It was a dreary, unusually cool, and rainy Monday in August.  Most everyone I bumped into in the office had a case of not just the Mondays, but the dreary, rainy, end of summer vacation season Mondays - the worst possible kind. 

Schadenfreude! Such a delightfully fun word to utter. The German language can be so percussive, and this word is no exception. I've been thinking about it for a couple weeks now, walking around in my little world spitting it out randomly for fun in different ways, accenting different syllables, altering my volume, etc. Schadenfreude.

The sermon this morning covered John 14:25 - 31 where Jesus tells His disciples on the night he was later betrayed, "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you." Pastor started out by quoting some statistics on suicide, depression, anxiety and overall despair in our region of the country.

In a previous post I mentioned that I raised my voice to an unprofessional level for the second time in my career. It was not my finest moment. You could say that Cranky McJudgy-Pants (my evil twin, alter ego, Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll) was in charge at that time.

I love movies. I especially love Disney movies. I also love the Gospel. I'm talking about the real good news, the freedom from sin that we have in Christ, not the knock off legalistic version that has been popularized in evangelicalism and found lacking, but the true Gospel, the one that frees us from our shame and bondage and allows us to walk confidently in communion with our Lord.

Life does not disappoint in giving me inspiration for things to write about, unfortunately life also does not disappoint in giving me things to fill my time with, so my writing is not as prolific as I would hope. I have made a very small step toward an endeavor (i.e. book) I've been dreaming of for years but haven't had the time, the encouragement, the inspiration, or more so the kick in the pants needed to fully pursue it.

My grandfather did not have an easy life. His father left him and his mother when he was very young. As a result, he ended up being raised by his great-grandparents in Westville, NJ while his mother worked and lived in Philadelphia during the week.

When I think about reasons why many people aren't involved in a church these days, I would hypothesize that having been hurt by someone professing to be a "Christian" would be on that list. I know many people who have walked away from church because they encountered less than stellar representatives of the gospel message of Christ.

There is so much I don’t understand. There is so much I can’t understand. As a math major I spent a lot of time working with infinity: infinite series, limits at infinity, infinitesimally small amounts, etc. We captured infinity by representing it in our equations as a funny looking sideways 8, and in that form we could handle it coldly without having to think about what it meant.

Last week I returned to this blog after a 2.5 year hiatus. I wrote a puff piece on being nice to strangers and blamed my absence on my new, obviously fabulous, job. While my new role has been a distraction from other areas of my life in the last two years, it is not the sole reason I stopped blogging. There is a deeper, darker reason for the time out, and since the name of this blog is "Totally Transparent", it’s time I got real.

I’ve been absent from this blog for a long time. There are many reasons for this, but one is that a little over two years ago I took on a new role with my company. One of the great things about an internal move in the same office is that it’s less disruptive to your family, but one of the bad things is that there’s less likely to be a hard and fast stop of one job and then start of the other.

Most of the time when I hear a song as frequently as I've been hearing this one I get burnt out on the song and start flipping stations whenever it comes on. So far that hasn't happened with this song. I think mostly because it truly reminds me to breathe. And breathing is a great thing.

Another Christmas is in the books. Unlike Christmases in recent past I didn't spend hours mourning our losses, thinking about what might have been. This Christmas was filled with the happy expectation of what is to come... in less than 5 1/2 days now. That doesn't mean that we've forgotten what we've lost.

Today we went in for our 13 week visit and first visit with our regular OB doctor.  Knowing that we had been waiting for over an hour to see her…

I signed up on Facebook to be notified when I have memories on this date on the time hopper. Yesterday I was notified of memories from 3 years ago when I ran the half marathon in the flying pig.

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a conversation where the participants are one-upping each other on what they've endured? Or how about in a conversation where someone is intentionally downplaying their suffering?

Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of our last ectopic pregnancy.

Valentines Day. Some people really get into it. Others pretty much hate it. We've always kind of ignored it. When we were dating we acknowledged it with the usual exchange of candies and cards.

Today my name came up in multiple conversations. Having a unique name has is benefits and challenges.

My family and I recently went on a long road trip to visit some friends of ours. I think our new favorite traveling game is "beat the GPS".