Back to it?

Holy crap here I am again.

I have recently had the urge to start writing a bit more of my life down again, so here I am. I feel like I'm here for a few reasons this time. For one, I want to have a bit more of a record of my life. You only get to live once right, and my memory is bad enough. This way I can have a written record of things that I have done and experienced. I guess really, you can say I'm here for myself. The things I write here are mainly written with the intention of me reading again someday and remembering. Why do it in a public forum then? Well I guess that makes it a bit more exciting, it's also a tad more therapeutic. The thought that someone out there might be reading this stuff and actually be at least a little interested in what they find is pretty neat to me. Another reason I'm here is I find that taking the time to write out experiences and thoughts and such causes me to think them through better. I can organize my thoughts much better when I write them out than if I try to just sort them all out mentally. So yeah, here I go again. Now taking bets on how long I'll go this time.

So what's going on. There really is way too much to try to catch up. The Java project I mentioned in one of my earlier posts turned out to be nothing. We built the application as best we could and then the client sort of just went away. It actually turned out for the best though, because not much later I was put on another Java project that I'm still working on today. I have mixed feelings about it, but I'm happy to be on a successful project.

My grandpa passed away recently. He had Alzheimer's disease, and we watched it slowly progress until it finally killed him. This happened right after Christmas, around December 30th I believe. He was a good man and he died very blessed. I was unfortunately not there, but both of his daughters were there as well as several of his grandchildren and son-in-laws. I'm told that his breathing began to slow and that the family gathered around his bed and prayed for him. Not long after the prayer he passed. That's not too bad if you ask me. To die asleep and surrounded by people who love you and are praying for you. We should all be so lucky. I was not particularly close to grandpa. I looked up to him as a kid but once I grew up and he got sick we became pretty distant. I took his death harder than I expected to. I cried twice. Once when I was told the story that I just told you by my sister, and once at the funeral. That might not sound like much but please understand that I am not a crier. I honestly don't remember the last time that I broke down into sobs. Grandpa was a faithful Christian man, so in some respects the family was happy. It's hard to find a lot of consolation there though, as most of the sadness isn't for the person that has passed, but for those of us who remain and are now without them.

I suppose that leads me to the last object I want to write about tonight. I have been trying much harder lately to try and power up my faith. I am a Christian, but I fear that in many ways I'm only one because I was baptized when I was young. The more I examine myself the more I feel like I'm a pathetic Christian. I have a long way to go, and it's time to start on that path. I've been going to church on Wednesday nights to Nettleton Baptist Church's 8:15 church group. This is a weekly bible study that consists of a demographic of anyone college age and up. I think the ages currently top out in the mid thirties. It's a neat dynamic of people. You have people in college next to people fresh out next to people that have been out and are working careers. It's neat to see this group all interact as equals. I have a lot to learn from the people there, they know God better than I do. I'm trying for the first time in my life to actually study the scripture, I'm paying attention to lessons, I'm reading devotionals and Christian books. I really want to set myself right. As a result of this, there may be a fair amount of religious writing in the future. As I mentioned earlier writing down my thoughts helps me to process things, and that is something that I want to process badly.

So I guess that's it. Hopefully I'll stick with the blogging this time at least for a while. I hope to start throwing up pictures and videos and other content aside from just straight writing, although I suspect writing will be the main focus. I want to be able to read these entries in thirty years (if I'm lucky enough to live that long), and there's a good chance that any content that I link to will be long gone by then. I don't want to be remembering my life with a bunch of broken .jpeg icons and "Video Not Found" messages from YouTube or whatever video service we're using then.

P.S. Since primarily these entries are just for me, I"m not going to put a lot of time into proofreading them. If this turns out to be a problem to anyone out there that actually is reading this, then let me know and I may start trying a bit harder with my grammar. However I'd be suprised if more than 3 people ever see what I'm writing right now.