HICKORY FLOORING

I have been slowly reading Francis' Chan's book, Crazy Love. So many people have said how much they have loved it and have been challenged by it. I haven't made up my mind yet. I can be easily overwhelmed by guilt. Overwhelmed by all the ways that I fall short when it comes living out an authentic faith. One of the things Chan talks about is living within our income, or even better, living within the median income. That's around $40,000. (Well, it was when he wrote the book and I didn't double check his figures) He was talking about living within that median income and giving the rest away. Wow! Now that's a concept. So it's been on my mind. There's no doubt I spend too much on stuff I really don't need. Take the grocery shopping thing. My cupboards are full and I hit the grocery store for more, before I've even finished off what I got last week. Probably should refigure that. Then this afternoon we finally got new flooring for our "fireplace" room. Now I wonder if somehow we couldn't have gone a different, less expensive route so we could give more to where there are huge needs. It's easy to justify redoing the room. Much harder to put off something for self...

And in other things. I have not been blogging as much here I guess because of all the writing I've been doing lately. If you're interested here are a couple of links. The newspaper article comes on Wednesdays and if you're a fan of the Le Mars public Library I ususally post that.
http://www.lemarslibrary.wordpress.com
http://www.lemarssentinel.com

On Blizzards, wind and other such winter joys

I headed to work early this morning. After all we'd gotten more snow and the wind was blowing to beat the band! I was leaving early, though, because I had to open the doors for our cleaning crew. Ooooh, it was a really awful drive. Getting on and off of hwy 60 was a bit tricky since I couldn't tell if there was any traffic coming or not. Once I was in town, though, it looked like every thing was clear and fine. I settled into work. Phone calls, grants, sad news about county funding, etc etc... Then I start getting information about the fact that my little snowstorm illusion (i.e.that being in town made it fine) was just that-an illusion. Schools called off. Patrons in to describe blinding whiteouts. Husband telling me to get a room or head home..now! I think I've mentioned before that I have promised myself not to drive in blinding blizzards anymore. But I headed out anyway. It was worse than my trip down there. Oh boy. This is turning into a very long winter.