Please keep my mom (kowpatty) in your prayers. She's on a mission trip to the gulf coast of Mississippi. She and the folks that are with her could use some prayer for a safe and spirit-filled journey. I'm sure she is going to return with lots of stories and pictures to share, but I want to share the one she told me Saturday night with you. She's gone all week, so I'm sure she won't mind. Things are definitely not back to normal there yet, even nearly 6 months after Hurricane Katrina made her way through.

Aside from being lots and lots to clean up yet, and trees looking like toothpicks from the devestation that hit them, Mom said lots of people have not returned back to the area yet. I think she said someone told her that close to half haven't returned. This has left businesses in a great lurch as they cannot find enough people to work for them.

Case in point, the mission group stopped to eat supper around 7 p.m. Saturday night. They found a Cracker Barrel and thought that sounded good after a long day on the road. When they tried getting in, they found it was closed. I don't know if it was an owner or another local who told them that most places are only open during daylight hours right now because they can't get enough help to run the places.

I forgot to ask her where they eventually ended up getting supper from. It may have been a convenience store, or maybe they found a McDonald's open, I am not sure.

It's amazing how things we take for granted in everyday life can just be gone like that with one natural disaster coming through.

I've been fighting a migraine all day. I missed Sunday school but happened to make it to church. By the time church was over, my head was aching so badly it was making me sick to my stomach. It's only on one side of my head though. I hate when that happens. I'm sure it is from stress. It just barely popped its ugly head up a few days ago. Tylenol doesn't do a thing for it and I was out of Excedrin. Then I thought I would buy the lesser-expensive store version of migraine pills, but I ended up buying the equivalent of Tylenol PM instead.

Luckily I got my laundry done yesterday afternoon. While there is housework to do, it's nothing that can't wait a little bit. I can take it in chunks as the week goes on, if necessary. Loads of fun stuff happening at work. I got a new web client Friday. I present a concept for a brochure for a non-profit tomorrow and hope they accept. I also accepted a job to make custom graduation announcements for a college graduate. The printing side of things is picking up and I am extremely excited about it.

I need to go defrost some pork chops. I am planning on making sweet and sour pork for supper. It's mostly done in the oven so it won't be terribly difficult, aside from chopping veggies, pineapple and meat.

A whole 'nother week starts tomorrow. This week our son will turn 17. I've tried to call him today but he's not home and his cell phone has been busy. It's a fast busy signal, which makes me think he's out of prepaid minutes. When I asked him a couple weeks ago if he needed a refill, he told me he did not, so I hope it really isn't that he's out of airtime. I'm perfectly willing to help pay for the airtime, since we are the ones who bought him the phone. I have something I want to send him for his birthday, but his dad thinks I should feel him out first and see if it's actually something he will want. I already think it is, but the dad wants to be sure. The only problem with the being sure is the gift isn't sent yet and the birthday Wednesday. Also, I'm afraid it would spoil any surprises, but then John wouldn't care about that because to him, a birthday is just another day.

I've had a crazy two days without an employee. Her being out sick like this has made us realize that we MUST hire at least another part-timer - hopefully someone flexible who can come in if someone else gets sick. I wanted to hire two or three part-timers in the first place instead of one full-timer so we could work around schedules of people wanting to take vacations or needing days off that weren't convenient for the company. John argued with me on that saying he thought it would be harder to hang on to part-timers because people want full time jobs. Well, not everyone wants a full-time job. I don't know, but we've got to do something.

God was good to me yesterday and made sure things went at a nice slow pace so I could nearly finish a brochure I'm designing for a non-profit organization. I need to have it ready to present on Monday, and with the shareholders meeting this Saturday, I was beginning to panic that I wasn't going to be able to get it done on time.

On another note, we got a brand new business cutter yesterday. That thing is really slick! You load in your 8x11 sheet of paper with 10 business cards on it and it just slices them apart in two easy moves. Really neat. Boy does it save on the labor of cutting cards with the guillotine cutter.

