Truth, legalism, and lies

It's really easy to write about the things that make me laugh, or ponder, or go "hmm". Its easy to write about cool insights I get from God's word, or from an experience I've had. It's really hard to share some of the deep work that God is doing in my life right now. But I'm not being honest with myself or with anyone following along on my journey if I don't.

This past Sunday night I tagged along with my friend Dorothy to her small group meeting (though God may be calling me to attend regularly and make it mine too). This group of folks contains many leaders in our church in whom God is also doing deep spiritual work. I've been a few times and I know some of the people pretty well from being involved at various levels of leadership myself. This week the group leader suggested we pray over each other and share where we think God is leading us on our next step of the journey. As we went around the room sharing this, I noticed that a good handful of people are feeling God calling them to step out into a new area of ministry or of helping people. It was interesting to hear these glimpses of everyone's journey. And yet, my heart was sinking inside of me. I was feeling jealous of the things God has been calling my fellow leaders to. Why?

Because at this season of my life, God is calling me to hide myself away in him - not to hide from everyone, but to do only those things which He has clearly called me to do and to spend the rest of the time reading my Bible, praying, blogging about my journey, and taking care of my family. This is a lot harder for me than it sounds. I am an extrovert. I crave people's company. I used to be the very definition of "if you want something done ask a busy person". In college all my friends recognized me by the way I used to tear across campus full tilt on the way to my next class, meeting, activity or what have you. My schedule was so stuffed I barely got any sleep, and yet I thrived on it. When I got out into the work force I always ended up staying late to finish just one more task. The common refrain from my coworkers was always "Are you still here? Go home!" I had mentally rewritten Descartes and my subconscious credo became "I'm busy, therefore I am." Or maybe it was "I'm needed, therefore I am."

Then I had a child. But still I was determined to be involved, so I took him everywhere. Then I had another child, which made things a little trickier, but still I was involved. Then I had a third child, and my world came screeching to a halt. Once your children outnumber your hands you need to reevaluate how you're living your life.

There's a prayer that we prayed a lot in the Methodist church I grew up in - John Wesley's Covenant Prayer which has a stanza or two that keep haunting my mind just now...

"Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee
Exalted for thee or brought low for thee
Let me be full, let me be empty"

Yeah. Be careful what you pray, even as kid - if you mean it.

The Truth - I am saved by Christ alone through faith alone.
The Legalism - I must prove I am saved through my good works.
The Lie - I am only worthy of Christ's love if I do the "few" (yeah, just a few - husband, 3 kids (one with special needs), house, set design team, personal Bible study, blogging) tasks he has assigned me perfectly.

See. I know it's a lie. And still I believe the enemy's whispers.

And the biggest lie of all? The one that says "if the whole point of being hidden away is to deepen your spiritual life then why have you hit a glass ceiling?" The enemy has a whole quiver full of those arrows and shoots them at me on a regular basis.

Literally, I feel like my spiritual life has run up against a glass ceiling. I can see where I want to be, but I can't get there. I don't know what I'm missing, or what I need to pray for. And just the moment my ADD brain seems to focus in on the problem, my kids clamor for my attention or a household task stares me in the face.

In my better moments, I can see with my spiritual eyes that my struggle is as old as time and the enemy has no new tricks under the sun. My favorite analogy is to liken it to Kurt Vonnegut's short story Harrison Bergeron. In this futuristic world, everyone has been made "equal." The smartest, strongest, most beautiful people have been made to wear various handicapping devices to bring them down to the level of the lowest common denominator. In this way everyone is alike - and no one rises above any other. But the whole world has become bland and boring because no one is allowed to excel at anything.

The enemy is afraid of me, wants to handicap me, make me ineffective. Since he can't take away my salvation, the next best thing is to take away my effectiveness. My head knows this. But my heart doesn't always.

Standing in the middle of my bedroom, unshowered, my hair pinned back helter-skelter, wearing day-old clothes, surrounded by mounds of dirty laundry and toys everywhere and a sick child home from school interrupting every train of thought - I feel utterly unworthy of God's love and not even threatening to a mouse, let alone satan. It feels true, even if it isn't.

I am not sure how to get past this - thus, my spiritual glass ceiling.

Learning to rest in God is a harder task for me than any actual physical task.

Did all my warranties expire?

