May 4, 2008

• 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?

  • 8:56 am
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