Twilight Zone

Ugh....Seriously? A little bit of reality would be good here, don' t you think? Sorry I can't elaborate....It's just bizarre!!

Psalm 23 Video

Obama's proposed tax changes

You can verify a lot of this here:
http://money. cnn. com/news/specials/election/2008/index. html


INTERESTING DATA JUST RECEIVED ON TAXES

Please spread the word. This is something you should be aware of so you don't get blind sided. This is
really going to catch a lot of families off guard. It should make you worry.

Proposed changes in taxes after 2008 General election:

CAPITAL GAINS TAX

MCCAIN
0% on home sales up to $500,000 per home (couples). McCain does not propose any change in existing home sales income tax.
OBAMA
28% on profit from ALL home sales

How does this affect you? If you sell your home and make a profit, you will pay 28% of your gain on taxes. If you are heading toward retirement and would like to down-size your home or move into a retirement community, 28% of the money you make from your home will go to taxes. This proposal will adversely affect the elderly who are counting on the income from their homes as part of their retirement income.

DIVIDEND TAX
MCCAIN 15% (no change)

OBAMA 39. 6%

How will this affect you? If you have any money invested in stock market, IRA, mutual funds, college funds, life insurance, retirement accounts, or anything that pays or reinvests dividends, you will now be paying nearly 40% of the money earned on taxes if Obama becomes president. The experts predict that 'Higher tax rates on dividends and capital gains would crash the stock market, yet do absolutely nothing to cut the deficit. '

INCOME TAX
MCCAIN (no changes)

Single making 30K - tax $4,500
Single making 50K - tax $12,500
Single making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 60K- tax $9,000
Married making 75K - tax $18,750
Married making 125K - tax $31,250

OBAMA (reversion to pre-Bush tax cuts)

Single making 30K - tax $8,400
Single making 50K - tax $14,000
Single making 75K - tax $23,250
Married making 60K - tax $16,800
Married making 75K - tax $21,000
Married making 125K - tax $38,750

Under Obama, your taxes will more than double!

How does this affect you? No explanation needed. This is pretty straight
forward.

INHERITANCE TAX

MCCAIN 0% (No change, Bush repealed this tax)

OBAMA Restore the inheritance tax

How does this affect you? Many families have lost businesses, farms, ranches, and homes that have been in their families for generations because they could not afford the inheritance tax. Those willing their assets to loved ones will only lose them to these taxes.

NEW TAXES BEING PROPOSED BY OBAMA

New government taxes proposed on homes that are more than 2400 square feet.

New gasoline taxes (as if gas weren't high enough already)

New taxes on natural resources consumption (heating gas, water, electricity)

New taxes on retirement accounts, and last but not least....

New taxes to pay for socialized medicine so we can receive the same level of medical care as other third-world countries!!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Faith is:
Not believing that God can,
it is knowing that God will!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Wasp Update

Johnny sprayed the nest yesterday and this morning there were 13 dead wasps on the porch. He had killed 3 wasps already. That is a lot for one small nest!! Yikes!! We probably will treat the nest again tonight and then remove the nest tomorrow... Hopefully that is the last of the little critters! Whew!!

Head's up...

Stress? PMS? I don't know but I'm definately agitated! Don't cross me! ;-) Nah I'm not that bad...or am I? ;-)

Fight for the babies!!

http://http//article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=N2NmMGNkMTdkZWJkZWRkMjRkNjY5NjllNzZlYjkyNmY=

How can anyone look at a cutie like that and then consider blocking a bill that would allow these angels to be tortured and killed? Makes me sick at my stomach! It's not even about the issue of abortion. It's about the value of life. A living, breathing being. Obama can rationalize it all he wants, but blocking the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, not once, not twice, but 3 times is reprehensible. I disagree wtih many of Obama's stances, but the one I cannot in any way shape or form endorse is infanticide. Maybe we should just call him King Herod. Should pregnant women and mothers with infants flee to Eypyt too?

Obama might be able to do the presidential job, but he is anything but presidential. Protecting the rights of a nation - but only for those who were full term pregnancy babies - no - don't think that's how it was listed in the job description. With 2 little ones of his own, it boggles my mind how a father can be oblivious to this. He is worried more about the life of the mother receiving less value than that of the unborn child. That really has no relevance in the scenario that the Born Alive Infant Protection Act talks about. At that point the life of the mother and life of the baby are no longer intertwined. The baby is alive and deserves the same medical care as anyone else.

The rest of the issues up for discussion are important, yes, but they have people that will discuss and decide their outcomes. A baby cannot fight for itself. Barack Obama has no intention of fighting for it. The job is ours. Fight with your vote.

