Tomorrow I’m driving to AR, where I’ll meet the rest of my family. On Sunday we’re driving to Galveston, TX, where we’ll board a cruise ship and begin our vacation in the Caribbean. I’m the only one in my family who has not been to that part of the world, so it should be a fun, new experience for me. Of course, we’ll be visiting places none of us have been to before, so it will be new for all of us.
I wish everyone a happy, hearty, healthy holiday with friends and family. Thanksgiving Day is a great tradition, one that I am glad our nation celebrates.
I’m writing this from my mom’s place in TN. I had a good drive down. It’s a 6-hour trip, but the roads were good and the weather was nice. On the way I listened to a couple audio presentations on CD. One was about the causes of the American Civil War (the significance of slavery, culture, political power, etc.), and the other was about how Christians in America in 1776 justified the war to split with Great Britain. Both were really interesting. I may write more about them later. (I had earlier finished another CD in the same series, about the relationship between Puritans and native Americans. I learned so much from that—history that you don’t hear in today’s anti-Christian, anti-European academic world.)
I just posted a bunch of pictures from my childhood on Facebook. You can view them here:
Enjoy!
I got an email from UpDown saying I had been awarded 1¢ for my stock performance in October. (UpDown is an online stock market game, where users deal with the same stocks that actually trade on Wall Street, using their actual current values, but using play money.)
Note that this is a special award payment in real cash (or coin), not my actual stock earnings using the game’s play money. I’ve actually lost $222,505.14 of the original $1 million in play money that I invested; however, I have still beat the S&P index (a very popular, well-known index portfolio). In other words, I lost less money than they did. Thus my meager reward.
A couple years ago I registered to vote; however, on the day of the election there was some kind of crisis at work, and I was not able to participate. So this year was the first that I participated in the U.S. election process.
Here in Thompsonville, the line was very short. I think I had one person standing in front of me, and then I had a few minutes of waiting before a voting booth was cleared. It was educational in a small but significant way. The first thing I realized is that I had absolutely no opinion about 80-90% of the candidates, either personally or in terms of their platforms (I’m including all positions, including local government). I voted on a few people that I had some opinion of, but mostly stuck to laws and propositions.