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Life

Life

Tempus Fugit

“Time flies.” It’s an observation old enough that we have record of Virgil using it. Time does indeed fly. It flies past and is gone, irretrievably, to the past. I’m feeling a little melancholy today. Today is the 17th anniversary of my sister’s death. And it feels especially poignant to me because this year the 23rd fell on a Friday, just like it did in 2009, when she died. Seventeen years. She was six weeks shy of her 19th birthday. So next year will be the last anniversary of her death before she will have been dead longer than she was a live. That is a really strange thing to think about and hard to wrap my brain around.

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Life

Updates

Updates I don’t actually know what I want to write about today. I have a lot of things I can talk about. A lot has happened in the last two years. We settled in to our house. My oldest graduated High School and started College. I formed a great group of close friendships in my small group at church. I wrote most of a thriller novel and have a solid outline for a sequel. My two youngest children were diagnosed with autism. I built a family hub app that I’m pretty proud of. My aunt died. My dog died. A friend I’ve had for 18 years died. My wife became a business owner. I’m sure there’s more. The point is, a lot of life has happened. It’s been a very full two years.

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Life

When Everyone Is an Impostor, No One Is

When Everyone Is Super an Impostor, No One Is My first instinct is to talk about how it’s been a long time and I’m turning over a new leaf and I’ll be writing more. But you’re a human (presumably), you can read and see the difference in date. And you can probably deduce from that length of time that I’m unlikely to keep up blogging again, like I didn’t last time. So what’s changed? Why will this time be different?

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Life Musings

And Thus, Like a Self-Conscious Phoenix …

Image by raquelraclette https://unsplash.com/photos/red-flame-MYjFOiVWWT8 I poke my head up from the ashes and look around to make sure I won’t look like a complete fool as I try to rise again.

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Life

Death with Dignity

In just over a year, my mother-in-law has lost both of her parents. They were wonderful people and we all miss them. My wife’s grandfather died first, last year, not long after the lockdown started. It was sudden, but not a surprise either. He’d been declining steadily over the past few years. He fell at home and just never recovered. After he passed, my wife’s grandma moved up and lived about 20 feet away from my in-laws. She seemed to be doing very well for a little while, apart from the deep sadness of losing her husband of over 50 years.

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Life Musings

Permission to Breathe

A little while back, I posted about my commitment to posting on this blog. But it’s been a couple of weeks and I haven’t posted. I haven’t abandoned my blog, though. I have been working through a lot that’s been going on over the past few weeks, and I needed to scale back on what I was doing. There simply wasn’t enough time in the day to take care of everything.

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Life Random

Keeping Quotes

When I was a young man, I started writing down quotes that I found interesting, inspiring, or funny. I think I was probably inspired by a book my grandpa published when I was twelve, 1001 Great Stories and Quotes. It’s a habit I’ve kept up over the years, though with waxing and waning consistency. When I hear or read something that sparks my interest, I try to record it for future reference.

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Health Life

Doctor StrangeVirus or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 On Halloween 2020 my wife was getting ready to visit her sister in Idaho who was going through an awful divorce and I began to feel a tickle in my throat. I knew it wasn’t COVID because I had been so careful; I never went anywhere without my mask, I hadn’t been around anyone who had it, and I washed my hands religiously whenever I returned home. Since my wife was flying, though, I went to get tested first thing the next day just to be safe.

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Life

Changes

Photo by Michal Balog on Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/@mikbutcher The past 9 months have been full of changes. I received a promotion, adopted a daughter, remodeled a bathroom and a kitchen and accepted a new position at another company. And there are more changes coming in the next couple of months, selling the house and moving across the country.

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Life Musings

Ideation

As I tried to come up with an idea for this month’s blog post I started thinking about ideas themselves. Where do they come from and how? In short, how does ideation happen? I want to think grand and lofty thoughts, so how do I do that? I think we are all familiar with the phenomenon of the spark of inspiration. It comes unexpectedly and often at the time when we are least prepared to accept it. For me it always seems to come with my hands are wet, so I can neither write nor type. We can help steer these ideas, I propose. We are not slave to their whims. While what I suggest may not guarantee the thoughts and ideas we want they will be more likely to arise.

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