He is risen!

Happy Easter, everyone! The most important holiday of all is here.

Thank You, Lord, for the sacrifice of Your precious Son, Jesus. Without You, I am nothing.

We are in the midst of Easter Pageant performances. There were some changes made to the dialog and music after six years of doing it the same way. Combining that with Easter coming early this year, I wasn't entirely sure things were going to come together. But we had our first presentation last night and it went very well. I even cried at several places, even after having seen it so many times just this year.

I've been helping with stage makeup where everyone gathers to prepare each night in the fellowship hall. Keva is there too, and only pulled at a paper tablecloth once, sending makeup flying everywhere, before I moved her to a chair at the wall, behind the person I was applying makeup to. Then, she decided that it was a lot of fun to grab at costumes and laugh and clap. She's having a great time.

Keva and I also have the very important job of retrieving the torches from the Roman guards when they've come down the aisle to arrest Jesus. We have a spot reserved just for us behind the orchestra. It's perfect. And without us, the Romans would not have enough hands to arrest Jesus. All would be lost!

Mac joined us last night, too. He wanted to come and be part of the action after hearing the little kids talking so excitedly about it. He had to come early to come with us, so he joined me and Keva in makeup and then later in our very important task of retrieving the torches. He refused my offer to give him some eye shadow and was worried about just leaving the torches at the seat when we were done. He wants to come again tonight. : )

Keith has had the whole week off, so he turned himself into a painting machine. I was remembering the Pageant last year when the Kings were with us and Ginny and I painted my kitchen and breakfast room that gorgeous Electric Lime. (The color deserves capital letters.) And now here we are painting again a year later! I guess the only time we think we're allowed to paint is during Easter? I'm not sure. Anyway, Keith has painted the second downstairs hallway in the same brown that we did the hallway from garage to the family room. And then he bought more of the same brown to do the stairwell. He also painted the guest bathroom blue and did some fancy trim painting with the cabinets and closet door. He is currently finishing up the painting in the formal dining room. It's a nice classy red. I really like it.

We still have not come to a decision about what color to do the family room and living room -- just the two biggest rooms in the house. I want to go with neutral colors and Keith wants more intense colors. We need color therapy. Badly. Any home decor experts available to help us? I'll be posting the new room colors soon.

Keith is going to paint the girls' bathroom, I think before the weekend is out. And then we'll be done with painting for a short while. It's so nice to see the paint on the wall, though. We've never painted any of our rooms before, so this whole painting deal has been a lot of fun and makes the house so much more homey.

I worked three days this week. On Friday, I subbed for a music teacher. Usually I don't get to meet the person I'm filling in for, but I was called in to come at 10:30 that morning, so the teacher hadn't left yet. I walked into his office and blurted out, before I could help myself, "You look like you're 12 years old! You can't possibly be a teacher!"

He just smiled and informed me that he was 26, then presented me with organized sub plans, made sure I had referral forms for any problem kids, warned me about his sixth period class, and helped set up for the video that he had ready for the kids to watch.

"You know," I finally said, as he was preparing to leave, "I'm giving you a bad time about your age because I'm getting old!"

"You're not old!" he told me, so sweetly, that I almost believed him!

Then, later on, at lunch, I was eating alone at the teacher's table in the cafeteria, and the principal came to join me. That was a lot of fun. It so happened that I knew him from church, and I also new another teacher who came to join us, also from church and our neighborhood. We were then joined by about three other teachers and we all had a rather animated discussion about old TV shows and scary movies. It was hilarious.

I said that I was glad I wasn't the only TV addict in the world.

Someone else said, "If we could take all the hours that we wasted watching TV when we were kids and did research instead that we would have a cure for cancer by now."

Ain't that the truth!