Reading

My wife LOVES to read. I like to read too, and though I can’t hold a candle to the speed with which Kristen plows through just about any novel, I still enjoy sitting down with a good book. I recently finished the last of the Ender’s Game books. I only recently discovered them, but they are very well written, and I couldn’t put them down.

But the majority of my reading nowadays is online. I read news stories, opinion pieces, Facebook status messages, and blogs. Let me tell you – I LOVE reading blogs. I use Google Reader, and have collected more than 50 blogs in my subscription list (and I keep up on them)! Of course, there are some blogs from people I don’t know (Mel’s Kitchen Cafe, Mormanity, (Gay) Mormon Guy, etc.), but most are from friends. One of them is likely your blog, dear reader. So please update!

I’ve talked about the “mommy blog” and the “travel blog” before, and my feelings are still the same. I don’t enjoy reading the majority of those blogs, unless I have a vested interest in them (i.e. to read about my adorable nieces). So I don’t – no harm, no foul. They still have their readership, I’m sure, even without me. And for a while, I debated cleansing my blog roll of friends’ blogs that I found incredibly boring, and usually never read anyway. It was worse than the conflict I often feel when debating whether to remove a Facebook “friend.” But in the end, my practical male thinking won, and I deleted the boring blogs. Now, I can’t even remember who I removed – don’t worry, I’m sure it wasn’t you…

Anyway, there is another class of blogs that I still read, but only with some difficulty. These are the blogs that are very interesting, but whose grammar and spelling mistakes often make them hard to read. I don’t mean those that occasionally have the word “your” when they should be “you’re” (although that does bug me), or those that miss a comma once in a while. I can usually ignore most grammar mistakes and just enjoy the story.

But when words are consistently misspelled, there are agreement errors up the wazoo, the laws of sentence structure are all but ignored, and the text phrase “LOL” is used as a period, I have a hard time. Reading some of these blogs, I can see how if I was talking with the authors face-to-face, I would believe they were intelligent people. Their arguments are well thought-out and they’re passionate about what they’re saying. But they just don’t seem to understand English grammar, and it affects my enjoyment of their blogs.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all about breaking grammar rules…as long as you know them, and it’s only once in a while. And I hope I haven’t made you paranoid about your blog. Heck, I’m just one reader among many. But if you’re interested in some well-written and interesting blogs, try here or here or here.

I've Done Things

When I think about it, I’ve done some cool things in my life. I’ve been to New York, Paris, and London, lived in another country, and studied abroad (so technically I’ve lived in two other countries). I’ve seen both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. I’ve been to theme parks and ridden roller coasters. I’ve met people from dozens of countries, spoken to people in more than one language, and eaten cuisine from all over the world. I’ve been a waiter, a courier, a clothing salesman, and a paperboy. I’ve driven a forklift and a big box truck, made take and bake pizzas, and stocked food for a buffet. I’ve bought my own car (without a co-signer), purchased a piano (electric – not a baby grand yet), and rented my own apartment. I’ve built a frame and stretched a canvas on it, painted my living room, redid my back patio, and put in a surround sound system. I’ve barbecued on a charcoal grill (trust me, that’s a big one for me), baked a cheesecake, and made roses out of jelly candy. And I earned a college degree, found a salaried, full-time job, and married the love of my life.

Sometimes life may not seem too spectacular. But it is. Life is wonderful, and I’m happy to be living it.