Sin – Page 8 – Perpetual Adoration

July 25, 2015

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The Key to the Side Door

Last week, I wrote about an experience I had during the summer of 1974. At that time, I was 17 years old. I had a part-time job at the Ramada Inn in downtown Peoria, and one Saturday night after work, I drove to the Shrine Mosque in downtown Peoria to see if I could catch the second half of a show that featured a professional barbershop quartet. The quartet had won the previous year’s international competition of barbershop quartets.

July 18, 2015

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Backstage at a Professional Performance

During the spring semester of my junior year in high school (1974), I organized a barbershop quartet. I recruited three of my friends who were in the music program with me at the high school. We started out by practicing at the house of one of the guys in the quartet. We continued practicing throughout the summer and started performing in the fall.

June 6, 2015

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John Wayne vs. Bruce Jenner

Every so often, my wife tells me that I’m living in the wrong times. Because of my old-fashioned beliefs, she claims that I would have been better off living during the 1800s. Whenever she comments about this, I remind her that I spent the better part of my early years at my grandfather’s (Tom Williams’s) house, and since he was born in 1898, that’s probably where I picked up a lot of my beliefs.

May 23, 2015

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I was a god for a day

After I graduated from Saint Louis University law school in 1982, my wife and I moved back to Peoria. At that time, my wife was pregnant with our second child. Shortly after returning to Peoria, I began teaching CCD classes on Sunday mornings at St. Sharbel Catholic Church to seventh- and eighth-grade students.

May 16, 2015

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Modern-Day Goddesses

When I was growing up during the 1960s and early 1970s, my favorite movies were Westerns. I’m not sure why. One reason may have been because I watched a lot of television with my grandfather, Tom Williams, and he liked Westerns. Another reason may have been because the heroes in Westerns were always tough, rugged, no-nonsense men who reminded me of the men on the Williams side of the family.

April 25, 2015

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Dumb Behavior

I recently filed a chapter 7 bankruptcy case for a client who owed a significant amount of money to some local loan shark companies. (I call payday and title loan companies “loan shark companies” because they routinely charge up to 300% interest per year on money that is loaned to customers.) My client also had several thousand dollars in accumulated debt that he owed to credit card companies and medical providers. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to call my client “Jim.”

April 18, 2015

Guidelines For A Disgraced Congressman

If you pay attention to the news, you know about the recent resignation of our local U.S. Congressman, Aaron Schock. Schock is currently under investigation for violating federal law while he was in office. Some of the violations include using campaign funds for his own personal benefit, overcharging the government for mileage expenses, and flying around in private jets that were owned by individuals or companies who donated money to his campaign.

March 21, 2015

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Eradicating Weeds

In the early summer of 1975, one of my cousins decided that he wanted to try his hand at gardening. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to call him “James.” At the time, James and I were both 18 years old. I knew quite a bit about gardening because I had been in charge of taking care of our large family garden for the previous five years.

October 25, 2014

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A Hazmat Suit for Devout Catholics

BOO! Since Halloween is quickly approaching, I thought I would write about a deadly disease that’s scarier than the Ebola virus — a disease that has infected hundreds of millions of people worldwide. While everyone should be afraid of this disease, very few people seem to care about it. If they had full knowledge of its devastating consequences, they would be petrified and would wear the equivalent of a hazmat suit to protect themselves from the disease.