Divorce Rates Higher in States with Gay Marriage Bans
by Nate Silver

Over the past decade or so, divorce has gradually become more uncommon in the United States. Since 2003, however, the decline in divorce rates has been largely confined to states which have not passed a state constitutional ban on gay marriage. These states saw their divorce rates decrease by an average of 8 percent between 2003 and 2008. States which had passed a same-sex marriage ban as of January 1, 2008, however, saw their divorce rates rise by about 1 percent over the same period….READ MORE

A great scene from a mediocre movie: Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye in The Five Pennys

Today is the 10th anniversary of the day my husband and I first met each other in person. We had met online months earlier (August 30th, to be exact) and sometime around October decided it was time to meet in person even though he lived in Florida and I lived in Arkansas.

My mother and step-father gave me the plane tickets as a Christmas gift and I spent my week’s vacation down in Sunny Florida. However, my flight didn’t get in until around 11:00 the night I flew in and this (along with other reasons I won’t delve into) screwed up both of our sleep schedule so I didn’t see much of that sun anyway.

By the third day it was clear to both of us that we wanted to be together permanently. A month later I became a Floridian and 10 months after that, I became Mrs. Mills.

There’s still no other place I’d rather be than with Chris. He is the man I love, my partner in all things and the best friend I’ve ever had. He even tolerates my love of talking dog movies.

We rang in the year 2000 together and now, ten years later, we’ll ring in the second decade of what I hope to be many more decades together.

I love you, Chris.

Yes, some shameless self-promotion here. If you know and love China (like all those who meet her do) you can get yourself some swag with her sweet poochy face. Check it out!

make custom gifts at Zazzle

I just noticed that over half of my image files were corrupt. I got rid of the bad images. There are going to be a lot of posts with holes now.

Le sigh.

I’ve re-imported the template I want but there are still problems. I believe there’s something going on with the brandimills.com domain – everything on that domain is acting weird.

Anyway, I’ll fix it when I can but with all that’s going on in the ‘real world’ I doubt that’ll be anytime soon.

There’s something wrong with my blog. For the past two days it’s been completely blank. I assumed my hosting company was having hosting issues. But then I realized all my other sites are fine.

I finally logged in and saw that all the themes I had imported myself were just gone. Also, the software will not upgrade. I’ve tried several times and it will not work.

So, I’ve changed to this horrid template and hope to get the software fixed sometime soon. I don’t post here very much anymore, but I at least want it to look pretty.

I’m exhausted. I woke up feeling okay but then I checked the election results. I had to go to bed at 11:00 last night and the final result on issue 1 hadn’t been figured. When I went to bed No was winning by a few percentage points.

After finding out that my newly adopted home state joined the ranks of those denying fellow citizens basic rights all I wanted to do was go back to bed. But no, I had to go to work and be around people that I know voted Yes on 1. There are two things I refuse to discuss at work – Politics and Religion. Not everyone feels the same and I know several of my co-workers’ stance on both. It’s interesting that those who have no problems spouting off their politics are those with which I disagree.

I’m just so tired of people trying to control other people’s lives. I’ve been fighting against this tyrannical behavior since I was in college and it only seems to have gotten worse. Having a complete moron in the White House for eight years (Bush Jr. in case you don’t know to whom I’m referring) has emboldened the ignorant and fearful and they have no problem using that fear as a tool in their ongoing war with anything that doesn’t fit into their own personal world view.

I’m just so tired of it all.

Land of the free? – bullshit.

Home of the Brave? – double-bullshit.

Where ever you live, remember to vote. If you live in Maine, remember…

For a while I was keeping a separate Entertainment Blog. I have found it way too difficult to keep up with it so I’ve combined it with my personal blog.

If you look through past entries, you will see ‘new’ entries that have been imported from the other blog. Instead of posting my entertainment musings on that blog, I’ll just post them here. It’s not like I’m blogging all that much at present anyway.