I'm having a little problem with entropy this week. Or maybe with chaos theory, I don't know. All I know is that everything keeps breaking around me and it's getting annoying. Yesterday my Facebook page was having fits at me and the answering machine is on the fritz. Today the shelf that holds the computer keyboard just broke off with no warning (on my feet - ouch!). I'm sitting here typing to you with the keyboard on my lap (which in itself is no big hardship, but then there's nowhere to put it when I'm done).

I think that stuff is just not made with households with kids in mind. The answering machine was fine until my toddler decided that it would be fun to play with all the buttons. First he erased the announcement message. Now every time I try to re-record one, you get this weird buzzing/roaring/distortion thingy going on over top of what you recorded. And yes, last night we unplugged everything except the power source so there shouldn't have been any other interference. So now our new message is "Hi! You've reached the Smiths in distortionland - please leave a message - bye!" I love my husband, that was his idea! And there it will stay until we either figure out the problem or get the gumption to go look for a new one (which we're reluctant to do because the phone part works just fine.)

And the keyboard shelf? Well, let's just say that someone should have known better than to hang a laminated plywood shelf from two thin brackets on two tiny bearings and expect it to last in any normal household. You know, where people have children who lean on it and pets who sit on it and put cups of coffee on it and bang into it when someone forgets to slide it back under? Maybe I should ask Brian to go to Home Depot and get 2 sturdy brackets to re-hang the shelf. It's times like this I hear my dad's voice in my head going "They just don't make things like they used to!" No Daddy, they really don't.

So now I'm kind of tiptoeing around my house thinking, okay, what next? I'm telling you, those laws of thermodynamics just get me in trouble every time.

Variety is the spice of life

It seems to be hard-wired into my personality. Sometimes I like this. Sometimes it's my downfall.

Craving variety allows me to deal with the ever-changing landscape of my son, Christopher's behavior. Having a child on the autism spectrum automatically ensures variety in the life of the parent - who tries frantically to teach him to accept the variety in his life because and before it causes him to have a meltdown.

Love of variety allows me to accept my many and varied mom-duties, and the last minute changes to them that come from raising 3 small children.

It is not terribly helpful for my housekeeping skills.

My absolute least favorite housekeeping chore (and the one I need to do most right now) is the ever-popular sort 'n toss. Useful for ridding one's house of clutter, but in my opinion the most boring and tedious of chores - I have neither the luxury of thinking about something else nor the intellectual stimulation my brain constantly craves. I have to really think about what I'm doing, but it's not an interesting kind of thinking.

I am determined, however, to avoid the mistake many people make - that of moving to a bigger house to house your clutter, or paying for a storage unit. The chore was elevated to monumental proportions after my dad died and my mom sent a whole bunch of the stuff that was cluttering up her house to mine. Thanks, mom. Granted, some of it was my stuff to begin with. Some of it I'd like to toss sight unseen - except I don't want to toss something actually important.

Now, what would be helpful would be a place where I could move all the clutter to just temporarily in order to give myself room to sort it in. Because you know, if you have young children, everything you get out must be put away somewhere by the end of the day. If not, your efforts will be for nil.

I'm trying to simplify my life. I'm tired of moving clutter around and stuffing it in closets. But I still have to live here while I do it. I can't just take the house apart and leave it in a shambles. Making decisions as I sort is the tough part. Ever notice how some things defy categorization? I need a great big This Is Part of a Thing That I Have Seen the Other Piece But I Don't Remember Where closet/box/bin for all the bibs and bobs of toys/clothing/tools/dishes that are lying around like so much flotsam and driving me crazy.

Too bad the TARDIS isn't real. I could really use a "it's bigger on the inside than the outside" closet around here.

Useless, really

This morning I was surprised to wake up to snow blanketing the cars. This meant of course I now had to leave myself an extra few minutes to brush it off before dashing the kiddos off to the bus stop.

As I was busily tossing coats in the direction of the kids and grabbing mine, I tried to figure out what to put on my feet. I glanced over in the corner and wondered if I had time to do up my snow boots (lace-up, but they stay on really well). Nah, I'll just grab my clogs I thought. There's not that much snow (maybe a 1/2 inch) there flat and comfy, no big deal.

Hmmm.

