Lisa Zahn

Hard to believe it, George turned 49 on April 2. I'll tell you a secret to always feeling young: marry a guy 11 years older than you! Even so, I always say he has more energy than me anyday, and looks pretty darn good too. We celebrated his special day over two days (actually, going into his dad's birthday on April 3) because there was just too.much.food to be eaten. On The Day he came home from school/work with half a Key Lime Pie from Florida that a fellow teacher had brought him. So naturally, we all had to have a piece of that right away. Never mind the banana cake I'd just taken from the oven. That evening, we sat the kids in front of the electronic babysitter with the just-released on DVD "Alvin and the Chipmunks" in the player and homemade pizza on their plates. And we took off for a date! The first in oh, how many months? At least six. First "I" took George (he paid) out to McCann's, a newish pub in town for a beer. Our neighbor Chris is the ...

The church we've been attending lately, Unity of St. Cloud , is part of the larger Unity School of Christianity . I actually had an earlier connection to them in college when by some coincidence or other I subscribed to their publication, The Daily Word . It is a devotional "magazine" with a positive spiritual message, really an affirmation, and a short Bible passage to read each day. I liked it so much in college, and it helped me through many a rough patch Freshman year, that I gave my Grandma a gift subscription for years too. I just wanted to let you know about it today so you can read it online each day if you want, as I've been doing. Today's message is about "COMFORT" and the verse is from Psalm 119: “Let your steadfast love become my comfort according to your promise to your servant.” —Psalm 119:76 I remember from Seminary that those words "steadfast love" come from the Hebrew word "hesed". I remember the definition(s) o...

I've been learning some things about economics lately, but I'm still a finance moron for the most part. Still, today I ran across this article linked on The Automatic Earth blog that I now read daily. Here's the link for the article on its original blog, Market Ticker . I think this guy really does a good job laying out the issues and calling the Fed/Treasury to task for its recent actions. I don't know if he's right or not, but I thought it would be worth alerting others about so you can read it and make up your own mind. There's a petition you can sign if you wish. (Of course, I'm all for impeaching Bush. Have been for a long time, for one various reason or another!)

And she got 10 shiny dimes last night in a Ziploc. Funny the tooth fairy uses Ziploc baggies!

Well, it's April 1 and the "Freeze Yer Buns" challenge has officially ended over at Crunchy Chicken's blog . But um, it's still cold here in Minnesota. I asked George last night if that meant today we could turn the heat up to 70 degrees F. again. But of course we wouldn't! For one thing, I can say that it is possible to get completely acclimated to your house temp. being 65 degrees when you're home and awake (which is really lower in our drafty house--we probably spent most of the winter at 62 deg.). And I can't sleep at night if the temp. is above 58 deg.--just gets too hot with the flannel jammies and wool socks, the wool blanket topped with heavy down comforter, etc. And secondly, we have enjoyed and NEEDED the savings on the utility bill too much to raise the furnace temp. now. In the peak cold months of Jan. and Feb., which were really cold this year, we saved at least $40/month on our gas and electric bill over last year. This, while prices rose...

I forgot to bring the camera along on the exciting(!) field trips we took this past week. Bowling with the homeschool group on Friday, sugaring at St. John's University Arboretum's Maple Syrup Festival on Saturday. Those were fun, and exciting(!), events. But, no photos. So I had to take photos of our always interesting daily life... And here's a visit we had from a Big Green Worm. Big Green Worm entertained us with some keyboard playing. Elijah and the cat were not impressed. But then the cat tried to eat the big green worm from the inside... Oh, the highlights of our field trips: Rose used the gutter guards very advantageously as part of her bowling strategy and scored an impressive 81 and then a 91 on her second game. Elijah, with no gutter guard use at all, went from strikes to gutter balls and back to strikes/spares with not much in between to score both games in the mid 50 point range. The best part of the Maple Syrup Festival was the ice cream with hot maple...