Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Excursions

I was honored today to accompany my hubby on some of his work appointments. He had to drive to three different locations around the city and drop off some equipment. It was nice spending time together in the car, just talking, no distractions.

There are a few other thoughts floating around but I don't feel prepared to put them on paper. I think I'll go take a cold bath to cool down. Even with the AC running occasionally, it's still hot!

Monday, June 29, 2009

Babies everywhere!

I feel so tortured. Not really, but still... I want a baby. With all my longing and soul I desire to get pregnant and start growing our family.

Before hubby and I married, we discussed children. We decided that we were going to wait at least two years before trying to conceive our first. We wanted time to grow as a couple, get used to marriage, and try to get our finances in order. Near our second anniversary, we started talking again and decided to wait at least another year. Well, our fourth anniversary is in October and we're still not ready to start trying for a baby.

It's not that we don't want children. Hubby knows I do, the more the merrier. Hubby also wants children but wants to be closer to having our debt paid off. $73,000 is a hefty debt chunk to try to pay off on one income while raising children. We started off with almost $95,000 in debt so we're making good progress. According to my calculations, it will still take several (as in five or so) years to pay it all off.

I don't want to wait that long but I'm trying to honor my husband's wishes to wait awhile longer. In the meantime, I fight sadness every month when I have that reminder that we are still waiting. I'm going to be 27 in October and hubby will be 31. I know we're not too old for kids, but how long until we're ready?

As I mentioned at the beginning of my post, I feel tortured. The last couple days have been hard as I've come across babies on the blogs I read, the forums, and even the latest book I've been reading. I've been dreaming every night for the past few nights about our first child. Oddly, in my dreams, it's always a girl.

Oh, well. I will continue to pray that we will know when it's God's will for us to have a baby and I will also continue squeezing money out of our budget to pay off our debt. If only I had realized 8 years ago what I was sacrificing when I took out the car loan, student loans, and applied for my first credit card.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

What will they think of next?

This is sad. It's not enough that we have violent video games and that most people encourage kids to "pretend" to kill people. But now we have to make it look real by creating a video game accessory that looks like a weapon? Oh, come on. Stop with the pseudo-violence already.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

AC and raw foods

We turned on our air conditioning last night. We were melting. It was 93 degrees indoors and we just couldn't tolerate it any longer. We demolished our record from last year, though; we lasted until June 22 this summer! Our electric bill will probably jump from about $80/month to $130/month, but at least we won't melt.

I'm doing a raw food challenge right now. Today is day 11 of eating 100% raw vegan. If anyone is interested in taking a look at what's going on, visit my health blog. My longest raw challenge was last spring and I completed 40 days eating just raw foods. I'm actually starting to wonder if I might meet or exceed my attempts from last year but we'll see what happens.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Perfection

My hubby is at work, my brother is on his way here, the bathroom is clean, and it's almost Sabbath. All is right in the world. :)

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

I received a nice surprise this morning! Hubby sent me a text message at noon, saying that he was done with work and heading home for the day. Yay! He asked if I could make lunch for him. No problem.

30 seconds later, he walks in the front door. hehe. Silly guy... so he's been home all afternoon, on call if he's needed for anything. So far, no calls.

My productivity went out the window as soon as he walked in the door. I didn't have any big plans this afternoon anyways, though I keep telling myself I need to clean off my desk. Someday. Eventually.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Farmer's market

I am so excited. If hubby's working from home on Friday, I'm going to borrow the car and visit this farmer's market. It's only open on Friday mornings so I'll have to visit some week when hubby's off work or working from home. There is another farmer's market we visited last year that's open on Sundays, but it's 10 miles from our house.

Buying locally will provide better quality fruit and veggies as well as contribute toward my goal of green living. Hopefully I can find some good organic produce that's cheaper than the grocery store prices.

Monday, June 15, 2009

After 6 months

My husband is at work. At WORK!

God is good.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Sabbath

It's Sabbath. :) A day of rest to spend with God. I love this day of the week.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Easy does it

Today has been a much more laid back day than the ones we've been having lately. The only thing noteworthy we've done is signed a new lease for our apartment. We're locked in for another year. Even though I didn't want to stay in Phoenix, I feel this is God's plan for us right now. And with that, I have peace.

Next on our agenda (probably tomorrow) - close out our old checking account and transfer the money into the new checking account. Find hubby some new work shoes as he'll be meeting new clients on Monday and his current dress shoes are ratty looking. Make sure Cingular actually closed our account. I'm still getting calls on my old phone...

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Apparently I accidentally disabled commenting. I'm finding pieces of Disqus in my HTML for Blogger, which is messing with the ability to comment on my posts. Maybe now everything is worked out with commenting.

We've been living month to month in this apartment complex since our lease expired in March. Now that hubby has a local job lined up, we decided that it was time to sign a new lease. We talked to the leasing consultant this morning and she offered us a lease renewal with monthly rent of $699. Right now we're paying $795 a month. Savings! I'm really excited about it as that means we'll have extra money to throw at the credit cards each month.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Changes - lots of them

What a crazy day. I'm kind of reeling from the suddenness of it all.

Hubby received a job offer! He starts work on Monday. This is with the contract employer that he's been working with for the last couple months. We're very excited about it.

