Uh oh.  Shaggy Dog Journal is gone.  Just about all my regular reads are gone now.  They keep disappearing.

I'm doing Zumba again four days a week.  Through December I just did one or two nights a week and it's just not enough.  One class put my back out and I was sore for a week.  I think it was the samba that did it.  Already I feel peppier at work.

The wind came up today and when I pulled the heavy outside door open to go in for lunch the wind pulled it and the door pushed me and I almost dropped my cup of tea.  I gathered myself together and was a little embarrassed  for two reasons.  One, because I'm the stock clerk and I go through that door dozens of times per day and two, the huge lunch bag my husband sent to work with me is lime green and it was fighting me getting through the doorway.  A man walking by said the wind was blowing in beautiful women.  Welp, that purty much made my year.

Zumba is going well.  Although, the other girl in town is having larger classes than I am because her price is $3 per class.  When my friend told me I felt real bad.  Real bad.  Then it went away and now I  am happy for the people God brings to my class.  I love the ladies who are in my class and they pay me a wee $5 per class and we have fun.  I tell myself that even though I have fewer students, they are the creme de la creme.  Well, every instructor has her own clientele.  I still have the best location in town which is large a spacious with a genuine wood floor and bare minimum overhead to pay for the space.  Her class is larger lately but I earn nearly as much as she and most the money I make is mine.  God is good.  I'm a tither.  First fruits go to the kingdom.  Gotta do it because if I don't, who will.  The bartender isn't gonna care about spreading the gospel.  Neither is the drug dealer.  The disciples need to do the tithing.

I'm working extra hours because my boss is out of town.  I still love, love my job and the men I work with.  My boss even gave me three presents for Christmas.  I thought it was so sweet.  He gave me a nice pocket knife that is mini size; just right for my hand.  He gave me some photo coasters and some delicious sweets leftover from when his wife made pecan something-or-other.  The thing is, he remembered I don't like nuts so he gave me the sweet without the nuts.  He has some kind of memory I tell ya.  And he can count a couple hundred AA batteries in about three seconds flat.

Pastor hurt my feelings a little bit last week.  In November he had asked me to come up with a concept for the 2013 year.  He has a theme for each year.  Last year was the year of Double Portion from the book of Kings.  This year is the year of Holy Fire.  But one night another guy said, hey look, here's our new image for the year.  I said it was beautiful but my heart stopped.  Why didn't pastor tell me he chose someone else to work on it?  Probably because he's busy and forgot and has bigger fish to fry.  So I didn't take offense, but I felt bad.  I sent him the two I had done and he says he wants to use them through the year.  I didn't feel much better though. And I believe they will not be able to enlarge the raster image to vinyl banner size that the other guy did.  Frankly, I don't think he made it from scratch.  I think it's from the packaged software of backgrounds the church has and he just put some text on it.  They haven't asked me for any assistance though so I suppose they are not interested in what I have to say.  You need vector graphics for big banners.  I think there are some raster images you can use but they have to be able to be enlarged 1:1 for say, a 3' x 8' banner.  The pic they're using will not enlarge well.  It'll be blurry and pixellated.

I gotta get in the shower.  I'm late.  I have to get up at the crack of 6:45am.  Yeesh.