Still alive and kicking, barely

I am still here, but just barely, it seems. Since getting back from vacation, I've been so busy between work, church and my volunteer activities I barely have time to do anything else. I've also been fighting a nasty cold for a couple of weeks now. The cough is just terrible.

We had a Mother's Day tea at church yesterday. It turned out really nice and we had a LOT more people attending than we expected. We had about 30 ladies signed up and about 50 ladies showed up. It was really good though. We had plenty of food and good fellowship.

Yesterday we also had a program out at the Pioneer Farm on Laura Ingalls Wilder. That also had a lot more people than we thought would show, so we were pleased with that.

I was spread pretty thinly yesterday being that I was on the organizing committees for both of those events. We went up to the church Friday night and got everything set up there so all we had to do was finish preparing the food early Saturday afternoon. We were at the church until about 10:30 p.m., after which time I went to the grocery store to buy a few ingredients we realized we needed and what I needed to finish making the items I was going to bring. Then I went back to my store for a couple of hours to finish making up the Mother Trivia sheets and printing out the Bible bookmarks I had already designed  as mementos of the occasion. I had planned on doing them during the work day on Friday, but we were so busy Friday I didn't even get to sit down to eat my lunch. I had to eat it in bites between customers, and that was with a helper there with me. By the time I got home Friday night, finished making the tuna salad so the flavors would meld overnight and wrapping the brie cheese to make baked brie, it was 2 a.m. I woke on my own at 6:30 a.m. and got started on the day.

Once I left the house at 8:30 a.m. I didn't really see it much the rest of the day. The Pioneer Farm thing was in the morning. I came home long enough at 11:30 to make myself a grilled cheese sandwich before heading over to the church shortly after noon to finish making the sandwiches and salads for the tea. Two of us were the main organizers of this and we made the sandwiches, baked the brie, chopped up fruit for a fresh fruit salad with yogurt dressing, and chopped apples to go with the brie. Other ladies brought blueberry scones, mini quiche and fruit tarts for the 2:30 p.m. tea.

It was nearly 6 p.m. when we finished with the clean-up at the church, after which John and I took his mother out for her birthday supper. We got home about 7:30 p.m. and I was in bed shortly after 8 p.m. Whew!

This seems to be how my life has been the past couple of months. Just a whirlwind of activity. I did get some vegetables planted in the garden and plan on planting some more here as I find time. We've had quite a wet spring so it's been slow. Because of the wet spring, my basement has also been quite flooded and we've been down there almost every day running the sump pump and sweeping water toward the drain.

We have decided that we are going to look at buying a house this year. We've devised a plan to pay off a lot of our credit card debt with our tax stimulus checks and we are actually getting a tax return this year. We plan on just about all of it to go to paying off that high interest credit card debt. We are going to visit a banker to see what we can afford to buy. I'm going to approach it the same way I did buying my car at the beginning of the year: tell the banker what I want my payments to be, have her tell me what price we can afford to shop for to keep the payments within that range and what criteria they will require to provide us the loan. I'm quite certain with the price range I want to keep it at, whatever we buy will have to be fixed up, but it cannot be any worse than the housing we are renting now and it will be ours to fix.

Do you have any plans for your tax stimulus check?

Quiz

Snowbirding!

We've been in Arkansas for two days now, and it's been wonderful weather both days! I can see why older folks snowbird. I talked to my assistant manager back home today and she said it was zero degrees with a wind chill of negative 14. Here, it got up to nearly 70 today and we were walking around outside in our short sleeved shirts. We went to the Janet Huckabee Nature Center in Fort Smith today after church. It's a really nice nature center with all kinds of hands-on activities and several nature walks. We started down one and came to an intersection with paved paths going left and right and a dirt path in front of us. John and my brother David decided to take the dirt path and my mom, her roommate and I took a shorter paved one around the small lake. We beat the guys back to the van by about 15 minutes. They ended up coming to a dead end on the path somewhere and walking through the woods until they came out on the main road somewhere and walked back along the road.

God blessed us with wonderful weather driving down. We saw clouds in the sky ahead of us but we ran into no snow or rain ourselvses. We will be here until Tuesday and then are heading even farther south to visit two of our kids and two of our grandchildren in Texas. I haven't even seen one of those grandbabies, yet.

We did get to meet my youngest brother's girlfriend yesterday. She's really nice, and extremely pretty. She's coming over with him tomorrow, and one of my other brothers is supposed to bring his wife over tomorrow as well. Mom is making Bul-go-gi, a wonderful Korean beef dish.

12 inches is more than enough!

Get your minds out of the gutter! I'm talking about snow. Our little town made state news because we got so much.

Sunday morning, the weather man was saying we could expect 1-3 inches of snow. By noon, it hadn't started snowing yet, and hubby even asked, "What happened to that three inches of snow we were supposed to get?" Shortly after noon, it did start snowing, coming down in that real small powdery stuff. By 2 p.m. it was coming down in great big flakes, and fast. We left the house a little after 3 to take some cheese dip up to the Super Bowl party at the Eagles and as soon as I stepped off the porch I knew the weather man had lied. The snow came up over my ankle and I told John, "This is a lot more than 3 inches." He had come with me to the Eagles. We were looking at possibly having a pop (soda of those of you who don't live in the Midwest) and eating some of the chili another Auxiliary member was bringing. He only came for the chili and grumbled that he didn't want to get roped into watching the Super Bowl. It's a good thing he came with me because for the 5 or 10 minutes we were inside the Aerie, the car was covered in snow and I was stuck. He had to push me back out of the parking space because the car kept wanting to slide sideways into the car parked next to us. About 15 minutes after we got back home, someone from church called to tell me they were canceling church for the night. Good thing, too, because I don't think I'd have gotten back up the driveway.

About 5 p.m., John went out and started shoveling the driveway. He came back in for a break saying it was hard to breath out there. While he was inside, the snow came down so fast and hard you couldn't tell where he had started by looking out the window. By 9 p.m. it had stopped and we went outside to shovel the walks. We live on a corner lot, so there are twice the walks to shovel as most houses. We both were sore last night after lifting all that wet, heavy snow. By the time it was over, we had 12 inches of it.

We are expecting another round of it tonight. They are saying we are in for the same amount. WOW!!! This is the most snow I've seen since we moved here 12 years ago. John says this is more what it was like when he was growing up. I've always teased him about how he told me I would have snow up to my butt before we moved here. If we get another 12 inches tonight, it will be pretty close.

Iowa sure is making the south look good right now. We leave are leaving for a round trip to Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma Friday (hopefully, if the weather is good for driving that day). I'm so looking forward to seeing my mom and brothers in Arkansas, two of our kids and grandbabies in Texas, and my sister in Oklahoma. It's going to be a nice trip. Yesterday Mom was telling me they are predicting 72 degrees for Arkansas on Saturday (WOOHOO). The 10-day forecast on weather.com today says more like 60 though. That's ok. I'll take it!!! Beats the heck out of highs in the 20s and 30s. We thought it was pretty warm here yesterday and it was only 35. It felt good to be above freezing.

So long Heath Ledger

   I couldn't believe it when I heard this morning that young actor Heath Ledger died yesterday in his New York City apartment. He was such a talented actor and while I didn't like his choice of a few roles ("Brokeback Mountain" for one) I did admire his looks and talent. My favorite roles were the ones where he played pony-tailed hot-headed but humourous gentlemen like in "A Knight's Tale" and "The Patriot". How sad that he died so young. It just goes to show you that you never know when your time will come.

If you were to die tonight, do you know where you'd spend eternity?

Heath Andrew Ledger
April 4, 1979 - January 22, 2008