If you haven't watched it yet you should really set aside 20 minutes and head over to http://storyofstuff.com/ and watch the video.  It gives a great overview of where our stuff comes from and the inpact it has on the environment.

On a neighborhood blog someone brought up the idea of replacing a failed local grocery store with a coop grocery.  While realizing that idea may be bigger than what we can handle with our current state of no organization, a smaller scale food coop is not.  I've stepped up to be the point person for that and am excited about it!

Does anyone have experience starting a food coop?  Any wisdom to share?  We'll be in an urban neighborhood(Church Hill in Richmond, VA) which should bring blessings and challenges together.

A few months ago we started hosting weekly potluck dinners at our house on Thursday nights.  It's grown into an amazing weekly gathering of friends who hang out, goof off and just generally love on each other.  Even with the cleaning and cooking needed to prepare for it it's my favorite night of the week.  I can't recommend it enough!  Invite your friends and neighbors over one night a week and enjoy the community!

We have spent the last two weeks living a nightmare.  Every morning waking up hoping that it has just been a dream.  I still hope to wake up tomorrow morning and find that it's just been a horrible, horrible nightmare.

My brother-in-law Jarrett was one of the students killed at Virginia Tech two weeks ago.  He was my wife's favorite person in the whole world.  Every time she talked about him, and it was often, she would just light up.  Not to mention when she could be around him when she just basked in his presence.  To her he was as close to perfect as a person could get.  She loved him more than she loved anyone or anything.  And now he is gone.  A life of so much promise, so much joy, so much love...  cut short with the pull of a trigger of a madman's gun.

And we are left to go on with life.  We are supposed to go back to work and play.  We are supposed to have life go back to the way it was.  But that can never happen.  Life is not the way it was two weeks ago.  Two weeks ago everything changed.  I know my wife will never be the same.  I know that I will never be the same.  I know that our marriage will never be the same.

I have no answers or explanations.  What I have is hurt and confusion.  I don't even want answers.  Any answer that makes this okay or bearable is unacceptable.  This is not bearable.  This is not okay.  This is tragedy.

I live under no illusions that we are the only ones who have lived through tragedy such as this.  Many have living through it and many are living through it right now.  We just happen to be the most public right now.

It is time for me to make a difference in this world.  It is time for us to make a difference in the world.  It is time to take every hurt and pain we've experienced in life and use them as our motivation to help the hurt, troubled and mad people in this world.  To help people understand that violence is not the answer.  To be with the hurting.  To choose to love instead of retreating into self-pity.  It is time for this to happen now!