my pink life, mi vida rosada

I'm struggling. I've mentioned before that my sweet hubby and I have a little spending problem. Somehow we are still not doing such a great job of figuring out how to budget for everything, or to quite make our budget align with our priorities. I think part of the problem is that we want our priorities to be different than what we actually seem to make them. For example, I think we could save a tiny bit of money each month if it wasn't a priority for us to drink wine every few weeks. But since we are making that a priority, and not cutting our favorite, Silver Coast, out of the budget, we are taking away from our ability to give and our ability to save for the future. Same with Netflix. We love that instant queue. But that $10 a month might be something that would get us to sit on the couch less, and to do more, and to have $120 in a year that we could put towards bringing sweet hubby's brother to visit and go to school in the states for a semester. Also, I thin...

It's Sunday morning. I'm sitting at the kitchen table in my pjs, listening to Rayen crunching her kitty food, staring at the pile of dirty dishes, with a bird singing in the background, a cup of hot chocolate and slippers on my feet. I'm thankful today. Thankful for sleeping in, for a kitty cat who wakes me up to feed her breakfast, then settles for purring and petting as I refuse to get up. Thankful for my sweet hubby, who washed all the clothes yesterday and only asked me to help fold the very last load. Thankful for my mama, who cooked an AMAZING chicken marsala last night and made TWO desserts, special for my sister and brother's birthdays. Thankful for a roof over my head, with enough stuff to create clutter, and thankful for the series Hoarders , which makes me want to clean up and clean out and share my bounty with others. Thankful for the boxes of stuff we could donate yesterday to goodwill to help build others up, too. I'm thankful for things I don...

Today is my sister's birthday. She is beautiful, smart, skinny, kind, thoughtful, and in general, a pretty cool girl. She is bringing broaches back. She will be a Ph.D. soon. She runs with her best friend, who is losing weight to fit back into the wedding dress she didn't wear several years ago, when she called off her first engagement. (The friend, not my sister.) She makes everything look fancy, all the time. She uses her free time to bake real things, like cinnamon doughnut bread pudding with custard sauce. And honey angel biscuits. Yum. She has impeccable fashion taste. I'm usually jealous. Even when I manage to buy the same things, because somehow they look better on her. She has a sweet kitty who talks to her in cat chirps. She sews neat things, like pouches to keep her vintage white gloves in. And then she wears the gloves to fancy dinners, just for fun. She kicks but at scrabble and bananagrams. She is a champion in the pineapple game. She can waterski like no...

I needed a project. I needed a project very badly. In the evening of the third day of no school, I think I lost it. There were some unkind words from my mouth directed at sweet hubby, and I don't think he appreciated them. I didn't appreciate that he wanted/wants to put off new shelves in the guest room until Monday. I didn't appreciate that he *had* to go back to school on Wednesday, while I was still off for another whole day. My unkind words did serve one purpose, though: they got me some help. I said unkind and jealous words about how I wasn't enjoying not getting anything done with too much free time, alone time, time at the house by myself, and then told sweet hubby that if he wasn't going to install the shelves for me, that he was going to go with me to get all of the wedding china and grandma crystal. And that he was going to go with me *NOW*. And even though it was cold out, 8pm, and starting to ice over again, sweet hubby did. He did tell my mama ...

So, tomorrow is day four of no school. I should have been on a cruise. No, really. Sweet hubby looked up cruises for me, in August and September, when I was constantly reminding him of the fact that he was away for 1/6 of the year, between his trips to weddings and a month in Chile and his stint at Idyllwilde and the trip to Brazil, and I was home. I think I went out of town for a couple of weekends without him, but nothing near the extent of traveling that he was able to do. So to make up for it, he was going to send me on a cruise with my friends. My friends are broke. And I would have had to take time off work. Or so I thought. Apparently I could have gone on a cruise and not taken time off work, since we have snow day #4 tomorrow. I am getting seriously stir crazy. I just had winter break, and was able to get a great deal of relaxing and project-making out of the way. During December, I managed to convince sweet hubby to help me clean out the fridge (also thanks to the h...

It's true. The south has had snow twice in one winter. And not just a tiny little dusting of snow -- enough snow to cancel school for going on three days now. Three days. Today was number two, tomorrow is number three, and hopefully that will be it -- I'm getting cabin fever. But the roads down south are too icy for us to drive on, and too dangerous for the school buses to run, so all public schools in this area are closed. Yesterday, I invited my neighbors over for hot chocolate and a movie. We watched New York I Love You and drank a variety of my favorites by Land O Lakes . I thought everyone would go home after the movie, but they sort of hung around....so we played a few rounds of scattergories . We sent sweet hubby to the grocery store, which he said was PACKED, after he cleared a thick layer of ice off of the car. We fixed some pizzas and played a dancing game on the wii. The power went out briefly while the pizzas were in the oven, and came back on as we wer...

Boo! I'm sick! And it is Saturday! To be fair, I knew yesterday that I was sick, too. I just tend to ignore it when I have cool and important things planned for school. I took some medicine in the morning and felt well enough to make it through the day -- and someone must have been praying awfully hard for me and my students, because it was a GREAT day in the classroom. I love it when my students can handle themselves and we can actually get some fun stuff done. Yesterday was a lot of wrapping things up. Finishing unit 5 in math (unit test), last sound activities before sound projects next week(and vocabulary quiz), working with kindergarten for the first time, and behaving well enough to have 30 minutes of math games. It is extremely unusual for there to be a school day in which I do not have to give my students laps to walk at recess for behavior problems -- blurting out and failure to follow instructions and the like. Now that winter break is over, I'm also giving out...

And boy, do I need a weekend! Monday back at school was ok, Tuesday a little rougher, I almost snapped (maybe I did snap, a little) Wednesday, today was tough, but I was calmer than yesterday, and tomorrow is Friday. Saturday, Sunday, how you tease me. And how sad I will be when Saturday is here, and Christmas vacates my home.... We'll pack up the ornaments, the lights, the Christmas cards (ok, we'll just toss those), wreath will come off the front door.... Sweet hubby will start back to class on Monday, though he hasn't been completely on vacation as he has worked through the break. And it is a good thing, too, since we are broker than broke, and horrible at sticking to a budget. I'm sure I'll feel a little bit better once the next pay checks post to our bank accounts, but until then....I'm feeling the pinch. Sweet hubby is agreeable, so far, to the matching retirement with charitable giving idea. Sweet hubby is not agreeable, so far, to the idea of match...

99 bottles of.... Oh, wait. Wrong song. 99 days of school left to go, 99 days of school.... Monday starts and Tuesday follows, 99 days of school left to go. back to school tomorrow. BOOOOO. home from the beach. BOOOOO. great weekend with friends to bring in the new year? YAY! Just wish it could have lasted longer!

And I've got some goals. While I think that last year was a good year, and I accomplished a lot, I have some things that I think would make me feel good about myself during the new year. Or, as Annie, my favorite yoga teacher put it in class on Thursday morning, things that I can do to spend more time as my "best self". I like myself best when there are a couple of things going on. One of them is.... I like myself best when I am at the beach. I know, I know, that is not a surprise at all, to anyone. I love being at the beach, how much more relaxed I can be, how much more productive I can be, spending time away from the TV, in the sun, and all of those good things. While I don't really spend more time in the sun during the winter, I still love being at the beach house. It is one of my goals for 2011 to spend some time at the beach at least once a month. The summer months, I'm sure, will be easy. Finding time in spring, fall, and winter has always been mor...