No matter who is elected to the presidency on Tuesday, there are still some fundamental things that will still be true come Wednesday morning.

Our pastor showed us these wonderful truths from Romans 15:13-33 during the evening service Sunday. I thought I would share them with you. As Pastor Thompson pointed out, these are not in order of importance, but in the order in which they appear in Scripture.

1. Our joy and peace will still be in believing.
2. The Holy Spirit will still be the power that works in us.
3. We can still be filled with goodness, knowledge and admonition.
4. God's grace will still be active.
5. We will still glory in Jesus Christ.
6. We will still be able to preach the gospel.
7. Things still won't be perfect in the United States either.
8. We will still enjoy the company of fellow believers.
9. We will still be able to minister to one another.
10. We can still pray.
11. God can still deliver us from those who do not believe.
12. God will still be with us.

So if your candidate doesn't win, please remember that God is still in control. The Bible says that God still rules the rulers, no matter who they are; and whatever happens, it is part of God's bigger picture.

It is VERY important that every eligible Christian in the United States make it to the polls Tuesday and vote their Christian values. If you live in Iowa, the Iowa Christian Alliance has a chart that shows how the candidates stand on Christian issues. I didn't have time to look one up for the other states, but I'm sure there is one available. This one does have the presidential candidates on it, as well as the Iowa senators and representatives for the federal level.

A young couple moves into a new neighborhood.

The next morning while they are  eating breakfast, the young woman sees her neighbor hanging the wash outside.

'That  laundry is not very clean', she said. 'She doesn't know how to wash correctly.  Perhaps she needs better laundry soap'

Her husband looked on, but remained silent.

Every time her neighbor would hang her wash  to dry, the young woman would make the same  comments.

About one month later, the woman was surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband: 'Look, she has learned how to wash correctly.  I wonder who taught her this?'

The husband said, 'I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.'

And so it is with life.  What we  see when watching others, depends on the purity of the window through which we look.

I will agree with most anyone that prescription drugs are way too costly in this country. The government thinks so, too, and in their feable attempt to "fix" the problem, has placed regulation on drug company marketing funds beginning January 1.

I discovered this on my way home from a Taking Control of Your Diabetes conference in Des Moines this weekend. I rode up with a health care provider from town who was going as well. She and I attended different morning sessions as caregiver and patient, and we shared some of the information we learned on the way home.

One of the things we talked about was that the health care folks are spending what's left of their marketing money great guns right now because come Jan. 1 they will not be allowed to do so. I like the fact that I won't be seeing nearly as many commercials encouraging me to "Ask your doctor about Drug X" without ever really finding out what Drug X is supposed to be for, but the new regulations is also drying up the samples that doctors often use to help those of us without insurance stay on prescriptions we could not afford otherwise.

My case in point, I had a terrible time controlling my blood sugars. Even on the generic meds, I could not seem to get them below 150. Granted, my lifestyle needs some serious changing, too, and we are working on getting that exercise squeezed in there. However, the doctor put me on Actos, which is a new type of drug that's only been around about 10 years, which triggers my muscles to absorb more of the glucose in my system. This drug has no generic as yet, and costs $250 for a 30-day supply. There is no way I can afford this with the other medications I am on, so the doc has kept me supplied in samples for the past 2 years. She has also been able to keep me on samples of Lipitor, which runs $80 per month and also has no generic. Samples of both of these are drying up.

There have been rumors for a few months now that Actos will be available in a generic form sometime in 2009. This was confirmed at the conference this weekend. It's going generic because Takeda, the drug manufacturer, is coming out with a new drug for diabetes next year and will allow the Actos to go to the generic manufacturers. The doctor and I were hoping to stay on the samples until it went generic, but when I called her yesterday for a refill, she said she hasn't anymore and isn't going to get anymore.

So, a program that physicians have used to help patients is now discontinued because the government wants to regulate their marketing, not thinking that those samples are part of marketing.

The good thing for now is there is one other drug in the same category of Actos, and the doc has samples of that left. So we are going to try Avandia for a while and see how that goes. If she runs out of the samples, Avandia is only $140 per month instead of the $250. It's steep, but still better than the other. I will start on the Avandia tomorrow and see how it works. If we run out of the samples before the Actos is available, then at least the Avandia is $110 less than the Actos. Hopefully it works too. It's supposed to do the same thing with the triggering the muscles to accept more of the glucose. Actos is supposed to be better for your heart than Avandia, but like hubby said, I am relatively young yet and don't have any heart problems at the moment. I'm hoping for it to be a stopgap until the generic is available.

I just wonder how many more things the government is gonna mess up in their attempt to reform health care in this country.

I wish McCain's ad showing other people claiming to be Joe the Plumber would go further to explain how Obama's plans will hurt small businesses, which employ more than half of the workers in the United States. While there are big corporations that hire thousands of people, there are hundreds of thousands of small businesses like mine that employ the majority of Americans.

I planned on not blogging much about politics, but on this one, I just feel like I have to help inform others. Obama claims that he will not raise taxes on small businesses "making" less than $250,000 a year. He's very careful in not stating whether that's net or gross, but it turns out he is indeed referring to gross.

We have owned our business for nearly 13 years now. Last year was the best year we have ever had, and we just cleared the $500,000 mark on our gross revenues. What Obama, the attorney, doesn't understand, is that the majority of that revenue goes right back out the door to pay for the cost of goods sold, payroll, utilities and rent, the cost of leasing equipment, etc. I think the most gross profit the business has shown at the end of the year has been $7,000.

