It's been a year!

One year ago my Mom found out she had stage four cancer. Her doctor gave her two options: do nothing and let the cancer take it's course or try chemo. Chemotherapy had not been very successful for treating her types of cancer, so they were not sure if it would work or not. As a result the option for not doing anything was a viable one. Fortunately she decided to fight it. She began chemo treatments soon after the diagnosis. Unsure if they would work or not we were on pins and needles with each check-up.

Long story short...The treatments have worked and she had a check-up last week that showed that the tumors have not grown any since they were shrunk earlier this year. Her next check-up is in four months!

For those of you who have been praying for her and us...thank you. Recently our family got together to sing, it was special because she was able to play the piano. You can see she is getting her hair back. It's hard to get us all together these days, but we could not pass up this opportunity with Mom working so hard to get ready for this.

Websites

Today in staff our website came up in the discussion. For those of you that don't know, I'm on staff at Grace Community Church of Clarksville, TN. Our website is: www.gcomchurch.com

Our site is pretty sweet for a church site (sad to say). But we try to stay on top of things here at Grace and discussed what is currently on there, what we need to update, what works, what doesn't, etc. Anyway, it got me thinking about different sites- how some sites just pop and how some sites simply don't. There always seems to be an 'X' factor to those that grab you. This is usually something only a great designer can create. But then you've got the content that needs to be injected to give it a soul. Below I've listed some sites I use regulary, mainly due to their content, not design. A designer I dig is Pixel Peach - go check them out. They do sites that pop for sure, but I usually use sites that give me good content.

Anyway- I'm curious to know some of your favorite sites --- and why.

Here are some of mine:
Yahoo -- I check out the latest news and link to my fantasy football team there : )
Google -- I have a few different gmail accounts I use- they have some great tools from google docs to their awesome gmail features.
Drudge Report -- I go there to check out just a mass of news and links to news sites
Worship Together -- other than being my publisher I'll go here to check out the latest worship offerings.
Album Art -- I use this site to find the album art that itunes can't find for me.
Rhymezone -- a good songwriting tool I use to get me out of writing jams.
Stumbleupon -- if you are just looking for some random cool sites, sign up for stubleupon.

Money in my pocket!

Well, I have to say I am pleased with the recent price drop in gas. I'm compelled to point this out though, I read today in the news about oil dropping even more-- that's a good thing right? Well, it seems to spell gloom and doom for this reporter:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081113/ap_on_bi_ge/oil_prices

If I remember correctly gas prices ROSE because the economy was doing so poorly, now they're DROPPING because it's doing so poorly. I'm sure there's a ton of technical/factual stuff wrong with that statement, but either way-that makes me laugh.

Two good things I'd like to report here:
1. I actually blogged. : ) Sorry it's been a while.
2. I filled up my gas tank for $43 yesterday! (This summer we had to swipe the card twice per fill up in the truck because it would only let us pump $75 at a time. We regularly put $85 in it. Same tank, same amount of gas, much less $ going in to it. So, if there is anything positive coming out of this economic "slump" or whatever the media decides to call it, at least gas is back to $2 a gallon...for now : ) Go fill'er up!!!