All in a day of loafing

Today was a blessing. After the busyness of yesterday, I was able to stay at home for President's Day. Played Blokus several times with the kids, did some routine cleaning around the house with Jenette and the kids, and did a little internet research about buying tires for the van. (My physical work and activity today was limited to bringing in wood, cleaning out the ashes from the woodburning stove, wrestling with Jenna and Joy while Jenette was gone, and grinding two cups of grain so Jenette could make cookies tonight - yum!)

Ran into this link

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/problems/studies/15PassVans/index.htm

on a lawyer's (ambulance chaser) website about 15 passenger van rollover crashes. All stuff I have heard before, but I was reminded of the importance of good tires. I got the oil changed the other day at the Express Care here in Ozark (awesome guys there!) and they told me, "you need new front tires!"

So now I am fretting about that a little. Tires are not cheap these days, and we have just this month finally after 16 years of marriage established a realistic budget that we are committed to so we can get out of debt completely in two years.

Jenette has never been the big spender of our family, she is content to live with nothing and she would even give that away if I would let her. This new, bombproof budget only works now because I have started using online banking which enables me to force myself to commit the money to double our minimum debt reduction payments.

February has been a great success for our new budget - Jenette spent the final $45 for the month today on a few groceries for the rest of the month. (Including more grain for me to grind.)

As anyone who has lived committed to a budget knows, it is things like new tires that are the budget busters. So we are going to get two new tires in March and wait until April or later for the back tires. We also need a new serpentine belt, and we are paying for the processing of a side of beef with March's budget. Should be interesting.

The boys and Jordan wanted to watch Star Wars tonight, so we watched Return of the Jedi (they call it episode 6). Of course the hokiest line of all the movies is when Leia says to Han, "hold me." Gag!

If Leia had a blog, she probably would have written something like this:

Today I found out that Luke was my brother (did I actually kiss him on the lips?) and that Darth Vader was my dad. Talk about a wierd day. Then I was so overwhelmed with emotion that all I could say to Han was, "hold me." Can you believe it? How corny. Oh well, not as corny as my hair-do.