Now, the clogs have this felt-bottomed ribbed gumsole thing going on for the sole of the shoe. I thought it would give me traction. Turns out the weirdest thing happened. As I was going along, the very wet slushy snow stuck to the bottoms of the shoes and kept building up! After a few minutes I found myself skidding along on about a half inch of packed on icy snow that was stuck directly to my shoes. I had to do this funny shuffle walk to try to scrape it off so I wouldn't fall down at each step.

These shoes that are normally so comfortable had become utterly useless and downright dangerous. God chose that moment to show up and poke me in the brain. Gave me a micro-lesson, if you will.

How I really needed those shoes to provide safety and traction and instead they picked up everything they touched and became useless and dangerous. Kind of like some people I've known. You know the type - they become psychic lint brushes that drag all their bad experiences around with them. In a crisis they're utterly useless because there's nothing about them that makes them stick.

And then I wondered - how am I in a crisis?

Do I have anything abut me that makes me stick and get traction and dig in and be useful? Or do I pick up everything along the way to the point where I just go skidding along being useless to myself and everyone around me?

Food for thought, that.

And next time I'm grabbing the snow boots!

Well that's a relief!

I got a little panicked by something I read on Katdish's website about the fact that Facebook owns the rights to everything you publish on your site. I had had a notes link to this blog. I have gone through and deleted all my former notes (and while I'm sure they have archives I could argue that the fact I deleted them indicates my changing my mind).

So then I wondered about Blogger's rights. Turns out, Blogger considers all content published on your own blog to be your own intellectual property. Whew!

So unless Facebook really wants to publish a book about my grade school years and various musings I should be safe in the event that I ever want to. Just goes to show you my Daddy was right when he said make sure you read all the fine print.

Just in case you're interested

I've added a follower's link - finally. One of these days maybe my techno skills will be equal to the 21st century. This is not to try to give myself a pat on the back. I recently realized, when my friend Mad God Woman started a new blog and had a followers link that duh, of course I wanted to follow and how nice for her to make it so easy for me to get updates.

So....just in case you've been salivating for an easy way to get updates, there ya go. No pressure or anything.

Stay tuned - maybe one day soon I can convince my husband to get a digital camera that works without an elaborate sacrifice to the camera gods beforehand - and then you'll get pictures once in a while. I know, you're on the edge of your seat just thinking about it.

The black shoe saga

It started a couple of weeks ago. I was getting ready for church one very early Sunday morning. That day I would be doing a lot of backstage work (including set moving) and thought maybe I should dig out a pair of nice, sturdy comfy black lace-up shoes (as opposed to my usual clogs which sometimes fall off when I'm dashing around). I remembered that I had a cute pair of black suede lug sole sneakers which I'd gotten back in the 90's when a friend of mine was working in a shoe store. Hadn't worn 'em in a while since it's easier to have slip on shoes when you're a mom with little kids. After a bit of digging around on the closet floor I found one them, and was getting ready to tear the closet apart looking for the other. Then it occurred to me perhaps I should slip the shoe on that I had to see if it would be comfy for running around all day.

Well.....

Not only was it not comfy, it was so tight I could barely stand in it. I used to wear these shoes to work when I worked in a bookstore on my feet all day, and now I couldn't even stand to tie the laces. Yikes! So this is what they meant about a woman's feet growing with each pregnancy. I thought they were exaggerating, but it obviously crept up on me unawares.

How could it creep up unawares, you ask? Well, since for about 8 of my years in the work force I worked in retail, most of my shoe wardrobe before children was various sorts of pumps, flats, loafers, and boots - all on the rather dressy side. I bought a couple pair of comfy clogs after our first child was born and wore them till they pretty much fell apart. For a while I'd pick up a pair here and there as needed, from somewhere inexpensive like Payless or Walmart. The problem I've discovered recently with that is my feet won't tolerate cheap shoes anymore.

I figured it was time to actually make the effort and go to a real shoe store and invest in a pair of decent black shoes that I could walk around in without hurting my feet. (I've got 2 or 3 pair that look just fine but kill my feet if I walk around a bunch.)

Now I'll let you in on a little secret. I must be the only woman in America who hates shoe shopping. I don't know why, but from the time I was a little girl, my feet have always been hard to fit. When I was little, it was because my feet were really small and slender so all the shoes were too wide.

But now? I used to wear a size 5 or 6 when I was in high school. The shoes I just bought are an 8 1/2. Do you really mean to tell me my feet have grown 3 1/2 sizes just from pregnancy? That's a shoe size a child! Thank goodness I didn't decide I wanted a dozen or so children or by now I'd be wearing the shoe boxes.

