Thirty-One Years Ago Today...Umm, I Mean Last Week

I'm a few days late with this, but I need to pay tribute to the woman I love, who turned thirty-one on September 12.

Jeanell and I have been married for over eight years now and it's been a wonderful experience to live life alongside her, through all the hills and valleys that it brings.

Jeanell is such a wonderful wife and mother and takes such good care of me and the boys. As most of you know, I spent the major part of a year and a half traveling every week for work and she supported me through that and took care of things here, working full time, taking care of the boys, doing homework, getting kids to practices, doing meals, just taking care of everything.

I've had the opportunity to be home for a few months now and it's been wonderful to get reacquainted and to be able to spend time together.

In a few more months, we'll begin another phase in life (again) and I am so looking forward to taking care of our new baby girl with my beautiful wife. She is one in a million.



Happy Birthday Baby!

Reading and Running Update

Haven't blogged for a bit...quick update on my running and some comments on the book I just finished.

I've more or less stuck with the running and ran a total of 24 miles this past week, with a long run of six miles on Saturday. I'm feeling pretty good, but am still not really dropping the pounds like I hope to.

My brother-in-law Cam ran the Park City Marathon and is planning to run the Logan Marathon here in a couple of weeks. I have a ways to go before I'm ready for that.

Just finished The Glorious Cause and found it a bit more difficult than some of the other books I've read, but it was still interesting. Some of the main things I found interesting...

• The wide variety of issues that led up to the war that basically all boiled down to the Colonies saying, "We ain't paying taxes to Great Britain." Benjamin Franklin, who at one point was in favor of reconciliation, tried to argue that the Colonies would accept "external taxes", but not "internal taxes" although the supposed line between these two types of taxes proved to be quite blurry.
• The difficulty that George Washington had in keeping soldiers in the army (not to mention keeping them fed and clothed).
• The importance of France in the war and the unlikelihood that the Colonies would have won the war without their assistance (guess we do owe some gratitude to those cheese-eating surrender monkeys).
• The details of the Constitutional Convention and how the ratification of the Constitution was not that easy. In fact, many people of the era saw the Constitution as being in violation of the very principles for which the Revolutionary War had been fought. Namely, that it created a powerful central government, not too different from the government they'd just fought a war to be free from.

My next book will be another Franklin biography (this one by Isaacson). I might knock out Sam Walton's ironically titled Made In America quickly first.

Of the Revolutionary Era books that I've read, I'd have to say that my favorites have been by Joseph Ellis (Founding Brothers and His Excellency). I enjoy the analysis that he adds in addition to just telling the story.