New Year...better days ahead?

After all the death in our lives in December of last year, we're looking forward to a happier and healthier 2009. Now that Christmas and the New Years holiday is over, we're busy getting ready for our new baby (due in 12 days.) The room for the baby is painted except for a few touch-ups of the trim and the ceiling. All the furniture is in the room except I need to put the crib together. We also need to buy a couple of things for the room like a new window shade and to replace the ceiling fan; it didn't matter what the ceiling fan looked like when it was just a spare room, but now that it'll be our baby girl's room, it's just ugly and it has to go.

Besides the baby we're working on getting our house organized and trying to deal with these crazy economic times. Any family with one income like ours has to pay particular attention to how any economic event may affect us. If you have a 401(k) or likewise and you've looked at it's value recently (maybe stupidly as I have) it's scary. We've easily lost 50% of our current retirement stash. I've heard that's pretty much the average so I suppose we aren't doing any worse than most people, but it doesn't make it any better.

We already have about 11 inches of snow on the ground and were supposed to get about 4 additional inches tonight, but we got about an inch in about an hour when it first started snowing and then it changed over to freezing rain even though the temperature was 24°F. Now they're talking a blizzard warning as the wind is going to really pick-up overnight.