Or is something else going on here? My dad used to tell me stories from his various other jobs he had before I was born. One of the places he worked as a time study engineer was a shoe factory. He used to talk about how very carefully each part of the shoe was crafted, how it was measured up exactly against the proper size shoe last (the 3-D form). And how all the shoe sizes for all the factories were standardized to those same lasts. A woman could walk into a shoe store and ask for her size in any style shoe and it would fit.

My mom and I have similar size feet. Between us we have had shoes over the last 20 years in sizes ranging from 5 to 8 1/2. Have her feet grown 3 sizes too? Me, I think that shoe sizes have become more like food label portion sizes - a recommendation only. An average. Otherwise how can you explain that when I go shoe shopping I need to start at my actual size with the understanding of going up or down as much as a size and a half either way?

And I'd really like to know if anyone test drives some of these shoe styles on actual feet. Some of the shoes they're making for ladies these days don't even stay on your feet long enough to walk to the mirror, let alone around town. Maybe you're just supposed to stand around and look fabulous in them. I must have tried on a hundred pairs of shoes today. Only 10 or so were worth doing a test walk - only 5 could I actually consider wearing all day. Do most of the women I see around town actually find these shoes comfortable? Or do their feet suffer their vanity? I used to be able to do that, but I can't anymore. It's one thing to stand all day in pumps that slightly pinch. It's quite another to grocery shop and chase a toddler in less than comfortable shoes.

About 3 hours and 100 pairs later, I finally found 2 pair worth taking home. The new ones are an 8 and an 8 1/2. The ones I wore to go shopping are a 7 1/2. Go figure...

And what did you do today?

Well, the highlights of my day were racing from Supertarget to the gas station to the CVS all before bus pick-up time. Then I concluded the day with chasing a wayward kiddie pool down the street (it was real windy in our neck o' the woods today), reading part of a dictionary to my daughter for her reading time, and filling out 3 classes worth of kiddie Valentines.

All in a day's work.

All for Jesus.

If God told me what I'd be doing today I surely would have laughed...

The only problem with Facebook (and the internet in general)

I've got a bazillion Facebook requests piling up on my page. I don't want people to think I'm ignoring them, but when your blog, blogroll, email, facebook page, etc. starts to back up it suddenly becomes a question of update your electronic world or live your life. In an ideal world I could take a few hours each night to check in with everyone and write notes, and send plants to Green Patch and everything. In reality my son's homework is taking 3-4 hours each night and I'm still sick with this cold and need whatever extra sleep I can grab.

It's a balancing act for sure - I never did learn to juggle real well....

Further thoughts about women's roles

So one of the books I picked up at the library is called, "America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines" by Gail Collins. It's good so far. One thing she says right near the beginning that really grabbed me was this line, "The center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it."

Smacked me right between the eyeballs, that did. Yep, that would describe my life in a nutshell. Having been a child in the 70's and a teenager in the 80's, I was taught that the sky's the limit and I could do anything I set my mind to. Of course, they failed to tell me that while a woman can have it all, she can't have it all at once. And some things are incompatible no matter which way you look at them. And some things are true whether you want them to be or not.

Like having to take the job that's available because it pays the bills. Or having to put off graduate school indefinitely because even 2 salaries only just let you squeak by each month. How about the fact that a woman's body has a certain biological clock ticking that all the advances of science cannot stop even though they've set it back a few years? If a couple wants children then it's still the woman who has to carry and give birth to them. And then make the decision to nurse or bottle feed, with all the ensuing hormonal consequences. (Or go through the adoption process with all its fees and paperwork and pitfalls.) Or that if you have children and don't make enough money to have the luxury of a nanny and housekeeper the stay-at-home parent will become responsible for the home and all living creatures in it.

Those "realities" were quietly swept under the rug during my schooling years.

So I did what was, at the time, a very countercultural thing. I went with my heart. When the man who would become my husband stepped onto the stage of my life, I made the conscious decision that my relationship with him was more important that any of those other goals. My parents were older than all my friends' parents and I was an only child and I'd decided long ago that I did not want that for my child(ren) if at all possible. So I was 25 when I married - young for the 90's. And though I've sometimes wondered what my life would have been like if I'd chosen differently, I've never regretted it.

