It's been over a year since I wrote in Xanga.  It seems like it's been at least a decade.

Since I’ve last written, I’ve been busy.

I have:

1)      Graduated from Saint Louis University with Magna Cum Laude Honors

2)      Accepted a full time position with Commercial Letter, Inc.

3)      Started a Pet Grooming Salon and Health Boutique

4)      Been fired from Commercial Letter, Inc.

5)      Started the first Secular Student Alliance Group in Metro St. Louis

6)      Become engaged to my sweetheart, Jessica Lynn

7)      Accepted a much better, higher-paying position at Con-way Freight

8)      Found out that I’m going to be a father in April 2009

9)      Moved above my business

10)  Decided to close my business

11)   Taken the raise and relocation package with Con-way Freight to La Salle, IL.

12)   Found out that that I’ll be having a little daughter.

 Wow.  What a world.  Now what comes next:  actually moving to La Salle, having a baby, and getting married to Jes.  We’ll no longer have the business (we’re in the process now of either selling it or just closing doors and counting our losses), but we’ll be a family.  I can’t believe it.  Last year I didn’t know if I wanted to stay with this woman.  And now I found myself looking forward to the rest of my life with her and a little baby girl to call my own.  We still haven’t found a name for her.  We were thinking about Nolan Scott if she would have been a boy.  Now, it’s between Carolyn Elizabeth or any other name we think of.  I personally like Carolyn.

But it doesn’t really matter what her name is.  Of course I’ll love her all the same, and take care of her no matter what her name is or what she looks like.  She’ll be my little baby girl.  And I’ll have a wife, and a family, up here in Northern Illinois.  That’s where I’m typing this as we speak, in a Days Inn in Oglesby, IL while Jes is at the hospital.  It’s un-related kidney type issues, but I wish I was there for her.  It kills me that I’m not there by her side helping her cope with all of these changes.  The stress is unimaginable.  So many changes over the past 365 days.  Some of the biggest events in a man’s life came to me within just one year.  And more to come in 2009.  Graduation.  The First Big Job.  Starting A Business.  The Big Lay-Off.  The Second Bigger and Better Job.  Pregnancy.  Proposal.  Closing a Business.  Moving.  Marriage.  Baby.

No wonder I’ve been stressed out.  I’ve finally had time to just sit back and realize all of this.  In the mean time I’ve seen my best friend’s grandfather die (he was close to me as well), an investor come and go, and my own father lose his job, gain his old job back, work in Iraq, and then come back home after a near-death experience with an RPG. 

I’m only twenty-three years old.  Do you believe it?

Sometimes I don’t.  I thought about shutting down this account because I’m never on it.  I was just going through my email account, cleaning up the 185 new messages because I’m too busy at work (Con-way takes up about 60 hours a week now, with the rest of the week going towards the Salon and Jes herself) to check my personal messages anymore.  But I’m glad I’m writing this.

And if anything ever happens to me before I turn 24, I think I’ve seen some of life’s biggest challenges and overcame them.  Or, they overcame me.  

Peace and love to the world,