When I was 13 years old, I worked as a mother's helper for a Jewish family down the block from us. I babysat like crazy in the 8th-10th grades, and made pretty good money at it, too. This lady asked me if I'd like to be a mother's helper, explaining that it included babysitting but also helping her around the house. It meant working for her after school a few days a week, and babysitting most Saturdays while they went to Synagogue.

It was loads of fun for me at the time and VERY educational. I love learning about other cultures and she did not mind at all explaining to my young mind many of the histories behind their traditions. I helped her clean out her kitchen in preparation of Passover. She moved everything non-perishable into a shed outside, and everything that would spoil during that time went into the trash. Anything at all that had any kind of leavening agent in it had to be removed from the house and every surface where that might have touched needed to be scrubbed down. While we worked, she explained to me that Jews did this to remember their ancestors' time in the desert of Egypt where God fed them with manna. I remembered the story of the Exodus from Sunday school, but it was so much more real hearing it from someone who still witnessed it.

She also explained the Teffilins inside each door frame were little prayer boxes that had scriptures in them for protection and as reminders of their faith when they went in and out of those doors. She invited me for Sabbath dinner, too, and explained their prayers and traditions of that to me as well.

I was an ambitious babysitter, often cleaning people's houses for them, or doing the dishes, etc., while they were out. I got an eduction in Kosher after I did her dishes for her in the bare sink instead of using the proper dish basin, ruining those dishes for what they were intended. I offered to pay for them, but she was very nice about it and said she could purify them and they could become part of another set of dishes that did not touch either meat or dairy.

Her son's name was David, and she explained to me that in Hebrew, it was pronounced Dah-veed. I loved saying his name that way. I sometimes wonder what ever happened to them. Whenver we are approaching Easter, and subsequently Passover, I wonder if they have any idea what an impact they had on my life because of their generosity and willingness to explain their faith to me.

My mom called me about half an hour ago to let me know that Ann's baby has arrived. Miss Chonda Lilly arrived at 2:58 p.m. weighing in at 6 lbs-14oz. She's 20 inches long and I could hear her crying so sweetly in the background. Welcome my newest niece. You can congratulate Ann on her site, but she'll be in the hospital a few days.

What a weekend!!! It was full of a lot of good points, highlighted with a couple of bad things.

Today is my father-in-law's birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD), but we are both busy all day and we both have an historical society board meeting tonight, and because I'm not dining out during Lent, I made them dinner at my house Saturday. I went shopping for the ingredients Friday afternoon and made the soup that same night. I had every intention of taking off work Saturday as soon as the store closed at 2:30, giving me plenty of time to clean up the house a little and prepare the rest of the dinner. Someone came in wanting a cell phone shortly after 2:00 and while he was helped by the employee who was working Saturday, the employee has the gift of gab and this was one day I was wanting to tell him to SHUT UP because I had places to go. I needed to count his drawer down, so it was about 3:30 by the time I got out of there. While I did run around like a busy bee, I did a fairly good job of maintaining my calm (something I do not do well under pressure) by continuallly telling myself that I had done a good job of prep work and as long as I kept at a steady pace, we would be ok. Dinner was supposed to be served at 6:30 and I was running just a little behind. Dad called at 5:30 to tell me that the car wash where he worked had over 100 cars go through that day and they might be about half an hour late. PERFECT FOR ME, just the amount of time I estimated I was running behind. They showed up a few minutes before 7 p.m., by which time I had everything prepared and in the fridge just waiting to be served or cooked at it's appointed time. The dining room was lit up with a bunch of candles and I was very proud of the ambiance. I offered them each a glass of wine as I popped the appetizers into the oven. We enjoyed each other's company over the next two hours as we had a five-course meal served a little "ghetto" as I do not have enough dinner plates to cover that many courses. So, I had regular dinner plates on the table, on which I served most of our courses on plastic disposable dinnerware (saved on the amount of dishes I had to do as well).