DIE WASPS DIE!!!

There is a monstrous wasp nest right outside the door on John's back porch. I believe I referenced this in my freak out session in a prior post. John sprayed it tonight....one got inside....hopefully the rest will wither away. Might need to retreat tomorrow. Yuk!! They need to just go away!!!

RMBC is Playoff Bound!!

My sweetie played awesome yesterday! They had a double header and beat the first team by a landslide. John was batting awesome - line drives down the third base line. He pitched well both games and then got the game winning RBI in the second game. I don't know why I put the smurf up there - it's all in fun :). They are number 2 for the season and have playoffs starting in the next couple of weeks. He will be excited if they play fall ball too, but we are waiting to see if we have enough people. So yay for RMBC!! Yay for Johnny!! :)

Time to get Serious!!!

Home away from home.... For the wedding...To relieve stress...For health...For future... Here we go!!

Double Header Games Tonight

Because the last 2 Mondays were rain-outs, John has a double-header tonight. Hope they play well and injury free! He is thinking of playing in the fall too - if there are enough guys to do so....

Can I handle all this? I'm trying....

I am so stressed now - I just want to cry. It's not like things are not making progress - but things are just so tight right now and things are pulling from all directions. We all worked so hard on my place this weekend and there is still more to do. Not much but some. We are all meeting over there Tuesday night to finish up. Then Wednesday the A/C guys and hopefully the pest and dishwasher guys will be there... so maybe we can still get it listed this week. I'm praying it sells quickly. Like REALLY quickly. Moving is stressful.

To make matters worse - I freaked out last night because I was trapped within 2 feet of a wasps nest at waist level that was right on the doorframe of where I needed to be. I don't remember the last time I have been so scared. Maybe that's a little irrational 0r maybe a lot irrational. Maybe it's that time of the month but I don't freaking care. When I am out on the patio where the only exit is back into the house and they are at waist level on the door frame - about 10-15 huddled around that nest.... Yuk. 1 got inside - but quickly met his demise.

I keep telling myself that after October things will start to settle down - at least financially. Breathe in....Breathe out....Breathe in....Breathe out.

Fantasy Football Draft Time

It's Fantasy Football time! J0hn picked Romo. That's the only one so far that I have any interest in. I'm still learning to be a football fan. :) Got the new Cowboys hat and ready for the season. The draft is on hold until later this afternoon so we can actually leave now to go focus on finishing up my place!! Hopefully I'll be making a phone call to Susie on Monday to get this thing listed!!! Dad reminded me that I put a contract on the condo after it had only been listed for 2 hours - so hopefully I will have the same result!! It looks really nice...and we are leaving enough stuff there to stage it so it doesn't so much look like a bare house. I'm so over doing this every weekend and I need the money from the sale!! Pray it comes fast! Ok - we are outta here!!

Jewelry!! 1 down 5 to go!!

I tried my first hand at making jewelry last night. Thanks to HeatherKJ for the design idea... Took longer to do one set than I thought it would but that was me trying to get the hang of it too... Kinda hurts your fingers a little bending all the wires after a while...but nonetheless, it was fun and I'm feeling accomplished...

For Sale....Seriously? Seriously.

This weekend we are going to finish up my house so hopefully it will be ready to get listed next week!!! Yay!!! :) I'm so ready to get this process underway! Just a few things left to pack up - empty out the food in the kitchen and start sprucing the place up a bit. Hopefully touch up paint will suffice rather than having to paint all again.

Where do I move from here? An apt in John's complex! October is just around the corner too...Thus will end my ties with the lease company. If I end my agreement with ADT then too - then all business expenses should be wrapped up and it will finally go away. Talk about one big mountain overcome...then I can chip away at some other goals and maybe in the next year or two we can purchase a new home. October will be a big month!! Also my baby niece will be born!! I can't wait!! I've already planned a long weekend to drive to Pensacola to see! :)

Among all this craziness - I have wedding plans to make:

Cake, Limo, Invitations, Making Programs yadda yadda yadda.....I've kind of lost the wedding momentum...Come back, come back!!

Feeling Lost...

Anyone missing Lost? I don't want to wait until January!!! LOL :) Going to have to re-watch some DVDs or something to get me through!! :) This time last year I hadn't ever seen an episode so John and I watched them all from Season One through the current season....Got used to watching them so regularly....waiting is torture!! :)

Nice to have the bed all to yourself huh?

I don't know...I just thought this was an adorable picture.....Makes me sleepy just looking at the cutie!

