1. A powerful series of blogs from a friend and adoptive parent. She details some of the struggles they go through. It's worth the time to read the whole series:

“Apart from any parenting stress, seminary was very time-consuming. PJ worked overly long hours on classwork, and I worked overly long hours at home with the kids. Money was tight, but time was tighter. This took a toll on our relationship, though I didn’t realize how much until I flew to Texas with the kids while PJ went to Baltimore for a mission trip and a conference. After days of falling apart, I wrote this email to a friend late at night.

I’m so, so mad(?) or resentful(?) or—I don’t even know—at PJ right now. This week has been pure emotional hell while he is on that Baltimore trip. I see tweets all day from great lecturers, and I’m jealous that he gets to sit and soak that up for hours. He has afternoons off, and all afternoon I’m mad that I can’t remember the last time I had a break, let alone hours off every single day. His blogs come in, and I read that he got to spend his evenings focused, unburdened in sharing Jesus. And man alive, I am struggling knowing that he’s teamed up with a girl who gets to do this with my husband every day this week. I so, so desperately wish it were me beside him in this work…Thanks for listening. I feel a huge weight lifted in just telling someone what I’ve been so ashamed to admit: I’m mad at my husband for being on a mission trip.

Note: PJ was actually on an eight-person team, and there was absolutely no wrongdoing—nor even a suspicion of wrongdoing; I was upset about my state in life, not his actions.”

2. On the importance of routine to the creative process:

“Think outside the box, shake things up, and think different: The metaphors we use for creativity suggest that it’s different from many other pursuits.

As a result, it might seem that being creative requires a different approach than most other skills. If you want to be a great tennis player, you need to practice your swing. If you want to nail a presentation, you need to practice it several times. But, it turns out that creativity also requires practice.”

3. NPR did an objective piece on a pastor who struggles with same-sex attraction but chose, with his wife's full knowledge, to get married:

“Allan Edwards is the pastor of Kiski Valley Presbyterian Church in western Pennsylvania, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America. He’s attracted to men, but he considers acting on that attraction a sin. Accordingly, Edwards has chosen not to act on it.

”I think we all have part of our desires that we choose not to act on, right?” he says. “So for me, it’s not just that the religion was important to me, but communion with a God who loves me, who accepts me right where I am.”

Where he is now is married. He and his wife, Leanne Edwards, are joyfully expecting a baby in July.”

4. The Facebook comments of the above story indicate this isn't a discussion about personal choice for many vocal people.

5. Sadly, there is a movement afoot to prevent unregulated sledding. The litigiousness of American is one again turning on the fun vacuum:

“As an American (and Iowan!) I find this sort of flinching risk-aversion profoundly embarrassing. We might like to locate the blame for things like sledding bans somewhere out there in the unruly tort system (and indeed Messrs Ramseyer and Rasmusen do), but we must face the possibility that the blame also lies within. Perhaps it’s better to be safe than sorry, but one wonders whether we won’t become sorry to have made such a fetish of staying safe. In much the same way that dominant firms, jealous of market share, tend to become over-cautious and lose their edge, America the weak-kneed hegemon risks losing the can-do, risk-taking, innovative pioneer spirit that made it the world’s dominant economic and military power. Is it worth devoting so much zeal to protecting America’s young minds from brain damage if the finest among them wind up too conservative to seek anything but a sure paycheck? If Americans need something to fear, it should be that by continuing to inspire this surfeit of heedfulness in generation after generation, America risks heading downhill, and not in the fun way. ”