Our menu consisted of:

• Pigs in a blanket (Cocktail sausages wrapped in Crescent Roll dough)
• Chinese Noodle Salad (mmmm, good. I'll have to post it sometime)
• Homemade meatball soup (I cheated and used frozen meatballs, but the rest was homemade)
• Orange sherbet for a palate cleanser
• London broils (tenderloin beef wrapped in bacon) and corn-on-the-cob
• Mango Strawberry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream

It went over well. Dad said he needs to have birthdays more often. The folks left the house about 10:00 and I took a couple Tylenol PM and went to bed about 11:30. When I calculated whether I had enough time to sleep the pills off, I forgot to figure in the change for Daylight Savings Time, so when my alarm went off at 7:30 in the morning, it was really only 6:30 to my body and I could not make myself wake up. I ended up missing Sunday school because I couldn't talk myself awake early enough. I literally was laying there telling myself "You have to get up, Debbie, you have to get up."

Church was great and I managed to catch a short nap afterwards before heading out to the monthly sing-along at the assisted living facility. This is always fun. I've been going the second Sunday of the month for years now and many of the residents and I know each other on a first name basis. Many of the folks that come down are younger people (in there 40s or 50s) who are a mildly mentally challenged. One of the ladies always brings cookies and candies for a snack. She's been bringing small cans of soda for a few months now and attendance has boomed since she started bringing those. Yesterday we had one guy there who would just sing out as loud as he could. He called out all kinds of hymns, but especially wanted to sing "Jesus Loves Me". The other residents were getting annoyed at him and would yell, "We already sang that one," every time he would ask. The funniest thing about this guy, though, was that it didn't matter that he didn't know the words. He would sing the words he did know and make up the rest. It was so cute. He just loved singing for Jesus.

On the way home from County Care, I called my elderly friend Barb, who had left me a message earlier that day that she couldn't go to county care because she had not been feeling well for a few days and was running a fever. When I asked her if she was feeling any better, she told me that she was still feverish and her urine was red. That raised HUGE flags and I told her she needed to go to the hospital. She argued with me a little, so I told her I was going to call her power of attorney and see what she said. The POA wasn't available (turns out she had her cell phone off while she was attending a concert at her church that afternoon), so I went by my friend's house to check on her, even though she kept telling me she didn't want me to get what she had. Long story short, I convinced her to let me take her to the emergency room, where I spent five hours while they poked her and tested her and x-rayed her, and finally admitted her. She has a severe infection, either kidney, bladder or urinary tract, but the way she was wincing when they poked on her side last night, probably kidney. She was also pretty dehydrated. I wanted to stay with her until they either admitted her or sent her home. She kept worrying about being such a bother, and I kept insisting she was worth it. Her POA got the message and came by the hospital as they were getting her settled into a room. I was SOOOOO thankful for her to be there. She showed up at just the time she was really needed because that's when they started asking all kinds of in-depth medical questions I had no idea about. We prayed a little and I left as they were bringing my friend a Healthy Choice dinner.

By the time I got home at 8:45, John had eaten what was left over from the salad, but he still had room for soup when I heated it up. I have one bowl of it left that I think I'll take over to my friend's house if she gets out of the hospital today (which we are both hoping she will). I did not manage to get any laundry done yesterday at all. I usually manage to get all of my laundry done on Sunday afternoons in between naps and movie watching. I will just have to throw a load in a night this week and hopefully stay ahead of our needs. I don't usually like doing it during the week because I have a bad habit of forgetting it and either end up with very wrinkled clothes or, worse yet, soured clothes from sitting wet in the washer.

I need to get ready for work. I HATE the time changes.

Last night was a rough night. I went to bed at 9 p.m. after dozing off in front of House many times. Hubby says to me, "You know if you wouldn't get up so early you wouldn't have that problem." Ugh! I know. There are not enough hours in the day. Last night I could not shut my mind off. I woke up the first time about 11:30 p.m., then again at 3:10 a.m., and several times in between or around there with John's snoring. The main problem was too much going through my mind. It was too late to take a Tylenol PM or I wouldn't have wanted to get up in the morning. I need at least 8 hours if I'm taking Tylenol PM or I feel groggy and can't wake myself.

It's going to be another long day. I, once again, have too many irons in the fire and more pulling for my attention. I have to learn to say NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

We still have power and are still alive, in spite of last night's storm. I believe we are in for a little more snow, but not supposed to be as bad as yesterday, and for us, yesterday was not as bad as last weekend. Where we live, it started out with rain, then hail, then really wet, heavy snow, but only an inch or so of it. The problem is the wind blowing the snow back across the roads, and the drifts it's creating.