I'll leave you all with this final thought for the day. This is something I got in e-mail, and we've seen similar ones before, but it sure makes sense to me.  The e-mail said you wouldn't understand if you were under 40. Well, I guess since I AM 40, I understand it perfectly. Sure sounds like my house growing up. The part about needing to have accomplished something to feel proud about really hits home with me. These days, the schools are all about making you feel good about yourself. While I'm all about teaching self-confidence, I think we have done our children a great disfavor by not allowing them to feel ashamed when they mess up, either.

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in icepack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now..

Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

I am still around, I promise. I'm just superdy duper busy these days. It seems like I never have time to catch up on my SIR. I do miss you all very much.

Between planning healthy meals and actually preparing them, and work, working out and quiet times, I'm getting very limited on my computer time anymore. Couch potato time is getting pretty slim too, which I guess is a good thing as it means I'm more active in other places. I actually have 3 or 4 shows a week I care about seeing: Survivor, Grey's Anatomy and The Shield, and if I'm home on time on Friday night's, I like catching Ghost Whisperer, too.

As if I don't already have enough to do with the computer business, we are trying to expand into digital printing, which is actually more where MY background is. I majored in journalism in college, worked as a reporter for a few newspapers in my life, decided the politics of reporting sucked (but was hooked on that adrenaline rush) and tried getting out of it several times. I worked for an Army advertising office that did the advertising layouts for the sports, recreation and leisure activities on base. I did layout for a small "singles" newspaper and I was the editor of a corporate employee newsletter for a couple of years. I love doing layout and design. The job on the military base was my favorite because it had the most diversity in the projects I got to do. I (along with the illustrator) even won an award from the Department of Defense for a coloring book he and I designed to pass out to children whose parents were deployed in Operation Desert Shield/Storm. It was full of information about where mommy/daddy were and the culture of the people there.

So, this side of the business is starting to pick up. And I LOVE it. But it hasn't picked up enough yet to hire someone else to do the less than mundane tasks I now do as the business manager/bookkeeper. It will happen. My husband is helping me keep on task with the bookkeeping end of things, even taking over some of those tasks for me, so that we can develop an end of the business that will be a joy to me.

We actually managed to get our server site up last week so we can start hosting web pages. I haven't advertised yet because we are still working on the pricing scheme, but I've had two people call this week wanting me to do web pages for them.

God is good. I just have to keep my eye on the goal. If all works out well, I will soon get to manage a team of people designing flyers and posters and tickets and newsletters and web pages to my heart's content.

In the meantime, I will continue to rise between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m., grab a workout and/or some quiet time, shower, eat breakfast, and be at work by 6:30 or 7 a.m. I will work in the store until 6 or 7 p.m., come home, fix supper, do quiet time, and watch a little TV before falling into bed at 9 or 9:30 p.m. (10 or 10:30 on Sundays and Tuesdays when Grey's Anatomy and The Shield start at 9).

The new season of Survivor starts tonight - HOORAY!!!!

Survivor Panama - Exile Island. I believe this is the 3rd time Survivor has gone to this chain of islands in Panama. The first time was Survivor: Pearl Islands and then immediately after for Survivor: All-Stars. I look forward to watching my favorite show again.

Ay, ay, ay. So much to do and so little time to do it in. Planning menus, preparing healthy food, and excercise have taken over my computer time. I am so far behind on my SIR it's not funny. But I've lost 2 lbs. this week.

John is not so fortunate. I do not understand why, but he gains weight when he eats the food that is on my diet. If he eats junk food like potato chips and cookies and candy bars, he will lose, but not if he eats the same foods I do. It makes absolutely no sense. I feel guilty not cooking for him if I'm cooking. He thinks it's because the carbs are so controlled. "It's all bulk and no substance," he says to me.

Finally got finished with the end-of-year books. I've now got to prepare for the stockholders meeting in a couple of weeks. First step is to get notices out in the mail today. These reports shouldn't be as hard to do.

I switched hosts for our business web site yesterday. I was told it would take 12 to 24 hours for the DNS change to go through, but it really only took like an hour or two. So our work e-mail was down for just a bit with the transition. Hope we didn't lose much between servers. I'm going to call my old host today and tell them to turn us off, and hopefully they'll be nice and send back out any e-mail sitting on their server.

