I am considering giving up something for lent. I am ashamed to admit that I have not been very good about sticking to daily devotionals lately, not since I quit teaching Sunday school actually. Our Sunday school lessons had a week's worth of devotionals built in to prepare for the week's lesson. I left the quarterly teacher's guide at the church when I left, thinking it would be there in case someone else decided to pick up teaching the class.

But this morning, I did get up and do my devotional before jumping on Xanga. During today's devotional, it talked about fasting as a means of separating yourself from the things that separate you from God. I have a few things that get in the way of my relationship with God, and unfortunately, Xanga is one of them. On the other hand, Xanga does provide me a means of staying in touch with other Christians. But is that an excuse for the voyeurism I do on other people's lives?

So, with Lent approaching next week, I am considering giving up Xanga for Lent. I'm also considering, as an alternative, giving up take-out food during that period and putting the money I save from it toward a charity or a mission of some sort. Both will be very hard for me to do. The thought of giving up Xanga all together makes me very sad, but then I think if it is separating me from God, I should give it up.

Too bad it isn't possible to give up work for six weeks - HA!

In all seriousness though, I would like your prayers as I struggle with this decision. I have a week to decide what I'm going to do. I feel led to give something up for Lent (even though I'm not Catholic).

I'm heading into work early on a Saturday. I have GOT to get the bookwork for 2006 caught up and turned in to the accountant so he can do our taxes. We are required to have Schedule Ks to the shareholders by March 15 and in order to do that he needs to get the taxes figured and in order to do that, I need to make sure everything is entered into the computer so I can make him a copy of the file.

On top of that, our new point-of-sale program that we started using last year does some weird things to help reconcile cell phone sales. Problem with it is I haven't learned how to use that portion properly so there is lots to clean up on the Quickbook side of things. YIKES!!!

John also wants me to go with him to the Knoxville store sometime this weekend to work on some maintenance issues he needs another set of hands for. I'm hoping the guys at the Oskaloosa store today can handle things up front without my help. That would require that we not get too busy at one time today. I pray that folks come in at an easy steady pace instead of in a herds like they normally tend to do. If it's nice and easy, the employee will stay busy up front and not have time to come interrupt me, while he won't be so busy he'll need to call for assistance. We don't want customers walking because they have to wait, either.

Enough yacking - off to work!

Great. Xanga is crapped out again. I've tried commenting on someone's site and it won't let me. It now is also not letting read the rest of my SIR.

This is a photo I found recently while digging through the packed boxes at home. That's me with my dad and brother Jeff. I was trying to remember how old I was in this photo and I'm sure I was probably 5, which would have made Jeff 3 or 4. The chair we are sitting on is inflatable furniture. We kids thought that was so neat to have blow-up furniture. The set came with a chair, a sofa (or probably a love seat), and a coffee table. I think it might have also come with an ottoman and an end table, but I'm a little fuzzy on that.

The really nostalgic thing for me in this photo is the Shakey's hats. We LOVED eating at Shakey's. At the time, they had a band there. It was a hillbilly style band with a washtub bass and everything. I always felt special when we went to Shakey's for some reason. Maybe it is because Mom and Dad both let us feel like we were dining high with them.

No, my water didn't freeze again forcing me to rinse with soda, I just poured a glass right after finishing up in the bathroom and took a huge swig of it thinking it was going to be refreshing. It wasn't.

I don't normally drink 7-Up. When I was a kid I liked it ok, but as I got older, it lost it's dazzle for me. It was relegated to upset stomach days. However, I bought a bottle of it last month for the company party because my father-in-law usually drinks Diet 7-Up, but he drank tea all night instead. So I figured I'd better get rid of it, and the other night my stomach was a little queazy, so I opened the bottle. Now I need to finish drinking it before it goes flat. I do, however, seem to like it better this go around than I have in the past 10 or 20 years. I'm wondering if it isn't because it now has more lemon-lime flavor in it?

Gonna be cold again here today. It's warmer than the past few days have been, but we are expecting up to 5 inches of snow today. I guess there is something to be said about it being too cold to snow.

Was that a great football game or what? OK, truthfully, I wouldn't know much about that anymore, but I had a great time watching. I used to be into football before I met my husband. After listening to him grumble about what a useless game it was the first year we were together, I kind of got out of it. I have managed to watch 3 or 4 Super Bowls in our 15 years of marriage without listening to too much grumbling from him.

Today, he watched most of the game with me, outside of a couple of catnaps he took in the recliner. I thought it was sweet of him to watch with me. He'd say things like, "The quarterback for the blue team looks so young. I can't believe they put someone in with so little experience..." referring to all the crappy passes that were intercepted. Or when I'd come back into the room from checking on dinner, and I'd ask what happened, he'd say something like, "The white team is going to kick a field goal," or "The blue team has finally started to figure out that the white team really only has three basic plays."

I did have to listen to a little bit of his old mantra about grown-ups getting paid so much money to play a kid's game, and how they should make it a law that you should have to play the sport for every hour you watch of it. Finally, tonight, he came up with they should put pedometers on people and you can only watch so much television for every mile of walking or running you do in a day.