One of our customers delivers the newspaper to rural areas. He ended up in a snow drift that covered his 4-wheel drive Jeep. He was stuck there for two hours before a farmer with a tractor came and pulled him out. The rest of the people on his route are not getting their paper tonight.

North and west of here got it REALLY bad. There were blizzard conditions across the west and north half of the state. Interstate 80 west of Des Moines and Interstate 35 north of Des Moines are CLOSED. We did not open our Knoxville store today because all of my remaining employees live here in Oskaloosa and I wasn't going to have them driving in those conditions today. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Still lots of people without power. Please pray for them. We did lose power at the Oskaloosa store late yesterday afternoon and closed up early because we had no computers and no machines to print airtime cards for the pre-paid cell phone users. Closed the Knoxville store early because of the weather, too. Got home from work REALLY eaerly and had power there, but it didn't last long. Went out about half an hour after getting home, then came back on 5 or 10 minutes later, but then we had no cable. We watched a DVD until just before 7 p.m. and then checked to see if cable was back on so we could watch "Survivor." It was and we did and we got to sleep in a warm bed with heat, thank you LORD!

Wow! It the first day of March. Where have the first two months of 2007 gone already?

As I was fixing my breakfast this morning, I started thinking: I really only have a handful of weekday breakfast routines. This morning, I'm having two slices of raisin toast with cream cheese, a sausage patty and some fresh strawberries with Splenda. It's quick and easy to prepare, and tasty. Other mornings, I may have a bowl of cornflakes with sliced banana and a small yogurt; or an egg (scrambled or fried) with a slice of toast and a handful of grapes (or some other fruit I may have in the fridge). Those are usually the rotation.

On occassion, I'll throw in a bowl of oatmeal instead of cold cereal, or like yesterday, I'll break the yoke on the egg and throw it on two slices of bread along with some cheese and a couple slices of deli ham. Last week, I had a couple of tortillas left over from our Fat Tuesday dinner at the Mexican restaurant. I scrambled some eggs and put them on the tortilla with some cheese and salsa. Those were really yummy. Sometimes, when both John and I have the morning off (which happens so rarely), I'll fix biscuits and gravy, or pancakes and bacon, but usually, it's the same few things rotated.

Do you eat breakfast, and what do you normally have for breakfast?

Protected post update!

All of Iowa is bracing for another round of winter storms. They are predicting two more storms to pass through Iowa between tomorrow and Friday. There are still 100,000 homes without power. A few of the counties have no 911 emergency system because of their counties being without power. I know our county's 911 has generators because we sold them UPS's to protect their computers from the spikes when the generators kick in.

I am so thankful that we still have power and heat. There are an estimated 1500 in our town without power. While other counties were announcing where their shelters were, ours did not announce it until yesterday, after many had been without power for a couple of days.

I pray that we will be able to maintain our power still. We were without gas for a couple of days when we lived in Arkansas, but we had a fireplace and a heated waterbed at the time. When I stopped to buy ice melt from the local garden center today (which just happens to carry 40-lb. bags of the ice melt I like), they were talking about how Wal-mart was sold out of D-cell batteries and you couldn't find a generator for sale anywhere in the county today. Aye, yay, yay! Please, God, let us keep our power. We have gas heat here, but the thermostat and blower are electric. I don't know what we would do with our pets, either.

We had one customer who came in telling us about how her mom's power went out at first so Mom came to stay with her, then a couple hours later her power went out and they both went over to her brother's house after it got down to about 45° inside the house.

Please pray for those folks who don't have heat. It gets pretty cold in Iowa this time of year.

I am one of the lucky homes to still have power. We had a terrible winter storm yesterday. We haven't seen one like this in about 8 or 9 years. There was not church practically anywhere in town this morning. The county was declared in a state of emergency and people were told to stay indoors until after noon on Sunday.

It started out raining yesterday morning, but the ground was cold enough it was freezing as it hit the ground. That went on for a while, and the slushy rain just kept piling up. We debated closing the stores down for the day, but figured we were in already so what the heck. We did end up closing both stores early as the power kept cutting off and coming right back on. That's hard on computers and it started to get more and more frequent. Places in town had already lost power. We were watching the ice build up on the power lines across the highway and the lines kept drooping lower and lower. We watched a tree across the street continuously losing branches. It made us wonder how our house would look when we got home, being that we had two trees close to it in the front and side yards.

