October is starting and I don't want to get too far behind, so here's a good effort to play catch-up.
Visiting the Folks
The second weekend of September, we traveled down to visit my mum and dad. On Friday night, I managed to get quite drunk all by myself (well the entire bottle of wine to myself helped). We all had fun, but I was wiped for pretty much the whole rest of the weekend. Saturday, after I recovered a bit, Betsey and mum went out for girl time, and dad and I moved a water softener to the water pump and pulled wiring out of the attack. After we finished grunting, we cleaned up and relaxed a bit. Mum and Betsey came back a little later and then we all went out to dinner at The Brewery (map). We were treated, because they're great. The food was excellent. Sunday arrived all too soon, but there was no hurry to go anywhere, so we stuck around and had a late lunch. Before leaving, I grabbed a box with my old yearbooks in it so I could finally accept those facebook names I just couldn't put a face too. The trip home was uneventful, and we looked forward to the next two weekends; our first weekends without plans to see anyone in about two months. Seeing mum and dad had been fun, but we needed time to be us with just us.
The New Things
When the third weekend rolled around, there was one simple date. Go have dinner Friday night with James, his wife, Kayla, and their just 1 year old daughter, Chloe. This was kind of new for us. Being adults and having dinner with adults our age. They made us a great dinner with fresh vegetables from their garden and garlic rubbed pork cooked on the barbeque. It was an amazing dinner. After dinner, the five of us went on a nearly 2 mile walk (baby in stroller) through the neighborhood on a fine end of summer evening. We finished up the evening with a movie and marionberry pie, taking home a jar of homemade pickles, the best pickles we've had in quite some time.
Saturday afternoon we awoke. On the way home the previous night, I'd told Betsey I was thinking about cleaning out the office for when her new school year started. Well we woke up, and went on our usual walk to the local coffee house. Walking home, I was surprised to find myself still motivated. The office has never been clean since we moved in, so cleaning it would be no small task. The main bit was emptying, cleaning, and moving Molly's habitat. I hadn't wanted to do anything with it after she died, and the habitat had sat there, silent and full of bedding and toys and food, for several months. With the 50 gallon aquarium and stand in the garage, there was a huge space left in the office. Betsey and I decided new furniture was in order to fill up the space and provide shelving and organization.
Sunday morning we decided to make good on our thoughts about furniture. We still had a ton of Target money from our wedding, so we went shopping. We picked up a short cabinet that Flitter's 10 gallon aquarium would fit on and a modular cube shelving system that we already had one of and knew we liked. As an added bonus, all our wood furniture in the office is from the same Target line and is the same pattern "maple", so things look quite coordinated.
Flitter is Chrystal's fish we're looking after while she's in Denmark. Her blog is full of great pictures of the places she is visiting. There's a link to it on the right called "Crossing the Atlantic".
Sunday evening I finished building the furniture and moved it into the office, while Betsey started cooking for a new household tradition we're trying to start up: Vegetarian Sunday. She made Southern Italian Ratatouille. The only thing Betsey did different from the recipe, as I understand it, is not salt the ingredients. We tend to prefer to add salt to taste after the meal is cooked. After dinner, we moved Flitter and thus his aquarium from the floor by the television, where he had lived for over a month, to his new home on top of the cabinet in the office. His aquarium fit perfectly.
Last Weekend before School
Knowing how Betsey becomes school Betsey, I surprised her Thursday night with the news that I was taking Friday off to spend some quality time with her. After she canceled all her dates with her myriad of boyfriends, she was pretty pleased about the deal. We did spend a lot of time together, which was nice, but we picked up on the tasks from the previous weekend and continued the great office effort. As I sorted through probably over a decade's worth of bank statements and miscellaneous documents and separated the few keeps from the many other papers, Betsey became an extension of the shredder. As a team, we eliminated from our life several cardboard boxes, two full garbage bags of papers that did not need shredding, and six full bags of fairly well compressed shreddings. The process was very liberating. It took all three days to make it through the papers, and we're still sorting things out now. I imagine, in a couple weeks when everything is as we want it, there will be a photo or two to share. Until then, admire the trash; please.
We did reach a milestone of sorts that weekend that's worth a picture. In August, we bought a cheap little white board from Dollar Tree and started tracking our budget. We set an ambitious goal of 100 dollars a week. Those 100 dollars do not include fixed costs like utilities, rent, and loan payments. Well, the cheap board fell apart by the end of the first week, but we kept at it and we learned two things: We liked having our budget on the wall giving us feedback, and we had set the budget aggressively. So in September, we bought a better white board, set the budget to 150 a week, and went for the gold. We beat our budget each week. As a reward, the money not spent, goes into the play money (Christmas gift) fund. If we go over, it comes out of the play money. I think it's visually interesting to see how the budget came out, and I hope you will too.
The budget also doesn't include food, because in July we bought 1200 (Tax Relief) dollars of FredMeyer gift cards (that's 4 cards). FredMeyer gave an immediate 10% gain in value for every 300 dollars. We knew our bank couldn't beat that, so we picked up the extra 120 bucks. Our food doesn't enter the budget until the cards are empty, and then we'll bump the budget to adjust.
Capitol Idea
As a member of Salem YoungPros, each month I have the opportunity to go do something pretty fun. September's event was a tour of the Capitol building. I didn't get to go in grade school, so, camera in hand, I intended to make up for it. The building is quite impressive. We had a full tour, including the statue at the top, but due to the fire in August, we did not get to see the governor's office. I had a ton of fun with Dan, Scott, and Nick, some of my friends from work.
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