A Return to Blogging, and Some Miscellaneous Rambling as Usual

Hello again, friends. I'm pleased to say that my break in blogging has now, more or less, come to a close. Thank you very much for your prayers and encouragement. I haven't exactly found a solution to my situation - particularly since my conference minister isn't returning my calls - but after crunching the numbers I think I may be able to grit my teeth and bear things for another year in my program here. I'll be blogging lightly still until the end of this month, since I have plenty of work that needs to get done and too many distractions as it is. Needless to say, I'm quite glad that I still have that stockpile of finished-yet-unpublished posts! Not much substantial, but enough to do for now, I hope. It may be a while before I resume reviewing Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. In the meantime, while I've been absent, I read Joseph Smith's Quorum of the Anointed, 1842-1845: A Documentary History, and since then I have begun to read The Nauvoo Endowment Companies, 1845-1846: A Documentary History, though I don't intend to read much more of that until the last few days of April, when I'm freed up. (Not sure when I'll have a chance to read the third volume in the set.) Nevertheless, both volumes are giving me some excellent insights into the development of the various temple ordinances; it surprises me at times just how freely some of the early Saints (most notably William Clayton) were prepared to talk about most aspects of the endowment. Interesting reading, and while I doubt I'll be devoting any reviews to those books here, I do want to take a moment now to remark on how much I recommend their sensitive yet comprehensive treatment. I haven't gotten around to listening to the General Conference talks yet, but I have enjoyed the diverse range of reviews and reactions I've been getting from various blogs and podcasts in the meantime. Also, today I've done some more updates to this blog's introductory post.