We left the truck parked in the garage and walked to work. The driveway is on a hill and we figured we'd probably be better off walking with the Yak Trax on our shoes than trying to get up an icy hill later. The walk home wasn't too bad. It was mostly slushy stuff. The trees all around us looked like a crystal forest. They were beautiful, but it was scary listening to the branches break and crash to the ground. K-CRACK!!! Sometimes it sounded like a shotgun going off.

We were about a block away from our house when I could see we had a couple of big branches down in our yard. There was a very large one sticking out into the street and I was going to try to pull it out of the street but it was too heavy and John said he wasn't going to get under the tree when the limbs were coming down like that. As we were just getting up on the porch we heard another K-CRACK!!! and a limb came falling from a tree across the street hitting the back end of the neighbors minivan. It wasn't long before he came out and moved his van out of the street.

I was frightened and fascinated by the storm at the same time. I stood out on the enclosed porch, where I had a good view of both of the trees in the front, listening for the eerie sounds of the limbs cracking and crashing to the ground. I'd come back in the house for a while, then go back out on the porch for a few minutes to watch. We were watching TV when I heard something that sounded like someone banging on the front door. No one uses our front door, and John said it sounded like a limb hitting the roof to him. Sure enough, it must have been a limb rolling down the roof, because immediately in front of the door was a limb that hadn't been there five minutes earlier, surrounded by thousands of tiny ice cubes that would have broken away from it as it came down.

I had gathered up all the candles I could find: a couple pillars, some tea lights, and many tapers (though I only had two taper holders). I put them in a basket along with a box of matches and a lighter. We were prepared for the power to go out.  I have an electric stove so I prepared supper early, wanting to be sure it got cooked while we still had electricity. We lost a few channels on cable, and lost the entire cable for a couple of minutes. We lost power several times but it was only for a minute at a time. My husband started getting irritated with me because I didn't seem to understand that the transformers would reset as soon as they realized there wasn't a ground there still. He explained to me, since I didn't grow up around here, that the trees hitting the power lies knocked them out temporarily, but the transformers reset as soon as the ground was gone.

The entire city of New Sharon, about 11 miles north of us, ended up without power and they opened a shelter for people who had now way to heat their homes. The closed down a portion of the highway on the other side of New Sharon because there were so many limbs in the road and they couldn't keep it clear. They came on the radio about 8 p.m. asking people to conserve water, not because the water was low but they wanted the fire departments to have plenty of water pressure.

It was definitely a little frightening, but also awesome experiencing God's power of nature all around  us. I cannot imagine how people manage to go without power or water for days, let alone months. We had a plan that if the power went out, we were going to shut ourselves up in the bedroom, snuggled under all the blankets in our flannel pajamas, with candles lighting and heating the room. It never did come to that, though.

I took a picture of the limbs in the front yard. I have to download it off my camera phone, and the cable to do that is at the office, so I'll try to get it posted tomorrow. I attempted to use the panoramic view, so we'll see how it actually managed to stitch together.

John has the limbs all stacked up on the curb side of the sidewalk now. He's shoveled the snow (we got about 3 inches overnight, but they had predicted 5-10") and ice off the walk. It's still snowing just a bit, but it's really light and doesn't seem to be doing much accumulating.

Pray for those in the Midwest who are still without power, particularly when it's so darn cold.

In recent posts, I had mentioned possibly giving up Xanga for Lent. Well, I have not. I'm still here. I am giving up dining out for Lent. No take out food, not fast food, no delivery, no restaurants period.

I am also making sure I spend at least 15 minutes a day with the Lord. I have gotten lax in this recently, so 15-30 minutes every day. This is actually what has been keeping me off Xanga the past week. I usually get on the Internet in th mornings, but lately I'm spending that time in prayer and the Word.

We did go out to dinner last night, as a last "hurrah" to tide me over until after Easter. John reminded me that his and his dad's birthdays are during this period so that must mean I won't be going out with them. At first I thought I would make exceptions for their birthdays, but later decided to stick to the original plan. I can make them special dinners at my house instead of going out, or they can take John out with them.

My husband has also been quick to remind me that the pledge is that I do not eat out. He can eat out all he wants. Yeah, like that's gonna happen.