Crossroads

So confused..All an illusion or...?? Hurry up and wait...I guess is what we will do.... Not make any decisions right now....I'd like to wait while someplace far away like on the picture below...Just go away from it all....7 months till Tahoe!!

Seriously - stop with the bad news.....

Ugh - Just found out that my pastor resigned. What do we do? He was going to marry us? Wait it out? Find a new venue? At 7 months out - this is not good timing... I hope whatever is going on in his world that brought him to this decision will be resolved... Sigh... :(

Not in Kansas Anymore...

What a wonderful trip we had up to Kansas this last week! When we got up there on Wednesday, we went to Jared and got my ring cleaned. By then Julie and Doug were in town and we all met up at the hotel. We went to Bob Evans to eat and then went over to Applebees to visit with Mom, Dad, Jill, and Marilyn. Thursday, we had Carol's bridal luncheon and then celebrated Mom's 60th birthday. Friday, Jill, John and I went with Carol to get her make-up done and then went to the Plaza to Winsteads to eat. Winstead's is where my grandparents were when they heard about Pearl Harbor. It is also the place where Julie and I thought Mom and Dad had their first date though now they are trying to change their story on that!! After a classic burger and shake it was off to the hotel to change and head to the hawaiian wedding. It was a cool evening and a beautiful wedding on the lake. It was fun to visit with all the family!! Saturday we had a family reunion out at Tim's complete with swimming, football, volleyball, photos and more!! We stayed til 1:30am talking and goofing around. Yesterday we all had breakfast at Grandma's and John and I left to come home. Julie and Doug flew out earlier that morning. It was so hard to leave knowing that this won't ever happen again. All of us cousins won't all be hanging out at Grandma's....The way it looks now will be way different- Grandma's perfectly placed treasures won't be there...even if I do end up making another trip there in the next year. It's different now. Grandma is gone. An era has ended. I miss Grandma so much. She would have loved all the festivities.... I looked around trying to memorize every part so it stays ingrained in my memories....the smells...the decor....all the heirlooms....the house full of all the family...the family tree... John was really sweet trying to get me to stop crying as we drove away talking about making new memories with what will be our family... I wonder if it will be possible to try to get all the cousins together every 5 or 10 years....Several said they might make the trip down for our wedding, which would be fun if they do... Surely with that much notice we can try to put something together....Whether it is back to Kansas, up to DC, down to Texas....or a cruise or something else entirely....I guess it's just a matter of want to.... Sigh...So many wonderful things ahead....but I don't want to let go of my wonderful memories....Part of me is still that little girl that loved making graham cracker cookies with Grandma, playing cards with Grandpa and pool/ping pong with the cousins in the basement.....sifting through games my mom grew up with and playing with the player piano.......swinging on the front porch swing....looking at photographs....trying on Grandma's jewelry....hiding out from the grown ups...Don't make me go....not yet.....

The Written Word

1) Bold those you have read.

2) Put an asterisk next to those you started but didn't finish.

3) Italicize those you intend to read (or have started and intend to finish).

4) The ones you LOVE are Green.

5) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible*

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

6 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Sprinklers, Peas, and Bees, OH MY!!!

What a day!! John and I were spending the weekend out in Athens housesitting for his parents. We decided to shell some of the peas from their garden for them. Little did we know it was the bee haven!! Since John had to water the peas anyway, and because it was sooo hot, we decided to pick peas under the shelter of the sprinkler. Needless to say - we were DRENCHED!! What a sight it must have been. But we got quite a few peas for them!!

When we got cleaned up, I was able to work on my paper projects for the weekend. I got about halfway done with Carol's programs. Saturday night I finished the recipes and the goodie bags for this next weekend.

So tired now....going to bed. A good weekend but a long, tiring one....

Tick Tock Tick Tock

So much to do - so little time. Thought we would have a lot of time to get some projects done by coming out to Athens for the weekend. We did some work around the house, and now are about to get cleaned up to go visit John's Granny and hang out with her for a little bit. This afternoon we need to do the goody bags for the reunion, the recipes, and put together Carol's programs. I was going to try to do my aisle runner while we are out here, but silly me forgot to go to Kinkos to get an enlarged version of the monogram. So...the aisle runner will have to wait a while. I need to sit down with John and narrow down what kind of wedding cake we want and also confirm that the invitations we selected months ago are still the ones we are going to use.

We only work 2 days this week and then we head to Kansas. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone - who knows when or if this will happen again. In those 2 days I need to find a good gift for my mom's 60th... Does Jared have the answer?