Some Big News

With less than two weeks to go until I am done with school forever,* there are a few things about my short-to-intermediate future that I am ready to announce here.

*I reserve the right to return to school at a later date, but only as an instructor or administrator.

First, as you may know from my previous posts on the subject, I am currently looking for a job in Salt Lake City. While I wish this was an announcement of me or Kim finding a full-time position which would hasten our departure from Illinois, it is sadly not the case. Despite my efforts to the contrary, I have been unable to locate a suitable position. Part of the reason it seems is that I live in Illinois and people don’t want to interview me and are instead focusing on local folks first. If that’s the case, then I guess I should just move my happy self to Utah already and get on with it…which is what will be happening. though not for a while.

Continue reading “Some Big News” →

Why I Love Kim and Will Be Marrying Her Soon

I follow WordPress.com on Twitter, and today’s writing prompt led me to sit down and write this while I was sitting in the airport waiting to fly back to Chicago after a fun-filled vacation with Kim, my girlfriend since last May…or at least she was my girlfriend when we left Illinois last Friday. However, during our brief stay in Las Vegas, she became something more, the woman that I will spend the rest of my life with, the woman who will be the mother to my future children, and the woman that brings me the most joy.

Now, as many suspected and even mentioned, we did not get married in Vegas, though the thought had crossed my mind. At this point in our lives, I don’t think there is much need for a long courtship, and my time with her over the past 10 months has been nothing short of wonderful. I decided to “pop the question,” asking her to marry me and become my wife, something that I suspect will happen not long after we figure out where I will be working once I finish school in May. Continue reading “Why I Love Kim and Will Be Marrying Her Soon” →

Utah and Marriage

As alluded to in my previous post, I am going to try and write more this year, starting out at around 1,500 words a week and building to about that a day by November. Hopefully, I will be able to publish some things that my readers will find interesting, and if there are any ideas as to what you might want to see here, please let me know in the form of a comment. I aim to please and, honestly, it can be difficult to find things to write about sometime. On with the first “real” post of 2014, my reflections on the state of marriage in my home state of Utah.

It started on November 2, 2004, though honestly, I’m sure the swells started long before that. That was the day that Utah was among 11 states that passed some sort of amendment to their state constitutions regarding marriage, defining it as something that is only allowed between man and woman. In Utah, it was known as Amendment 3, and reads as such:

1. Marriage consists only of the legal union between a man and a woman.
2. No other domestic union, however, denominated, may be recognized as a marriage or given the same or substantially equivalent legal effect.

The reason that I am bringing this up now, as many are aware, was that the amendment was challenged in court by some same-sex couples in Utah, and on December 20, 2013, federal judge Robert Shelby, an appointee to the federal bench by President Obama that was endorsed by both of the Republican Senators from Utah, struck down Amendment 3 as unconstitutional, given that it violates the due process rights for same-sex couples, as well as the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Continue reading “Utah and Marriage” →