As I was growing up there was a popular song by Merle Travis titled "Another Day Older … And Deeper In Debt." Tennessee Ernie Ford had the most popular recording of the song which he called "Sixteen Tons." I suspect that most people would associate the song with him.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.

I turned another year older yesterday. Best part about it is, we’re not deeper in debt! In fact we’ve been able to reduce a significant amount of debt over the past year and other than some smaller balances on a couple of credit cards and a mortgage, we’re pretty close to debt free. Since war started with Iraq last night, that could turn out to be important! Yup — we’re liberating/disarming Iraq and I sure hope it goes quickly and smoothly.

Birthdays are pretty much non-events for me. I’ve had enough of them that I’m not particularly interested in counting any more. What ever happened to the days when people had to stop and think about how old they were? My wife Nina has her birthday one day before mine. We’re a day short of being a year apart in age. So, one day out of the year, we’re the same age. Then we go to sleep and I wake up a year older and she wakes up a day older. Doesn’t seem to be much justice in that!

The storm did come. Lots of wind and some pretty miserable weather arrived with it. Points north of Colorado Springs took the brunt of the storm on this side of the mountains. Around the house we picked up between four and six inches of snow, most of which got distributed quite unequally by the strong wind. On the west side of Pikes Peak, however, snowfalls were three to four feet in depth. Jared got about three feet at his apartment in Denver. The weight of the snow at the Denver International Airport caused one of the canvas peaks making up the roof to tear and dump a lot of snow into the terminal. Nina would like to know why the worst of the storm is always somewhere else? Personally, I’m quite happy to just be a year older with not much snow to shovel.