What a fabulous weekend! We spent Saturday morning at our favorite place...the temple. It is always so inspiring. The peace and joy we feel is so wonderful...and it colors the whole day. We spent the afternoon at Reliant Arena with thousands of other people watching:

With Dave Ramsey. Totally COOL! This was our Christmas present from my family. We've read his books and listened to him on the radio, but nothing compares to seeing him live. He has an energy that fills the room and is totally inspiring. A lot of people have a love-hate relationship with him, but Brian and I love his program. Truth is truth, and his program supports what the Church has been teaching for years. Brian and I were already following his program to a certain extent, but Saturday's conference inspired us to speed things up and we have set a D-Day Date (Debt-Free Date) in October this year. That's right, no more school loans and no credit card debt by October...all we will have is a mortgage payment...how cool is that? We highly recommend his program, and if you can, see him live and in person...it's eye-opening!

Happy 2009! It's been a while, but we had a wonderful holiday. We spent it with family up in beautiful snow-covered Utah. We've spent the first part of the new year getting back into the swing of things with work and home projects. Our garage is no longer a pit of despair...we started off the new year right by de-cluttering and donating about a third of its contents to Habitat for Humanity. With all the remodeling we've been doing, there were several large items we had pulled out of the house that we know will be put to good use by that wonderful organization. We are finally going to put in our floor next month! No more cold cement underfoot! In preparation for the big install, I wanted to get a little last minute painting done (no flooring = no drop-cloths - cement makes for easy painting!) Many of you know that we put in a backsplash last month...well, we were already not very happy with the paint color in the kitchen/breakfast room, and the new backsplash thoroughly convinced us that a re-paint was in the works. So, I re-painted the kitchen area - Gobi Desert is the new color (it is throughout most of the house - and I have plenty of extra paint in that color already laying about). Let us know what you think - I still need to finish the breakfast room, and now I'm not sure about the curtains over the windows in the bay window area (that's an easy change - they are just napkins!) Take a look and let us know!