A Family of Killers

It was Tomas’s 20th birthday yesterday. (How did we celebrate? He’s home (yay!), so we’d planned on doing a bit of a party, but he got sick as soon as he got home, so we’ve pushed that off a bit.) It only occurred to me yesterday that each birthday he has also marks the anniversary of me becoming a father for the first time. 20 years of that? It’s definitely a noteworthy occasion to observe….

A few months ago, Denisa and I were looking for a time to go down to Boston to take Michaela to the temple for her first time. We had hoped to be able to go with a group in January, but that didn’t pan out, so we wanted to be sure to get there soon, since she’d been looking forward to it so much. Of course, “soon” is a very relative term when we’re busy,…

Howdy, folks. I’ve been thinking a lot the past couple of days about Facebook and my mental health. For the past while, I’ve been more and more fed up with the sort of environment Facebook fosters. I have many friends on their whom I really value and enjoy connecting with. And then I have people I know fairly well, people I barely know, and people I don’t know at all. Nine times out of ten,…

This past weekend, I was up in Bangor Saturday and Sunday at Stake Conference. It’s a regional church meeting where members of multiple congregation from the area come together for instruction and a worship service. We had a visiting General Authority (someone from the international leadership level of the church) come to speak to us this time. Saturday evening, he focused on a series of questions Christ asked His followers while He was on the…

I skipped last for reasons, but I’m back this week with some new things I’ve been watching and reading. Let’s cut right to the chase, because I’m short on time. (Story of my life at the moment.) Television: Dark Season 1: This sci-fi show on Apple TV was . . . intriguing. It’s a multiverse show, exploring what the implications would be if you could move at will between different versions of reality. It suffered…

Hi. Me again. It feels like I come to blog these days mainly just to bemoan the state of the world, tell you what I’ve been reading or watching, and talk about AI. Well, today’s an AI day again. 🙂 I’m still plugging away at the iOS app I’m trying to make. As of today, I’m on my fourth major attempt at the thing. In other words, I’ve started over fresh four times now. On…

I’m exhausted. It feels like gravity increased on earth a few months ago, and ever since then, it’s been a slog just to get through the day. It’s not that things are going wrong for me personally. For the most part, things are actually pretty good. My kids are doing well. I’m relatively healthy once again. I’m still gainfully employed. But as I look at the state of the world and the decisions being made…

In today’s freshman comp class, I presented two papers on the same topic students are being asked to write on right now. I found one of them by doing a search on Google. It was on a site that offers papers for sale. You pick the topic, and they provide the paper. It was a sample of the type of paper you could get through them, so theoretically a slice of their best work. One…

A busy week, but I still found time to watch and read a few things. The most noteworthy one was finally being able to watch Wicked Part I. I’d wanted to see it since it came out, but life is hectic. We watched it as a fam the other night, and I loved the whole thing. Going into it, I was most skeptical of its 2.5+ running time, especially since it was just the first…

So much of my time these days is taken up working on this iOS app that I’m not doing much in the way of watching or playing other things. On the one hand, that’s good, right? I mean, the reason I’m not doing anything else is because I really enjoy working on the app. On the other hand, I don’t have anything to show for it, and until I actually finish it, there’s no way…