A Curious Instrument

A few years back, President Henry B. Eyring  gave a talk about a scripture study method he had used in the past. It was basically to read one verse (or two) a day and ponder it.  He said that he gained so many new insights from taking his study very, very  slowly. I decided that day that I would try that out. It has been years now and I decided to pick up where I had been reading in the Book of Mormon with chapters at a time (and inconsistently).  I can't say when I started (perhaps three or four years ago), but I began at 2nd Nephi chapter 10 and I am just now at approaching Alma chapter 27.  As you can see, it is slow going! As predicted, there have been many insights and there is one today.   I don't know if I will blog about this every day, but perhaps this will contribute to more regular posts.   It is from Alma 26:29 (a rather long verse) which talks about two subjects: How to spread the gospel and what reception you can expect to receive. ...

I am happy to note that Lisa and I have been married for 25 years this coming Tuesday!  We will be off somewhere and sleeping in and having the sort of fun we tend to have, which is probably terribly low-key compared to most... I also calculated something else and it has been fifteen years since "The Great Writing Year", where I penned many of my short stories, the awesome novella Rachel and Her Knight in Shining Armor , and wrote the first complete draft of a book from The Navigiary Series .  That was 1998, while I was bobbing about on the waters off the US Gulf Coast and the west coast of Africa as a seismic navigator. To celebrate the 15th anniversary of my big writing push, I am giving everyone  A Free Copy of "The Joys of Autism and Christian Ethos" , which is a collection of many of these stories that is available from my Amazon store .  The book will only be free for a few days, so don't hesitate to get it right now! Of course, I welcome your kind rev...

History The New Mexico Insubstantial Sub-College of Home Economics, Alchemy, and Politics was founded in 1925 as “The Sabino Women's College of Household Economy” by Francisco Velásquez of Sabino, New Mexico. The school's first degrees in Home Economics were awarded to five women in commencement ceremonies conducted in early July 1930. Its first building was completed in 1929 on land donated from the Valesquez Ranch Company. The first Headmistress was Annabella “Bubba-Ann” Eaton Mondragon de Velasquez. The name of the college was changed to “The Sabino College of Home Economics” in 1961 incidental to the enrollment of the first man in the college. In 1963, forty-three degrees in Home Economics were awarded by the faculty of sixteen professors and the campus consisted of ten classrooms and one residential hall. Due to financial pressures, the faculty appealed to the New Mexico Legislature to bring the college and its campus under state control, against the wishes of the headm...

The BBC today reported what I would consider to be a rather local story of a circumstance in Ohio where two young American football players were convicted of raping an supposedly unconscious girl at a party. I suppose what makes this, on any level at all, international news is the fact that this incident was played out on Facebook, complete with pictures of the act and is creating quite a stir. Let me say that I have not studied this Ohio incident at all and that I will make some assumptions in the case. I think this is a honest thing to do, as I seriously doubt that any media reports I could find to expand my knowledge of the matter would be rather tainted by one side or the other in the legal battle, therefore run through with misdirection and half-truths. I really don't want to study it and I don't want to particularly hear the rationalizations on either side on the matter. In the short report that I heard, it was obvious that significant camps on both sides were making exc...