When I thanked him for watching the game with me, and I mentioned that I quit watching football a long time ago because he didn't like it, he did say that we have more than one television in the house. That may be true today, but it wasn't 15 years ago when we first got married.

I loved the halftime show, although Prince didn't exactly play his guitar in time with the music (i.e., he was playing air guitar). I was a little surprised that he performed so many of the old school songs, too - you know, the ones from my college days in the '80s when I was so much in love with him and went woozy at his concert - but that's probably why I enjoyed it so much.

I think my favorite commercial was the Budweiser ad with the stray dog that got a hero's treatment once he got splashed with mud and looked like the firehouse dalmation. It was cute. I also liked the one with the rabbit and the guinea pig trying to click the mouse (owning a computer store, of course, I would be a little partial to that one).

Which was your favorite Super Bowl commercial?

I woke up this morning a little before the alarm went off but I laid in bed until it did actually sound off at 6:30. After lots of rest yesterday, including going to bed before 10 p.m., I was ready to tackle the day - tend to some laundry, shower and eat in time to make it to Sunday school and church today. I've missed church and Sunday school the past 3 weeks either because of weather or illness.

This morning, we didn't have any clean washcloths in the bathroom cabinet when I went to take my shower, so I had to go down to the basement to get the towels out of the dryer. While I was down there, I started the whites that need bleaching. Once I had a hamper full of clean towels, I came upstairs, grabbed a clean washcloth and towel, and went to take my shower. I turned on the spigots and there is no water, just a hissing sound.

"Oh, no," I thought. We've got frozen pipes. I turned on the hot water and I got a hissing sound there, too. I could have sworn the water came on in the washing machine when I was downstairs. I went back down to check, and it had a small stream of water coming into it. Then it dawned on me, the hot water heater would have had water in it and that's what would have started in the machine in the first place.

So I wake up John, telling him we have no water and I don't know if it's a main break or what, but I didn't see any of  our pipes broken. He gets out of bed to help me out, because I desperately need a shower before I go to church since I didn't shower yesterday (I know, skanky).

As he's checking things out in the bathroom, I tell him the toilet flushed earlier, to which he reminds me it will the first time because there was water in the tank. "Oh yeah," is my response as I take the lid off the tank and see that there is only about an inch of water in the bottom of it.

I call the water department, who tells me we probably just have frozen pipes. He doesn't know of a main break and if they did have one, we'd still be getting some water (unless it's frozen, I'm thinking). "It is 12 below outside," he tells me. He dismisses me after taking my name, address and phone number.

John continues to think the problem is them because we have air coming through our pipes, thus the hissing sound. So he goes scouting all over the basement. He comes back upstairs to get a space heater. Apparently our pipes are empty on our side of the meter (which is in the basement) but the water department's side sounds full (he's tapping the copper lines with a hammer to hear this).

Less than 5 minutes (I honestly think it was about 2 minutes) after turning on the space heater, water begins gushing through my faucets in the bathroom, followed seconds later by gushing water in the kitchen. Yeay!!!! He's gotten them thawed out already.

I get to listen to Hubby grumble the next ten minutes about how stupid it is that the line comes into the house from outside at a 90-degree angle, and goes from plastic to copper at that joint, and how stupid someone was to install the line in such a manner.

But it's ok, because this guy is my hero. And with his tousled mousy brown hair, looks pretty sexy running around the house in his blue lounge pants and bathrobe, with his chest hairs peaking out over the top of the V. He has rescued this damsel in distress. And now that the water heater has had a chance to refill and warm up some more water, I can now shower and at least make it to church on time this morning. 

I finally took a Saturday off. It was great. I slept in until 8:30, snuggled with hubby for another hour, made a breakfast of biscuits, gravy and bacon. I love the frozen Pillsbury Southern style biscuits. They are so great.

Then we watched some TV for a while. I fell asleep in the chair again, so I guess I'm getting some much-needed rest today. I started a sinkful of dishes to soaking and will go clean up the kitchen here in a minute, as well as possibly finish laundry today so tomorrow I will only need to worry about church and meals. If the church is doing a Super Bowl thing, I may go to it. Hubby doesn't do the Super Bowl, so it might be fun.

Then again, as cold as it is this weekend, I don't know if I want to go outside any more than I absolutely have to. We have a bitter cold warning this weekend. It's 5° at the moment with a wind chill of -15°. I was debating what to make for supper, but after reading a few people's blogs, I think soup would be good. I've got lots of potatoes and onions that need to be used, so a pot of potato soup sound in order.

I always have to separate it out into two pots in the end. I grew up with a milk base in my potato soup and that's how I like it. I pour a can or two of condensed milk into my potato water. Hubby doesn't do milk products, so I have to separate the soup so he can have his with just the potato water. I had never heard of potato soup that wasn't milk based before I met him. We do like ours with chunks of potatos and onions, and lots of garlic and pepper.

How do you like your pototo soup?