Random Ramblings: Finally!

Happy: Are you ready for some football? This will be an interesting week for the NFL. The NFL is back as the players and owners have agreed to a new 10-year deal. And now teams will have to compress 5-months of business into a week or so. News will be flying fast and I couldn't be more happy.

Laughing: Patriots owner Robert Craft said something pretty funny during the news conference announcing the new NFL deal.

"I believe you're going to see a very great NFL over the next decade and I hope we gave a little lesson to the people in Washington because the debt crisis is a lot easier to fix than this deal was." 

Excited: This will be the final blog of the week as I am taking off to Girl's Camp early tomorrow morning. I am looking forward to spending time with my wife and these wonderful girls. At least it will be quite entertaining. Kristy put me in charge of taking pictures and I have no problem doing that. My only rule is no duckfaces. I hate that look. It is not cute, it makes you look plain stupid.

Sad, Worried and Confused: I have a situation drama that I am observing and it really gives me the heebie-jeebies. I can't blog much about it here because I certainly don't want to offend and with recent events, I have learned that I should keep my nose (and mouth) out of family matters, except for my immediate family. But I cannot stop thinking about it. Personally, I think they are making a big mistake, and one that could potentially be extremely drastic and that is what worries me. I get the reason why they are doing this, I desire the same thing. I get why they are helping someone, I want to help people as well. The big deal is not what they are doing but how they are doing it. The big mistake in my opinion is that they are being too casual.

*DISCLAIMER*

I am now on my soapbox.

You can skip this tirade if you desire. Just scroll down to the Monty Python picture.

It seems lately that Church leaders have warned us to be careful how casual we are in our relationships with others. We have been asked in our Stake (the local area) to assist each other in making sure everyone is being taken care of. My local ward has been asked to help visit (what we call home teaching) other members in other wards. But our leaders have stressed to be careful in these relationships. We should love them and treat them as we would our own family but we are to be careful in our casual this relationship should be. This casualness could lead down a road that will end up in a lot of pain and heartache. Being casual in some things can lead to other things becoming casual and so forth. And this is what I am seeing. I am seeing something that at first was good but now it has become casual. Too casual in my opinion.

Let's take me for instance. I am friends with the Young Women here in our neighborhood. I like being around them and I want to help them when I can. That's not bad right? Nothing wrong to see here. But what if I become to casual with them? What if I start to go out of my way to see them? Is that bad? I don't think it is bad initially. But what if it gets to the point where they come over and visit me? And what if they come and see me when Kristy is not around?

Do you see where I am going with this now? It started off all good and well but things are getting a bit too casual. It is not like I would do anything but it would be easier now that they are coming over alone than it would be if I only saw them in appropriate situations. This is why being casual could lead to problems. Why put yourself in that type of situation?

And this is the sort of situation I am seeing now. Now I know that I don't know all the details and I am not in the same situation. But I can't help feeling this way. It really frightens me where this could go. And unfortunately I wouldn't be able to help them once they are gone.

Boy that was depressing. 

And now for something completely different. 

I was going through some pictures and I found this one of my dad and sister and it reminded me of another picture.

I guess I do look a lot like my dad.

Welcome To My Nightmare

No, I am not talking about the Alice Cooper song even though the title definitely fits this blog. A few months ago a friend of mine decided to keep what is called a Dream Journal. Every time he had a dream he would write it down as fast as he could upon waking before it faded away. I was kinda enthralled with that idea. I know that I have a lot of memorable dreams (at least those that I remember right?) and I would love to revisit them.

Now I don't believe that dreams have much meaning, if any. I am sure that we can learn about ourselves from our dreams and that dreams can help us get through things but I just think that they have any special meaning or have special tokens. But I do know that if I ever was in a tornado, I would know EXACTLY what to do since I have survived most of the tornadoes that I have dreamt about. Keeping a Dream Journal would be interesting to see the patterns. I know I dream about tornadoes a lot (just last Friday night) but if I kept a journal I would know how frequent they were. My dreams range from the downright scary (just last week I dreamt that I was attacked by the Devil himself) to the absolute cool (I dreamt I was an X-Man!) and to the absurd. And I also die in my dreams, I have been shot, stabbed, crushed and beaten to death in my dreams. Kristy does not like to hear about my dreams.

The other night I had a dream that felt and seemed so real. And it has been a dream that has stuck with me since. I think about it often and it is starting to drive me nuts. I dreamt about someone here in the neighborhood that I am friends with. I don't want to name names here since there is an outside chance he/she might see this and I don't want to embarrass them or creep them out that I had a dream about them.

The dream was normal enough. No flying pigs, tornadoes or anything like that. I had run into them while walking around the neighborhood and they had called me over. I walked over and this person asked a question that caught me off guard in my dream and still rests on my mind.

"Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure. What's up?"
"Why do you care?"
"About what?"
"Why do you care about me?"

I remember that I was taken back and didn't know what to say. I thought about how I knew them and the many times I have served them and how they have served me. But I just didn't know exactly what to say.

Then I woke up.

I don't get why this has bugged me and I certainly don't know why I cannot simply forget about this dream. It has been four days since that dream and I still think about it. I have tried to make sense of this and I have come to a couple of conclusions of why it bugs me.

1. I think it bugs because this person should know darn well why I care about them. It should be pretty obvious. This person has served my family and I and has been a huge example to all of us. I have told this person many times how much I appreciate them and I look for ways to serve them. They should know that I love them.
2. It also bugs me that I didn't have a chance to say anything to them when I was dreaming. They asked and I never answered. It was like I failed.
3. Maybe I don't mean anything to them like they do to me. Maybe I am just off my rocker. I hope that is not the case but there is this small nagging doubt.

So why in the heck would I dream about something like this? And why am I still thinking about it? This is not the first time that a dream has made such an impact on me and stayed with me for days.

All I know is that my next dream better be one of my superhero ones. I don't think I could take another one of these serious drama dreams.