It's funny though, whereas my mother and grandmother's generation fought for the right to work outside the home, now I find myself defending the right to stay in it. Or having to prove to people that I still have a brain even though I don't have an "outside" job (well, most days I have a brain....some days I don't).

And all this is made harder by the fact that I'm an extrovert. I need people around to bounce thoughts and ideas off of - I process things on the outside. I need that sounding board, that feedback. During my short stint with our worship band, I learned that trying to sing, or play, and stay together and in tune without a properly working moniter is impossible. Without your monitor functioning, you can't hear yourself - and if you can't hear yourself, you can't make those necessary adjustments. Without people around to bounce all these ideas off of, they all go flying around my head and clutter up my brain. And so began the need to write it all down.

But then, of course, there's the guilt and the perfectionism. As in, if I'm the stay-at-home parent then my worth is decided by how well I perform (or not) that job. (Or so society tells me.) I spend my days striving for balance between my children's needs and my own, cleaning the house and living my life, supporting my kids' interests without neglecting mine, and somewhere in the middle of all this figuring out where God and my spiritual walk fits in. Theologians would say that of course my relationship with God comes first and everything should flow out of that. Theoretically I believe that - practically speaking those theologians have never had to do a dozen tasks before even seeing their first cup of coffee in the morning. And do those tasks sick and with 5 hours of sleep.

I've had people call me a good mom, and supermom, and say that they see me as a very gentle nurturing person. But I don't feel that way - most days I feel like a volatile, emotional trainwreck trying to hold this mothering thing together by the skin of my teeth. Trying to parent my autistic son without neglecting the other two or going crazy, trying to keep a house clean while battling crippling allergies to dust, mold, and pollen, trying to get enough intellectual stimulation to satisfy my seeker brain, trying to figure out what God wants me to do - ending up most days feeling like the guy who tries to keep a dozen or more plates spinning atop little sticks.

Many days find me wondering how God could have entrusted the care of these 3 beautiful little ones to one so scatterbrained, emotional, and random as myself. I pray constantly that God will fill in the gaps where I drop the ball (which lately seems daily).

It's nice to know, as I read this book, that many, many American women before me struggled with this same dichotomy.

Quick! Before something else happens...

Aaargh!!!

Okay, I've been trying to post for several days now and the universe is conspiring against me. This morning alone I've had to find the tools to unlock the bathroom to let the cat out (nobody would admit to pushing down the button), put away DH's tools that he left all over my washer, and fix the stupid internet connection on the computer! GAaaaaah!!!

Pant, pant.....okay...I'm okay now...really.

Anyway....

Sunday morning found me the only guest at a lovely little pity party I was throwing for myself. You see, yet again, after a busy week taking care of everybody but myself - as soon as I stopped - I got sick. Not really sick. Not, get me to the doctor sick. Not, please God kill me now sick. Just - annoying sick. Sore throat, swollen glands, achy all over and feeling like God just made gravity stronger. Sick enough that if I managed to force my body to function and push everyone out the door to church I'd be very sorry later.

So, we stayed home. And I lay there with my thoughts. It wasn't helping that Sunday was just gorgeous like the first day of spring and the rest of the family was outside enjoying it.

I thought about how it seems like all I do is housework and errands and shuttle children around. I thought about my college days and the career that never really got off the ground because I stayed home and helped my mom care for my father after his open heart surgery instead of moving out. I thought about how even though I've always wanted to be a wife and mother how many days I feel like I do neither very well. I thought about how hard being a SAHM is and how moms have to do so much every single day and rarely get credit for any of it. I thought about how sometimes I feel like the pioneer women must have felt - all alone with their children and their work - not having time or anybody around to socialize with.

Well... that line of thought triggered the researcher in me. I started Googling around now curious about just exactly how life would have been for my pioneer sisters before me. So I read a bit about that, and then got curious about motherhood and homemakers throughout history.

And ran up against a startling thing. I had this thought in mind that someone, somewhere would have written a web site (or book, I still like the kind with paper pages) about women's roles throughout history. And well, no. They haven't. Now, I didn't exhaust all my possibilities yet. But really these days, if someone has researched it you can usually find at least a reference to it somewhere online. Nope. Couldn't.

Lots of references on recent history - pioneer women, Victorian age women, pre WWI women, lots and lots from the suffragette movement to the present. Decent amount of stuff from the middle ages. But from the 1st century to the 15th almost complete silence. A few references under the Dark Ages - very sketchy.

