2011 Goals

What a very uninspired title! I think my creative juices have just been zapped for the week. What's that you say? It's only Monday? Yes well, the creative juices have been operating on a bit of a deficit and have instead been taken over by numbers and spreadsheets and budgets and percentages...mind numbing you can be sure.

Which is why, my 2011 goals are mostly non-financial related compared to last year.

#1 Run a minimum of 3 races this year.
#2 But at least one "new" used car.
#3 Find some new volunteer organizations and volunteer at least once a month.
#4 Blog at least 15 times per month.
#5 Invest in new photography set-up.
#6 Learn basics of my dslr camera in manual mode.
#7 Create extensive home inventory.
#8 Finish all the last name change details.
#9 Follow our budget, whatever it's changed to for the month.
#10 Pursue further testing if we haven't gotten pregnant by the end of the year.
#11 Pay off 50% of our student loans.
#12 Get Hubs a new job.
#13 Create 2 photo albums (Disney & 2009).
#14 Add at least 100 recipes into my cookbook.

And that's it, though I think it will be plenty to keep my busy this year! :) I know most people despise these types of posts or the idea of resolutions or goals but I generally tend to be very successful with my goals each year and I like that if gives me something to focus on!

Bullets & Snips

I can't believe I'm sitting here with another large blogging absence on my hands...but I am. This month of life has been crazy busy and there just doesn't seem to be enough time in the day to get it all done

A lot has transpired since I last blogged, we've gotten between 1-2 feet of snow, Hubs has been reffing a ton of hockey games plus we've started up the next hockey season with a new team, we've had MORE jobs changes and I've started a home inventory.

I've also discovered that I LOVE having a tv in our bedroom. Cuddling up in bed with Hubs, sipping hot chocolate and eating popcorn while watching some of our favorite old tv shows is just about one of the best dates ever. :)

Speaking of which, the last two days have been "snow" days and in between the shoveling, there's been lots of extra time for indoor workouts (ddr on auto + wii boxing is a total body workout), cooking & baking (chicken tortilla soup, chicken chimichangas, chocolate zucchini bread, homemade applesauce & baked apples plus spiced popcorn!) and the above mentioned "date nights" with Hubs. Take out the shoveling part and it's been absolutely glorious!

While I have been plugging away at some of my new year "goals", I realized I never blogged them! opps! I promise to remedy that immediately. Also, for those of you who have google readers, don't be surprised if you see a number of blog posts pop up in your reader over the weekend. I have a couple of posts that I never got around to hitting the post button on that I plan to publish over the weekend.

Can you all believe that it's already the end of the January? Time is flying too quickly! Auditors officially arrive in February (eeek!) so I'm hoping that that time in February flies!

Jobs a Pre-req for Baby?

Where does the time go? I can't believe it's been so long since I've last posted! I've thought several times about posting but life has been too crazy to allow the time.

We are in the busiest time at work, due to end of the year financial stuff and that's greatly occupied my time. In fact when I look back to this time last year, I was crazy swamped then too and all I did was work and shovel snow. At least I haven't had to do as much shoveling this year as last. You would think I would have caught on that this would be a busy time of year and prepare some posts ahead of time.

To add on to the stress of work, we've had a few incidents at work that are causing financial stress across the company, which in turn means...cutbacks. The rumor all of last week were that 11 out of 20 employees were going to get cut. My department gets a lot of the sensitive information before it goes company wide and well...let's just say I was on pins and needles all week. Our controller made a surprise, very last minute down to the office right after our CFO laid off some high level directors. It was pretty obvious what was going to go down and had you asked me, I would have said I was about 70-80% sure I was going to lose my job.

*sigh* On the bright side though, the slight panic over this very real possibility had me running our budget numbers like crazy. I was able to determine that we would not starve to death for at least a few months!

Also, I don't know if I've mentioned it on this blog but in a month and a half, my husband is scheduled to be done with his job. We've slowly been starting to prepare for this change but the idea of both of us being unemployed was a rather uncomfortable thought to say the least. Had it happened that way, I'm sure things would have been ok, as I realize God always has a plan.