I need to clarify that John and I consider ourselves employees and we do cut ourselves paychecks, which comes off the gross profits. Even still, we manage to live on (I hope my husband forgives me for making this public) $48,000 a year between the two of us. We cannot afford to buy our own health insurance now because of health issues we developed back when we were making even less per year, let alone be forced to pay for health care for our other employees, too. In the past few years, we have managed to add Aflac to the benefit at work, which is better than nothing, but still not a true health care plan. It would cost us over $500 per month per employee to get each of them on some kind of real health care plan, and that doesn't include their families. Group health care requires 75% participation from employees. When there is only 4 of us (we had 7 at the beginning of the year), that means that we all have to participate because John and I are married.

Republicans have been trying to get a Small Group Health Care Plan going for years now, unfortunately, the Democrats would rather see universal health care. Ask the people in Canada and the United Kingdom how great socialized medicine is. Most of them will tell you horror stories of not being able to get decent treatment, waiting months on end for an appointment with a specialist while your disease progresses further and further, etc.

I don't think either of the candidates has a health plan worth tooting a horn over. I think we'd be far better off to bring down the costs of seeing the doctor and paying for prescriptions than we would be to have the government pay for everyone's. I pay my own way at the moment, paying $100 here and $50 there on some of our bigger medical bills. It would be a whole lot easier to do if doctors couldn't get away with charging $500 for an emergency room visit that they didn't even spend a total of 15 minutes with you. That doesn't include the hospital or lab bills that came along with it, too.

I think I've blogged too long, so I'll step off my soap box for now.

Tonight we found the kind of reality show my husband can really get into. He has put up with me and my fanship of "Survivor" and "The Amazing Race" and even "Rich Bride, Poor Bride." Tonight was the premier of Hulk Hogan's Championship Celebrity Wrestling, definitey my husband's kind of show. It was kind of funny. I half-heartedly watch his WWE programs, he half-heartedly watches my reality TV shows, but tonight, we both watched CCW.

The premise of the show is that they take washed up celebrities (like most celebrity reality shows) who learn to wrestle from "retired" professional wrestlers. Hulk Hogan, his old NWO partner Eric Bishoff, and wrestling manager Jimmy Heart judge how well these wash-ups perform the moves. The team who does the best has immunity, the other team has a member voted off.

Tonight, former teen pop star Tiffany went home. Danny Bonaduci and Trischel from MTV's "Real World: Las Vegas" actually did pretty darn good in the ring. Their moves looked really great.

I suppose we'll be watching it again next Saturday night.

It seems like there is so little time in my life anymore for messing around on the computer outside of work. Lots of things have happened this past summer, the biggest of which was a really big scare when we had to take my husband to a hospital in Kansas City on our way home from a visit with my family in Arkansas. John was feeling nauseous and when I took his pulse, it was racing. At the hospital we discovered is blood pressure was sky high and since getting back have been on a mission to exercise a few times a week. We bought new bicycles and ride the bike trail around town at least twice a week.

So, where I was already finding a hard time squeezing in Xanga time, it got worse. I now have a laptop, so I might see if I can't blog and watch TV at the same time or something on the nights that we are watching television. We'll see. I do miss Xanga. I have been peaking at a few people's sites, though not too many.

A blessing we've seen from the high blood pressure thing is that we have been spending more time together outside of work. Our marriage seems to be doing better and we are having fun together again. Last weekend, instead of riding the bikes, we took a little drive to Dan-D Farms outside of Knoxville, Iowa and went through the corn maze there. He has two mazes in his corn field, an easy one and a hard one. We opted for the hard one and ended up spending two hours in the corn. It was fun, though there was a point where I was whining about how it wasn't so fun anymore. I was getting tired and thirsty and needed to pee. At the whiney point, we were making our way around in a bunch of circles. The trail we needed to get out on was nearly invisible because of the angle it took behind another row of corn and where we were standing. Once we found that, we managed to work our way out rather well. We were smarter by then and looked for the "hidden" trails. The farmer said it was about 4 miles of trail (and of course, that didn't count our back-tracking on ourselves). It was a fun way to get exercise.

This is John playing with one of the Three Little Pigs right outside the corn maze. The piglets were so cute. They were just like little dogs, wagging their tails and following people up and down the fence for attention. There was a little straw house, a wooden house and a brick house, but the pigs were out sunning themselves instead of being inside the house.

They also had a corn canon hooked up, but they were charging a dollar an ear to shoot that thing off. John said he wasn't going to spend money to shoot ears of corn.

Below is a photo of him walking through the corn maze. It got hot in that corn. I liked when we came to the big open areas where we could catch a breeze. At least it was pretty windy that day so there was a breeze to catch, otherwise I think I would have died in that corn. I was extremely thankful I wore a T-shirt and had left my jacket in the car.






Finally, I have a photo of me with my new hairstyle. I went to Cost Cutters after church on Wednesday and had them cut it off. It was long enough again to donate to Locks of Love. I had tried to go before church but they were shorthanded and very busy and I didn't have time to wait. I made it back after church about 15 minutes before they closed. I told them I realized they were about to close but I'd give them a good tip if they'd stay late to finish me up. I knew I wouldn't be able to make it back before the weekend. They said they'd stay. When they rang me up, they only charged me $12, which included an eyebrow waxing. I looked at her funny and she said, "The haircut is free when you donate to Locks of Love." I thought, how great is that. God really allowed for me to give them a good tip and not cost me an arm and a leg. I still paid what I would have for the haircut and a normal tip and it made the stylist extra happy, too. Now if I can just keep working out long enough to get rid of this stupid double chin.

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?

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.

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.