We also signed a new cell phone contract, picked out new phones, and I changed my phone number. Hubby's employer will be paying a cell phone subsidy so we picked out a plan with a HUGE amount of minutes as it will be hubby's business and personal line. We've never had this many minutes before.

AND we signed up for a savings account with a new bank. A couple months ago, we opened a new checking account with this bank to handle hubby's unemployment. The state picked the bank for us. We've had a really good experience with them so we decided to switch all our finances to them. We added me to the checking account today and opened up a savings account for our soon to grow emergency fund.

Whew. After all this, we decided to skip grocery shopping and just came home. I'm a bit overwhelmed with all the sudden changes. Happy, but overwhelmed! I probably shouldn't have changed our banking and my cell phone number in the same day because now I have a ton of work to do to update phone numbers, banking information, bill pay, etc.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Kitchen woes

We somehow really managed to clog our kitchen sink. On Friday, the sink drainage slowed drastically. Rinsing dishes caused both sides of the sink to fill up with several inches of water. Jeff tried to fix it and we ended up with a wet floor for our troubles.

Hubby notified the office on Sunday but told them it wasn't an emergency. The sink would drain, albeit very slowly. One of the maintenance guys showed up this afternoon and started working on it. An hour later, there are now two guys trying to figure out what's wrong with the sink and/or disposal.

Oops.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

World Builder

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.



This video is amazing. What incredible love this man has for his wife, that he would build something like this! Every time I watch this short video, I cry. I cry because I am overwhelmed at the ability to love, to pay attention to the small details, to provide enjoyment for a loved one.

This video reminds me of God's love. If a man can love his wife enough to build her something that's only going to last minutes, how much more love did God have for us to build a world to last for an eternity? I wonder if God created a calla lily and saw a bride walking down the aisle to her husband holding a bouquet of flowers. Maybe He spoke a tree into existence and pictured a father building a tree house with his son. Perhaps, as he created cats and dogs, He smiled and thought of a mother laughing as her child plays with the family pet. God loved ME so much that He fashioned man's body with His own hands and breathed into man His own breath. It's wonderful. It's love.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Links

I want to share some great links I've been saving. My open tabs (67 of them!) are spiraling out of control and my browser is crawling. I tried to upload a picture of my crazy tabs but everything runs together in a giant blob.

The Ugly-Beautiful Story - I love this story. "Because, somewhere, underneath the grime of this broken world, everything has the radiant fingerprints of God on it. With Jesus eyes, we have the astonishing opportunity to daily love the unlovely into loveliness." I want to love like Jesus does. I want to see the fingerprints of God on every human being. If I could learn to love like God does, if everyone could learn to truly love, this world would be beautiful.

Dark Waters - An encouraging post about persevering life's trials.

Free mini-workouts - These mini workouts with Jillian Michaels are sure to be good. I probably shouldn't be posting links to workouts I haven't yet tried, but Jillian Michaels' 30 Day Shred DVD is fantastic.

66 All-Natural Cleaning Solutions - One of my goals this year is to switch over to natural cleaning. I despise the chemicals in commercial cleaning solutions. As we finish each of our current cleaning products, I'm going to switch over to more natural solutions.

Refried Beans recipe - I tested and discarded four recipes before finding this one. The beans were actually the consistency of refried beans, though they tasted a bit different that store bought (I actually like canned refried beans). Now that I have the consistency down, I need to find the right balance of spices to make them taste good!

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Goings on

Hubby's working today so I'm at home by myself. It's so quiet when it's just me here! I can tell the cats are hot during the day because they sleep on the tile for hours at a time. I'm hot too but it's not too bad.

So far today I've washed the dishes, cleaned off the kitchen counters, picked up the living room, washed a load of laundry, vacuumed the apartment, and opened yesterday's mail. I don't think I'm going to tackle any additional housework today except cleaning out the catbox before hubby comes home.

Yesterday, we visited the Sunflower Farmers Market. They have some great sale prices! We brought home some apricots, nectarines, apples, tomatoes, lettuce, and bell peppers. We also found that Sunflower carries the entire line of Simply Asia products. We used to buy them at Sprouts but they have since stopped carrying them and Walmart only carries two varieties. Sunflower had them on sale plus each box had a coupon for saving a dollar instantly. We bought four boxes! My favorite variety is the Soy Ginger noodles, though that may change once I try the new flavors.

I'm plowing through my library books. Between hubby and I, we currently have 48 books checked out. The library allows 50 books per library card (we have two), so we could bring more home but I would never be able to finish everything. Sometime this week I'm going to post about a couple of the books that I thought were exceptional.

My brother and I are making plans for my mother's 50th birthday. That's all I can say, just in case my mom happens to read my blog between now and this weekend. 50 years old! I can't believe my mother is going to be 50 next week...

Monday, June 1, 2009

No more, I promise!

I am so full of cheer these days! This is my last negative post for awhile, honest.

Awhile back, I came across a site that hosts blog commenting. I really liked the concept they were pitching and decided to install that method for commenting on this blog. After awhile, I realized I preferred Blogger's commenting. After many emails back and forth with this comment host, I was finally able to delete my account with them. Unfortunately, I also lost all comments for the last couple months.

So... if you commented on my blog in the last two months, I unintentionally deleted the comments. I'm pretty upset about it but that's ok. I had read them all. :) I don't think I'll be making any layout changes for awhile, though I would like to tweek the text and link colors.

If anyone's reading my blog, I hope you have a great evening!