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.

   I couldn't believe it when I heard this morning that young actor Heath Ledger died yesterday in his New York City apartment. He was such a talented actor and while I didn't like his choice of a few roles ("Brokeback Mountain" for one) I did admire his looks and talent. My favorite roles were the ones where he played pony-tailed hot-headed but humourous gentlemen like in "A Knight's Tale" and "The Patriot". How sad that he died so young. It just goes to show you that you never know when your time will come.

If you were to die tonight, do you know where you'd spend eternity?

Heath Andrew Ledger
April 4, 1979 - January 22, 2008

I had a pretty good birthday yesterday. The good wishes started on Sunday when several people at church gave me cards. One couple I am particularly fond of presented me theirs personally instead of setting it on the table where cards are usually left for people to pick up. He always calls me "kiddo." "Happy birthday tomorrow, Kiddo," he says. "You are going to be 21, right." We both laughed and I said, "Yeah, times 2."

On of my friends sent me a bouqet of very fragrant roses to the office. They make the office smell soooo good. We went to dinner last night with my in-laws, my best friend and her husband. That was loads of fun. The food was soooo good. There was no room for the free birthday dessert, so we didn't even ask for it. In hindsight, I wish we had and brought it home. I just love their white chocolate raspberry cheesecake. As it is, we still brought leftovers home. I had a captain's platter, which consisted of four succulent broiled scallops, three large crisp fried shrimp and two large fillets of parmesan crusted tilapia. MMMMMmmmmm. It was a really good time.

I was a little disappointed that not one of the kids called. I did hear from my sister and two of my brothers and my sister-in-law. All-in-all, it was a good day.

I needed a good day after the weekend we had. The tech area at work is in shambles at the moment. The employees called us Saturday morning to let us know we had no hot water at work. The cold was running, so John didn't sweat it too badly. We came up in the early afternoon, right before the store actually closed, with a space heater in hand and aimed it toward an outside wall where the water pipes froze last year. The landlord always hires the absolutely cheapest people to fix things and last year he didn't bother fixing it right when it froze then, apparently. At that time, his solution was to put a vent in the wall to help heat get up in there. It only took about 10 minutes of the space heater blowing before it thawed, and started spewing inside the wall, running out of that little vent and all over my tech room floor. We scrambled to get the boxes of paper and the computers up off the floor. It took John about 45 minutes to mop up the lake that it caused while I called someone for help.

I told the building manager I didn't want that same plumber out there because he obviously doesn't fix things right. She said she calls who the landlord tells her to call. I offered her my cell phone number so she could call me back as soon as she got hold of someone, but she said she was driving and didn't have the time to take it down. So I hung up with her and I called the landlord, who happens to live in balmy Florida now. I told him that I didn't want that same guy, and he said it was probably the only person he could get to come out on the weekend. Unfortunatlely, the whole building is on the same water line so the tennant in the apartment at the end would be without water all weekend if we waited until Monday, and that wouldn't be acceptable.

About 10 minutes later, someone shows up banging on the door. He says he's there about the broken water line, so we let him in. THANKFULLY, it's not the same guy that the landlord normally calls. I go back into the back office to deal with some other things while John deals with the contractor, who assesses the situation and tells us he's got his plumber coming over soon. Not long after the contractor's plumber gets there, the OLD plumber shows up. He's upset because he got called out to the job and someone else was already there. I'm saying, "Thank God," someone else showed up first.

After all is said and done, they discover that a huge part of the problem is when this old plumber (who, it turns out, the other plumbers in town refer to as Red Green because the guy has actually duct taped a water pipe before), when the old plumber replaced the water heater a couple of years ago, instead of cutting off the old line and tapping it into the new line he had to put in to connect to the new water heater, he simply shoved the pipes up into the ceiling, which put a bend in the pipes that run along the very-poorly insulated outside wall. Where the down pipe bows it now *touches* the outside wall, and picks up the frigid air and freezes.

We now have new water lines in - really cool rubber hose kind of lines that will swell four times their size before they break so the risk of bursting when they freeze is minimal. The new guy also put some of that gray foam stuff around the pipe so it's insulated. The old plumber last year just tore some of the insulation out of the wall and stuffed it around the colder area, basically rearranging the fiberglass insulation.

I still have a hole in my wall where the paneling was taken down to access the pipes. The contractor is supposed to be in today to finishe fixing it, and then we can put our tech room back in order.

The building manager came by yesterday while I was out to the bank. Apparently she's mad, too, because I called the landlord directly and he yelled at her because she called someone besides the guy he normally calls. These people also own a few Subway restaurants around here and apparently they've had some other plumbing issues because of this old guy. If she would have just told me that she had someone else she could have called in instead of telling me she calls whoever the landlord says to call, I'd have never bothered calling the landlord. John told her that's the reason I called the landlord. She sounded like she couldn't deal with it right away and was going to call the same old guy in. Now I'm waiting to hear back from the landlord and get chewed out for it. I'm wondering if his plumber didn't bill him for the call. I'm going to tell the landlord if he wouldn't hire the cheapest guy in town every time it would actually save him money because he wouldn't have to constantly have things redone.

Anyway, thanks to those of you who offered me birthday wishes. It was nice to have a good day in the midst of all that chaos.

