craigslist.

Is it me or is Raiders of the Lost Ark one of the best movies ever?! Holy cow, I can’t believe I waited this long to own it. I forgot how much I absolutely love this movie. Adventure. Great love story. Action. Amazing character development. Wild ending. Love it. Best ten bucks I have spent in a long long long long time.