Pre 1st century you can only get if you look up a particular empire, i.e. Rome or Greece. You mean to tell me that in the 21st century no one has put together a comprehensive history of women and their roles? I found this rather unbelievable so I gathered up the baby and went about it the old fashioned way. We went to the library. I asked the nice reference librarian my question. She found it very valid. And she (with all her sources and interlibrary stuff) could find precious little. Feeling a bit nonplussed and confused I hiked over to the women's interest section and browsed the shelves. Hmm. More of what I saw online - lots of stuff from the 1700's onward - nothing before that. I emptied half the section with what books I could find and returned home to start learning.

I'm by no means done. But what I've gleaned so far is fascinating. I suppose this should have been intuitive, but I found out that throughout time (what I could find of it) society has always tried to put women in little boxes, dictated what's expected of them, told them what to wear, placed the ultimate responsibility for home and child rearing on their shoulders regardless of where they were, expected them to get all their work done regardless of conditions or resources, and took it for granted they would work even when sick, tired, or weak from hunger themselves.

In every society in every age that I could find, the women picked up the slack no matter what the men were doing. And during times of war, famine, and crisis - they did more.

Well, I didn't exactly feel better - but I sort of did. I feel like maybe my life drives me crazy sometimes, but at least I'm part of a long line of my sisters before me. They did the work because it had to be done and no one else was doing it.

Mabye I need to look into this further. It really frustrates me that I can't pull out a few books and share with my daughter our history across time as women. Maybe someone has done something about this. Maybe I'm supposed to be that someone - I don't know.

But now my curiosity is peaked and I'm on a quest. And on a quest for knowledge, I'm like a bloodhound....

Random list of absurd things from my week

What a busy, bizarre week it's been. So many things crammed into each day that I ended each night so utterly spent that I couldn't think one more thought straight if you paid me.

I've rediscovered that my ability to learn things quickly and to have a little knowledge of a lot of things comes in very handy once in a while. This week, on top of all my normal mom duties, Simba had his neutering appointment and Connor came down with the nasty snotty cough-y cold that's going around. So here's a random list of bizarre things I've done or been asked to do this week...

1. Spent 2 1/2 hours sewing the 6 patches on Charlotte's Daisy Girl Scout smock because the only working iron I could find is broken and so couldn't be set on the "highest no steam" setting needed for iron on patches (which never work for me anyway)

2. Spent 1 hour hand stitching the lining back in Charlotte's winter coat where it pulled away after washing it once.

3. Dragged 3 small children and 1 cat to and from the vet's office twice because of the necessary drop off and pick up times for the appointment. Maneuvered said children all around the (amazingly) small waiting room, appointment rooms, etc. while keeping them from annoying/playing with everyone else's pets.

4. Have managed to feed us 3 dinners this week even though I needed to go to the grocery store on Monday and still haven't gotten there. Thank you McDonald's. Our tummies appreciate you even if our arteries do not.

5. Had to administer medicine to 1 small boy and 1 small cat. All baby creatures hate medicine. Getting it in them according to the instructions never goes well. Small boy does not like inhaler mask over his face to breathe stinky medicine for 10 seconds. Small cat does not like yucky pain killer meds squirted in his mouth (and now I need to wait until his next meal so I can put it in his food0.

6. Albuterol inhaler has one very strange side effect on my son. Half an hour after he takes it, it makes him a chatterbox. Seriously. This is the child who uses his words only when necessary now going around babbling like crazy - weird - wonder if the drug company know about this? Maybe I've just accidentally stumbled on the cure for children who are slow to talk?

7. Last night it was so cold here that (inside my house with the thermostat set 65F) I ended up going to sleep wearing pajama pants, sleep cami, nightshirt, hooded sweatshirt,and socks while sleeping underneath flannel sheets, thermal fleece blanket and down comforter. My husband laughed at me when I got out of bed and pulled on the hooded sweatshirt with the hood up and climbed back into bed - I didn't care - I was finally warm.

8. I just yesterday discovered how to use the italics feature. Can you tell?

9. Our little kitty might have had to come back a eunuch but he is now sporting a rad tattoo on his ear (which I'll post a pic of as soon as I figure out where DH put the camera).

10. It is still so cold here today (12F at 10AM) that my fingers are now too cold to keep typing and I must go warm them on a cup of coffee.