Things are still busy at work. I have more to do than I have time for. We could use another part time person but then I'd have to make the time to do interviews again (YECK!!!). It's so time-consuming but it's a catch-22 situation. You need the help because you have so much to do, but you don't have the time to hire the help because you've got so much to do.

Right now I am LOVING my job, though. I am not overly fond of the bookkeeping side of the house, but since we started the printing side of the business and I can get my hands into the creative stuff more, I'm much happier, even with the neverending to-do list.

They are now saying the fire may have been arson. At first they thought it was the furnace, but now they are saying it started in two places and that's why they had such a hard time battling it. We had 5 fire departments here fighting this fire.

I had a photo of the next day, where firefighters were still spraying down the smoldering ruins, but I can't find it on my hard drive now. I'll try to find it later but now I've got 10 minutes to get to a meeting.

Later. Have a great day.

Edit: One of the ladies in my Bible study group lives a few blocks from the Nazarene church. These are photos she managed to take Saturday night, probably from an upstairs window. Another girl in our group is a member of that church. The TV news this morning said members will attend other churches until this one gets rebuilt.

Here you can see the fire just under the rafters (it was a domed sanctuary).

Here the fire is spreading...

I think this is probably about the time we drove past, around 9:30 p.m. The firefighters had been battling this for over 2 hours by this time. When we drove past, flames were shooting probably 20 or 30 feet in the air. You can kind of see the circular shape of the structure.

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The church that burned down on Saturday night was NOT due to my birthday candles. The church fire actually was reported to 9-1-1 just as we were starting the party. We made sure we knew EXACTLY where the fire extinguisher was before we lit the candles on the cake because we didn't want two churches in town burning down on the same night.

Speaking of that church fire, how sad. That is probably the 3rd, maybe 4th, largest church in town. Our little town of 11,500 has more than 50 churches. I drove by the Nazarene church on my way to church yesterday (as did a lot of other people from the trail of cars I was following) and the place was still smoldering. I wanted to cry. They held their services in the community auditorium yesterday. I have a friend who attends there, but my web-based e-mail has been down so I haven't been able to drop her a note. We did pray for the Nazarenes yesterday. It was a big, beautiful church. I'm sure they will have some soup suppers and other fundraisers to help pay for the rebuilding.

I had a G-R-E-A-T birthday. I slept in until 7:30. I got all of my bills paid and still had a little money left over. Hubby and I went out to breakfast together and did not even talk about work while we were there. It was nice to spend some time alone with him away from work.

Not lots of people at my birthday party tonight, but it was a nice party. All of the local in-laws showed up, a couple people from church came, my best friend and her husband were there, and my employee and her husband were there. The employee's husband wasn't there long, though. He's a reserve firefighter and they had a call that the Nazarene church was on fire. He didn't get to stay 10 minutes because he had to go to the fire. That was shortly after 7 p.m. when he was called. We drove as close as we could to the church about 9:30 and there were flames shooting 20 or 30 feet high above it. They called for the aerial truck from a city about 30 miles away. After more than 2 hours of battling this fire, they could not seem to get it under control. The sky is still glowing red over in that direction. Please pray for that congregation. They will not have a church to worship in tomorrow morning, I am certain. I pray that the firefighters are able to keep the fire from spreading to their other buildings. They are one of the bigger churches in town.

I am going to snuggle with hubby and try to stay awake long enough tonight to let him sleep with his first 40-year-old woman - hehe. In the card he gave me today he wrote "Welcome to the over 40 crowd."

This is my last night to be in my 30s. At 6 minutes until 6 tomorrow morning, I will turn 40 years old. I will sleep in and take it easy tomorrow, then go to the party my SIL has planned for me tomorrow night.

It has been an incredibly busy week and has just flown by. I have not had time to get online hardly at all, except to place orders for work and track an eBay auction for work. I broker eBay auctions and this is the wildest auction I've had yet. I've been selling modified toy tractors for a guy here in town that adds things to the boxed toys to make them more like the real models. Today we sold a toy John Deere for $255. WILD!!!

I'm heading to bed to cuddle with my hubby and watch the rest of Monk, and celebrate the last night of being in my 30s.