I went to the dentist yesterday for the first time in 16+ years. Surprisingly, I had no cavities. I had a lot of tartar that needed cleaning, which has led to early periodontal issues at the gum line on a few of my teeth, but for the most part, it was a pretty good report, especially considering how long it's been since I avoided the dental chair.

I do NOT like going to the dentist. I never have and therefore have avoided it as much as possible. I can truly remember only two times going to the dentist when I was a kid. Once was in 2nd grade when I had 2 cavities filled, and once was in junior high. The dentist counted 4 fillings in my mouth, so I must have had 2 filled that second time. The last time I was at the dentist before this was to have my wisdom teeth removed. That was right after John and I had started dating because he was the one who drove me to the hospital and back. We will be celebrating our 16th wedding anniversary this summer. They didn't clean my teeth at that time, so it's probably been more like 25 or 30 years since they were professionally cleaned. Yet I have ZERO cavities.

The dentist did say that there seems to be an anomoly that patients with a lot of tartar don't usually have very many cavities. That leads me to wonder if it's because the tartar is covering the teeth where most of the bacteria that eats your enamel sits, and therefore protects your teeth. It will be interesting to see how many cavities I start to develop once I start going to the dentist for regular check-ups now.

For those of you interested, here's what my new ride looks like. This one is not of my actual car. I searched the Internet for a pic, but this is indeed what it looks like. The color is called officially Sandstone Metallic, but it's listed as beige on many websites.

Happy Birthday to Ann, my baby sister.

You truly are my gift from God!

Also happy anniversary (Jan. 11) to Ann and her husband Daniel. Our lives have also been blessed by his presence.

The Iowa caucuses have come and gone, and the political ads along with them. I'm thankful to not have to listen to politicians tell us why the other guys are not who we want to vote for.

This was my very first caucus. As I explained earlier, we've lived here nearly 12 years, missing the 1996 caucus by a couple of weeks. For one reason or another, I never managed to make it to one before this. I guess the Democrats and Republicans each run theirs a little differently. We attended the Republican caucus. They gave people the opportunity to speak about why he or she supported a particular candidate before we voted by secret ballot. They simply passed out slips of paper and we wrote down the name of the person we wanted to put up for president. Then, we had a few people count the names, and I got to be the one who called them in to the state.  It lasted a couple of hours between the speaking and the voting, and they elected delegates to represent our precinct at the county Republican convention and voted on whether to pass a couple of items up the chain - like supporting research for prevention of chronic diseases (which stemmed a lot of discussion as to whether it would include stem cell research) and whether we supported the state making our sheriffs issue concealed weapons permits if the applicant met certain requirements. Currently, concealed weapons permits in Iowa are completely at the discretion of the county sheriff. If we have a lenient one this term, he might issue them where a more conservative one may decide no one qualifies for a concealed weapon unless they are law enforcement. It was a bit of a debate with that one, too, particularly with arguements about if it were at the state level then there would be a database of who owned handguns and that much closer to taking away our 2nd amendement right to bear arms. It was interesting, though. We had more than twice the number of people show up than what normally do in our precinct, and we didn't get started on time because there were still 70 or 80 people in line to register when the doors closed at 7 p.m.

We did end up buying our Impala last weekend. I *love* it!!!! There are a few small dings in it, and one of the backlights in the dash board is out (the one that lights up the driver's side heat/air control) but otherwise, it's in great condition. It's getting excellent gas mileage and I do love driving it. The dual-side heat/air control is great because I'm usually hot and John's usually cold and now he can have the hot air blowing on him without it burning me out. I realize it all mingles in the end, but at least I don't have to have the heat blowing right on me. I am having to get used to being that low to the ground again, and the clearance is quite a bit lower than the Jimmy. I keep scraping the underside of the bumper on the ground when I come down a hill onto the flat ground. John says it's because I go to fast, but I practically crawled out of the Hardee's drive thru the other day and still scraped bottom.

We have given up on flying down to Texas to see the kids and grandkids. Even though I really don't want to put that many miles on my Impala that soon, John thinks it would be more cost effective this time to drive it down. In a way, that's good because I'm thinking we can plan a side trip to see my mom on the way. We haven't seen her in over a year now and I need some mommy time. My son, who is the daddy of the newest grandbaby, asked me today if we could plan to be there for his birthday. I asked him why it was so important that we be there for that and he said that he could not remember one birthday where his dad and I were around for it. He was 3 when his dad and I married and we moved away from Texas a little over a year later, so truly, I have only been there for one birthday. We always got the kids in the summer and the girls have their birthdays in the summer so we've been able to be with them on their birthdays at least a few times, but because Micah's is in February, we've never had the opportunity to have him since we moved away from Texas. It was quite a poignant request so I will indeed plan to be there for his birthday. It pulled my heart strings when he told me that.

My birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks. I'll be 42 and am starting to feel my age (if not older). I didn't have a problem with turning 40 a couple of years ago, but now it's bothering me just a little. I shouldn't let it. Having survived cancer, I should look at each year as a gift and not stress about how much gray is in my hair or how old my hands are starting to appear. I'm sure the only reason I'm not starting to see crow's feet around my eyes yet is that I'm fat and it fills in under the skin keeping those pesky wrinkles at bay.