You know that feeling you get right before a huge storm?  When it feels as if you could plug an appliance directly into the air and it would roar to life?

I am getting that feeling now. My oldest daughter turns 13 tomorrow.

Her vocabulary is reducing to two words:  "whatever" and "ri--ight."  Both are delivered with as much sarcasm as she can muster, and she never verbalizes when an eye-roll will suffice. When she's addressing me, that is.  When she's addressing her friends, 5,000 texted words on a cell phone per hour cannot express all that she has to say. 

Sometimes she starts screaming and crying and slamming doors.  For no discernable reason. 

It's not that we don't have stuff.  To the contrary.  This farmhouse is exploding with stuff.  I give away and throw away truckloads of stuff, and still we have way too much.  We have so much stuff that there's barely room for us in this joint.  So why are we constantly going out to buy more stuff, to haul back here and add to the groaning, teetering piles we already own?  My kids could tell you.  It's because none of what's crammed in here is the right stuff. 

Ah, a March mountain Easter, right after St. Patrick's Day! The memories! I remember being a little girl on Easter morning, with the temperature around ten below, not counting the wind chill factor. We kids leaped out of bed around 5 a.m. and stood as close to the woodstove as we could without getting burned, rotating our bodies slowly on tiptoe, like rotisserie chickens.

Considering online dating?  Maybe you know somebody who found love on an internet dating site, and are ready to try your luck.  There are gobs and gobs of these sites. Some are free, like Yahoo! Personals and plentyoffish.com, and some cost money, like eharmony.com. 

But before you take the plunge and try out online dating, you need to learn the lingo, so here is the world's first ever Online Dating Dictionary.  The actual terms people use in their profiles are listed with their real meanings. Sometimes a word's meaning in an online profile differs, depending on gender of the person posting the profile, so, where this is the case, (m) is male; (f) is female.

So I got this catalog in the mail. And before I even get this blog underway, I want to plug Heifer International with great enthusiasm. It is a great charity, a worthy charity, one of the most fantastic charitable endeavors I know of. You should ante up for Heifer I. this very minute via their web site, http://www.heifer.org. My church youth group once solicited funds to buy a cow to send to an impoverished family in the developing world, and I ponied up $50, which bought a shank of cow or maybe even a hindquarter. Or maybe it was a pair of goats we sponsored, in which case I supplied at least a third of a goat. With any luck, it was the front third.

I get mostly two kinds of email: spam, and messages that look like this:

FWD: YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS ITS SO CUTE!!!!!!!
FWD: SIGN THIS PETITION OR BIBLE ILLEGAL!!!!!!
FWD: DONT DELETE THIS ONE!!!!!! KITTENS!!!!!!!
FWD: JESUS COMING NEXT FRIDAY 3:23 PACIFIC STANDARD TIME!!!!!!!

Lousy grammar and punctuation aside, I hate these. Honestly. I hate them worse than spam, because there is an outside chance that I may have won a $100 Macy’s gift card out of the blue, even though I’ve never darkened the door of Macy’s in my life. On the other hand, there is no chance in hell (except in hell, I should say) that the Bible is in danger of being outlawed.

And I’ll bet my kids’ college savings that the Lord will be a no-show on Friday afternoon.