The Past Two Years

It has been a while since I’ve writ­ten a jour­nal­is­tic update here. It looks like the last time I may have was over two years ago, in June of 2013, when I wrote about my jour­ney as a blog­ger. It’s not that long ago, though it seems like ancient history.

When I wrote that, my daugh­ter was just over a year old, and I was I was in the begin­nings of a rela­tion­ship with Jade. I had no idea what direc­tion I want­ed to take my web­site efforts in — the archives of 2010-2015 are a greater amal­gam of con­tent from var­i­ous domains and false-start blogs than the archives of 2003–2009 ever were. 

My daugh­ter is now three and mere months away from four. I’m at a loss to explain how that has hap­pened so rapid­ly; years were so long before she came along. She’s in school now — the first year of a two year preschool jour­ney — and her teach­ers love her. I try to be as involved with her school­ing as I can be, vol­un­teer­ing and show­ing up for events when­ev­er my work sched­ule allows. To that end, I’m the vice chair­per­son of the par­ent com­mit­tee — why not chair­per­son? Because I have no clue what I’m doing, of course.

She’s tak­en to school won­der­ful­ly, right from day one. She’s lost some inter­est in things she loved when she was two, like My Lit­tle Pony, but is as enthu­si­as­tic as ever when it comes to things like snails and insects, find­ing toads, play­ing in dirt, climb­ing, singing, play­ing her drums, and more. She grows clos­er to mas­ter­ing her bal­ance bike all the time, and I can’t wait for the inevitable upgrade to a ped­al bike.

Jade and I were mar­ried almost a year ago, on 2014-10-10, in a pri­vate lit­tle cer­e­mo­ny at the cour­t­house. I’m enjoy­ing get­ting to see all of the cre­ative things Jade does with her crafts, and she’s enjoyed mak­ing sure I know the sacred rules of how to han­dle craft fab­rics and which scis­sors are not for paper. Most of all, I enjoy our (still) new mixed fam­i­ly — two cats Kes and B’E­lan­na, Max the dog, the kid­do, Jade, and me. Between all of us, things stay pret­ty inter­est­ing around here.

And things cer­tain­ly are get­ting inter­est­ing in my life. Besides the vice-chair­per­son thing, which as of right now I’ve not had to do any­thing with as the next meet­ing isn’t until Octo­ber, I also became an ordained cler­gy per­son of the Church of Spir­i­tu­al Human­ism, which isn’t some­thing I’ve ever done any­thing with, but that’s about to change.

My sis­ter-in-law Tabatha has invit­ed me to offi­ci­ate her wed­ding, this week­end. I’m ner­vous — pub­lic speak­ing isn’t some­thing I’m ter­ri­bly thrilled with — but am excit­ed to be a part of it.

The impend­ing wed­ding date has made me give more thought to what it is to be ordained, about what human­ism is or could be, about spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. To that end I’m enjoy­ing the insights in Sam Har­ris’ Wak­ing Up: A Guide to Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty with­out Reli­gion, as well as the dif­fer­ent view­points being expressed on Sec­u­lar Now, a grow­ing group on Face­book made up of peo­ple who are tired of reli­gion inter­fer­ing in pol­i­tics, sci­ence, edu­ca­tion, health­care, et al. Here’s one of the videos I recent­ly pub­lished on Sec­u­lar Now:

https://www.facebook.com/secularnow/videos/1055659801140900/

I still have no idea in which direc­tion I want to take this site, though I have been work­ing on updat­ing old posts for SEO and such, remov­ing some of the more point­less cruft that had accu­mu­lat­ed through the years, adding fea­tured images to posts to make even old con­tent pop.

Despite the uncer­tain­ty of that, the ner­vous­ness of this week­end’s wed­ding, and the joy­ful chaos of a home filled with youth and love, things are going well, and they’re only get­ting better!