Diary of a Sweaty-Toothed Madman

  “Music does a lot of things for a lot of people. It’s transporting, for sure. It can take you right back, years back, to the very moment certain things happened in your life. It’s uplifting, it’s encouraging, it’s strengthening.”          -Aretha Franklin                               I am unashamedly, unabashedly a music nerd.  Ask me my favorite song or artist, and you will either get a simple, "I can't do that, there is too much," OR you'll get a long, geeky diatribe about different music for different things, or different musicians for different seasons of life, or really important musicians and their affect on...   Well, you get the point.    I have said for years that my musical tastes began with my parent's record and 8 track tape collections.  There wasn't a lot of music, but it was all pretty good.  I still have their ...

“There are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind...” ―   Mitch Albom,   The Five People You Meet in Heaven As a kid, I loved Christmas.  My Great Grandmother Collins had a way of making a simple, inexpensive Christmas a lot of fun.  She died when I was a sophomore in high school, and I struggled with Christmas for a long time after that.  I had a small resurgence of really enjoying Christmas while our son was small, but now, he's outgrown all the fun things about Christmas, as well.  Mom and Dad sort of stopped doing Christmas in any traditional sense in the last 10 years or so.   In a way, that's been good for me.  It's allowed me to focus on the faith reasons for the holiday instead of the commercial, gift based, "Silver Bells" sorts of reasons.  But still- Christmas doesn't hold the child-like magic for me it once did.   This year, ...