Happy B-Day, Stace-Ghost!

Today is my wife's birthday. Here are some things I'd like to tell you about her.

1. Stace-Ghost absolutely loves to dance. She dances all the time. She once told me that she had been unhappy for a little while (a few weeks) and she really thought that it was because she hadn't danced enough. When we DJed the dances when we were in the singles branch together, she always put a song in our playlist where she could go dance.

2. Sometimes she thinks that I don't see her when she's dancing, but I always do. There's nothing that makes me happier than watching her dance.

3. Stace-Ghost gets really grossed out by things that are close together. I know this sounds weird but bear with me. Fish eggs or the inside of a flower, where you can see a lot of things...well, close together gross her out. Its weird. But cute.

4. Though Stace-Ghost is 26 years old now, she is still afraid of bugs and the dark. If she sees a bug, she will walk all the way across the house to get me to come kill the bug for her. One time, she even text me and told me that I needed to come quickly to get a bug.

5. I call Stace-Ghost my "little ball of heat" because everytime I lie by her, she always heats me up and I have to roll away because I get too hot. The funny thing is that she is almost always cold.

6. Stace-Ghost is hands down, the funniest person I've ever met. She only gets funnier with the more time we spend with each other because she usually says the things that I'm thinking but in much funnier ways. The first time I met her, I thought the same thing. We were at a party and we were sitting on the back porch, making fun of all the other people that were at the party. We weren't alone, but she still made everyone laugh.

7. I love the way she says "coat" or "boat". She always pronounces the "t" really well. Whenever she says one of these words, I repeat it to her to 1) tease her and 2) remind her of how cute I think it is.

8. Before we were married, much to my parents dismay, I often fell asleep at her house, only to wake up at any hour of the day to rush home to bed. One time, I didn't wake up till 7 in the morning (and it was the summer so I didn't have school), and I rushed home and actually pulled in to the drive-way of our home as my Dad was pulling out to go to work. I always told my parents that I didn't mean to fall asleep at Stace-Ghost's house. This was only partially true. I never meant to fall asleep there, but sometimes I knew that I probably would, but I still didn't do anything about it. Stace-Ghost often told me I could go home earlier but I never wanted to. I loved being with her and never wanted to leave.

9. Stace-Ghost has an absolutely beautiful singing voice. She can even sing what my friends and I call her "opera voice" which is where she acts like she is singing opera, but it sounds really good! I know that it probably wouldn't pass if she was to actually sing opera, but for us she sounds so good. My friends and I used to play songs and have her sing to them in her opera voice. Most of the time we could barely get through them because we were laughing so hard at our opera renditions of popular songs. But even non-opera voice, she still has a beautiful voice. One of the highlights of her summers when she managed the swimming pool was to serenade the patrons. She would get on the intercom with her friends and sing songs, sometimes the Star-Spangled Banner to the patrons. She thought it was so funny. On the last solo album I did (I've done three), I wrote a duet for us. Her voice sounded so good and the song ended up being my favorite on the cd. But if I wasn't telling you this, you would never know because she doesn't like people knowing that she has a good voice.

10. She has blessed my life more than anyone else in my life save for my parents. She has changed me in a million ways all for the better. Recently, I was talking to my friend and he told me that he was jealous of me because he had seen how much Stace-Ghost had changed me and that he wanted that for himself. He was right. I love you, Stace-Ghost with all my heart. Not a day goes by that I don't wish that I was better for you in so many ways. Happy birthday.

Why I Hate The Book Of Revelation (Yeah, I Said It)

I have a confession to make. I hate the book of Revelation. My hatred for it has nothing to do with the fact that it is hard to understand.
I hate it because of what it does to us as a people. We read the various revelations with an extreme thirst. I think we as a people have always felt like something big is coming, something that will totally change everything, like another 9/11 event, and while I can't deny that it very well might happen, I hate that we all agree and are waiting for it to happen. This is why I hate the book of Revelation. It confirms to us that something IS going to happen, which makes us all greedily look for it to happen.
Ask yourself this, do you think you will be alive for the Second Coming? If you do, you're not alone. Almost everyone does. But you know who else thought they would be alive for the Second Coming? The pioneers. That was over 150 years ago. And while the point of this blog is not to make fun of the pioneers or to deny that the Second Coming will happen, it is to show us that we are all too greedy to look for doomsday.
I don't know why we all feel this way. Maybe we watch too many movies and we wish we were part of something, even if its bad, so we can say that we lived through it. But I think that if you start to believe something will happen, then it will. And while I am like you, and would like to see it happen as well, I'd rather see it all happen from heaven.
There is a lot of good left in this world. Its hard to see sometimes. Theres an old saying that "Babies are a message to the world that it should keep going." There's more babies now than there have ever been. We shouldn't be looking for the world to come to an end. We should hope for the future. We should hope for things to get better. I am often reminded of several times in the scriptures when the Lord withheld his hand from destroying his people because his faithful servants simply asked him to. Who knows? Maybe we can delay this coming destruction for thousands of years. Then again, maybe not. But it doesn't matter. The point is that we should keep hoping for the best and do everything in our power to keep the world moving on.

The wait is over...

Here are the answers to the riddles...Inside Stories gets bonus points for getting 4 of the 6 right....

1. He was in a hot air balloon with three other people. They realized they were too heavy and were going to crash so they took off all their clothes to try to lose the weight. Even that wasn't enough, and they drew matches for who would jump out. He drew the shortened match and plummeted to his death. (I could see that Inside Stories was on the right track for this one even though she didn't have the answer).

2. He was an astronaut on a spacewalk when he realized that there was a tear in his suit.

3. He stabbed himself with an icicle.

4. When the man draws the paper, he declines to read the paper and instead has his captors read the paper that is still in the hat. The paper, obviously, says "Death" which makes them believe that he drew the paper that says, "Life".

5. A stick. (hehe)

6. Because seven ate (eight) nine.

Thanks to everyone for participating! Some of them are kinda silly but whatever can get you through the day helps.