Excerpted from Voddie Baucham's excellent book Family Driven Faith. I've been reading it this week. I highly recommend it.

My last blog post on here was back in May, and at the time we were looking at a lot about 5 minutes down the road.

That didn't work out, but it's probably for the better, as we found a 7 acre lot with a house, a barn, a dog kennel (a concrete storage building with lots of doggy-doors), and a machine shed. It needs quite a bit of work, and we're going to be rolling some of the repair work into our loan for purchasing the property--but it's going to be years before we finally finish all the various projects we want to tackle to fix this house up.

But, we've now got our existing property to sell! This house has worked out great for us, and we hope that it can be a great blessing to somebody else. We're pricing our house to sell or rent as quickly as we can.

As many of you know, we've been looking for land for a little while now. We've followed up on numerous leads, but so far nothing has proven to really be what we're looking for. We've got a few leads right now, and one in particular sounds like it may be promising, but the price is an issue. They are priced way outside the market for the area they're in--2.7 times higher than the average sale price of a buildable lot, and this lot has a lot of undesirable qualities that would suggest it should sell for less, not more, than the average price. So, we'd need them to come down to a more reasonable price--we'll see what they have to say once we make them an offer.

We'll see how things develop! If they're not willing to be reasonable on the price, we'll just keep looking elsewhere. There's a lot of opportunity in this market!

In early December, Aaron and I went to a class done by the Log Home Builders Association, in Washington state.

It was great, and we learned a ton. Our first project is going to be a log fort (like a tree fort, but we're using logs for much of the walls). We've already built a model of what we're going to do and have gotten a lot of feedback from other LHBA members.

We're still in the process of looking for land. We've found a few lots that are promising, but are still reviewing our options and keeping and eye out for something better. The ideal lot would be 4 or more acres, subdividable into two lots so Aaron and I could both build a house of our own, less than $50,000, and in Berkeley WV, Jefferson WV, Clarke VA, or Frederick VA (those are counties, not cities).

There's an interesting article by Tom Mullen over at BreakTheMatrix.com.

I think he's right—most people don't even fully understand the implications of what is happening with this "bailout," or the real reasons we wound up here.

I'm sure everyone is aware of that both Republican and Democratic candidates for President are strongly in favor of this bailout. It's a great example of why I can't vote for either—if the only choices are socialism or socialism, I have to vote "none of the above."

Of course, you hardly ever really have to vote none of the above. There's pretty much always somebody else you can support.

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We had a baby today! Rachel Elizabeth, born at 8:01 AM this morning; Kerin went into labor around 12 AM today, and we left for the hospital around 6:45 AM. We arrived at approximately 7:45 AM, and then 16 minutes later we had a baby! She basically did all the work in the car on the way here, it would seem! Regardless, it was a much quicker and much easier labor than Abbi was—which is something we're all grateful for.

Mother and baby are resting and doing quite well. Here are a few pictures:

From the CampaignForLiberty.com:

This year, the Cost of Government Day falls on July 16th. Americans for Tax Reform defines COGD as “the date of the calendar year on which the average American worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government on the federal, state and local levels.”

They estimate that the cost of government now consumes 53.9% of national income, with the average American worker spending 83.7 days laboring to pay his “share” of federal spending. The average worker spends 50.5 days for state and local spending. Keep in mind that this is just spending, not regulation, which takes its own toll from you. Regulation requires 62.6 days, and “is estimated to cost 17.2 percent of national income.”

Don't forget that this discounts the inflation tax. This is when fiat money is created in order to pay for something, which results in the value of the money you hold going down. Thus, without actually seizing any of your property, the civil government, working with the Federal Reserve, is able to take your wealth and use it for their own purposes. Clever, isn't it?

As some of you may already know, we are distributors for No Greater Joy. Today, we officially launched our online store, which you can check out at jkbookshelf.com. We're calling our store "Josh & Kerin's Bookshelf".

So, if you're interested in anything that No Greater Joy carries, please visit our store! In many cases, our prices are discounted off the retail price!