In the end, God's plan was for me to stay. I was not one of the employees cut, though it was hard to say good-bye to those who were. We got the news at the end of last week and it was a cause for great relief over the weekend. I was so exhausted from all the tension that I was falling asleep from the time I left the office! Yesterday we received even more news, my husband's company has requested to extend his contract another two months. His job has a definite end in sight but we are grateful he has more time to prepare.

So in a matter of days we've gone from stable jobs, to no jobs back to rather unreliable jobs. It's a constant fluctuation! God's definitely got a plan in all of this, hopefully we'll be able to tune in to it soon! In the meantime we're squirreling away as many pennies as we can!

Things are starting to slow down a bit and I'll be back to posting regularly again. I've missed you guys! How has everyone been doing? What have I missed?

Happy New Year!

A bit late on the New Year seeing as it's the 4th but my days have been a whirlwind and until they slow down, it's just going to feel like one loooong day.

Since I last posted, Hubs and I have been quite busy! After Christmas with my family, we worked both Monday and Tuesday (VERY BAD IDEA) and we have both resolved to never do such a thing again. While it was very quiet, since everyone else had taken off, there was also a TON of work to do...since everyone else had taken off. We both had plenty of available time off, just hate to waste it on quiet days when no one else will be bothering us. Lesson learned, always take the holidays off as long as we work in Finance/Accounting.

We had an early morning flight to VT out Wednesday which had us up at 5am. We arrived at the airport 2+ hours early only to be greeted with lines out the door! It was Christmas rush all over again. Parents with crying kids (I felt like crying too being up that early in the airport), waaaay too much luggage and backlogged flights due to all the cancellations. Stupid stupid, we should have realized that all the canceled flights from Sunday-Tuesday would cause long lines and problems.

Even though we had already checked in and printed our boarding passes, we still barely made it. We arrived at our gate, which was a stones throw away from security, as they were boarding our flight. Thank goodness we weren't late, there were a ton of standbys and our flight was sold out.

To make matters even more pleasant, (if you follow me on twitter, you already know what we were subjected to) we were sitting directly in front of a father and two daughters. The father talked in a whiny, obnoxious high pitched squeal quite loudly and pretended to fake vomit on his daughters THE ENTIRE FLIGHT. OMG, Hubs looked about ready to turn around and punch the guy, I'm sure my eyes were saying the exact same thing. Geez, what has happened to our society that we don't know how to behave in public anymore! Seriously...his daughters were like 4 and 6 and were old enough to sit through a flight, they didn't need the distraction, rather, the father was just pushing their buttons and getting them more riled up!

Ugh, moving on.

Vermont was nice, though we actually flew into New Hampshire. Round trip flights cost upwards of $600 a person if you fly into Burlington because apparently Airtran thought it was a good business move to only fly to Burlington in the summer and cancel all winter flights. 3 months later they stopped flying to Burlington all together because they weren't making any money...I wonder why, clearly everyone flies to Vermont in the SUMMER.

So anyway, we flew into New Hampshire and rented a car and drove the 2.5 hours up to Hub's parents house. Sadly all of that combined costs about what it would cost for one person to fly direct to VT.

The next four days were spent dining out with his family, watching copious amounts of HGTV and Food Network, visiting with friends, attending a few UVM hockey games (they are terrible this year), Hub's hockey alumni game, and enjoying the New Years down at the waterfront getting rained on and then having my hair freeze to my head from the huge wind currents while watching the fireworks go off. It was a weird New Years...

In the midst of that my not-even-3-week-old cell phone absolutely crapped out and is dead in the water. Awesome. Spent the entire day on the phone with 5 different foreign agents that could barely speak a word of english trying to get a new phone and explaining to them why I shouldn't have to pay $250 for them to send me a new one. Even more Awesome.

I am still cell phoneless, the phone was supposed to arrive yesterday, delivery by totally awesome Fedex has been pushed back twice and its not supposed to arrive until tomorrow, we'll see if that holds up. All I will say is the HTC Evo is the best phone I've ever had and the only phone I'm willing to go through all the shenanigans for, that being said, I will NEVER. EVER. buy another phone from Wirely. Way too complicated for them. Plus, hire people that speak english, please. And can speak it without accents that are so thick that you have to ask them to repeat something 10 times.

*sigh* I'm sorry this post is so long and pictureless. I didn't pack a camera because I was planning to use my phone...so much for that!