Seizing a Lifetime, One Day at a Time

I just saw La La Land and wanted to share my thoughts about it. The movie tells the story of how an aspiring actress and a struggling jazz musician help each other find love through the struggle of achieving your dreams. Overall, it was a decent movie with some catchy music. Here are some things that stood out to me: * I loved the raw, immature sound of the lead actors voices. At first it was distracting, but as the film progresses it pulled me in and helped me feel like these were regular people like me. * The musical number at the beginning of the movie didn't seem to fit. It seemed like it was just a way to introduce that this was a musical but didn't really add to the story. * When Mia's car got towed, how did her roommates get home? Small plot hole, but it bugged me for a while. * There were a lot of plot holes. What happened to the band? What happened in between fall and winter at the end (trying not to spoil too much)? Who's number did Sebastian's sister ...

One of our (few) Christmas traditions is to go see a movie on Christmas Eve every year and this year we went to see Moana. * Fairly predicatble plot * Weird scene with crab * Super compelling, emotional music * Great animation. The water (as water, not when it turned into the ooze ocean spirit thing) looked amazing. The grandma's manta ray was really cool. When Moana gets covered in sand I was impressed at the detail of sand on her. Overall a good movie, music that I keep listening to and a gon. (I wrote this 18 months ago and never posted it so here it is now. Since everyone waits for my reviews to figure out if they should see a movie, I apologize for making you wait so long :) )

Last night, my wife and I completed our December Date-athon (we went on 4 dates this month!) by going to dinner, getting some shopping done and (finally) seeing Rogue One. I had high expectations going into this movie based on all the reviews I've seen. Usually that's a bad sign as the movie never lives up to the expectations and, sadly, this wasn't different. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie. I just didn't enjoy it as much as it seemed everyone else did. Here are some of my thoughts (caution spoilers): For the most part, I didn't care about the characters that died. Maybe I didn't get attached to them because going in I knew that a lot of people were going to die, but whatever the reason, that spoiled the movie. Also, we didn't get a lot of background on all the characters so there was less attachment to them. Along those same lines, it felt like the movie had two identities. The first half of the movie wanted tell the story of the people...

Thanks for coming back! If you haven't read the last post, this is a follow up to that. I would suggest reading it before you go on. For those who have read it, here's a quick reminder of where we left off. Faith is found throughout scriptures to be the source of many miracles. The priesthood also appears to be a source of many miracles. It didn't make sense to me that God would have two ways for miracles to occur especially since he gives only men the priesthood. So what really is the source of miracles? Now before we go on I have to define two things: power and authority. Power is easier to understand if we define authority first. Authority represents the right or permission to do something. On the other hand, power is the ability to do something. You'll notice that both power and authority relate to a person's actions. Here's an example of how they work: My son Nathan is just learning to walk and he gets into just about everything. He explores the entire ho...

I know I promised a while ago that I would write a post about the question, "Why is there no maximum wage?" but the more effort I put in to trying to understand my position, the further I get from being able to provide a good answer. I'm still working on it and hope to have my thoughts aligned by the end of the year. :) In the meantime, I wanted to write about something that has been on my mind recently. For a long time, I have been curious about the relationship between the priesthood and personal faith. This topic is very much related to my beliefs as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has been a source of minor confusion for myself and others I know. Hebrews 11:1 says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It goes on to talk about many people who did righteous things because of their faith. Faith is a principle of belief and action.  James 2:17  teaches us that true faith results in action. Fa...

It's been a couple months since the last time I posted. I hoped to have written a new article about maximum wages and the economy already, but I haven't had a chance to sit down and really clarify my thoughts. I have been thinking a bit about my previous post though. Timing is a funny thing. I wrote that article on May 20 and within a few weeks it felt like everything I saw was full of facts and information about homosexuals and marriage. It's probably a lot less than I make it sound like, but it really opened my mind up to a few things. Before you get your hopes up, I still have to state that I believe marriage is and should be defined as between a husband and a wife. My stance on that hasn't changed. I have no more facts to sway my political opinion on that. I'll admit, my opinion is based largely on my religious beliefs and I may not have any completely logical reason for feeling the way I do. However, it is what I believe and until I feel prompted to change th...

I'm not a writer. I start that way because I've tried for about 15 minutes to figure out a good way to lead into what I want to say and I'm still stumped. So pretend I had a funny joke, an interesting statistic, or an attention grabbing statement that leaves you on the edge of your seat waiting for what's coming next and humor me while I share a few thoughts on what's sure to be my most controversial blog yet. I might even get double digit comments on this! (Although it's more likely I'll just lose some facebook friends.) In the past few weeks, one of the biggest pieces of news was that President Obama has switched his opinion on gay marriage. He now stands in support of the idea that marriage should be the same, whether homosexual or heterosexual. There has been a lot of news coverage on why he finally announced it, some saying it's a political move to help in November, while others say the president's opinion has naturally evolved and he felt it w...