Soon we will all find our lives swept away

I finally posted to my work blog after 3 months - yikes. I really should post there more often, at least weekly.

TJ pulled an all-nighter for some unexplained reason last night. He couldn't sleep so he went into work at 2am with Peanut. Apparently Peanut didn't like being at work that late (early?) so he slept nearly all day today. Poor puppy. I think he likes his routine to be predictable.

We took the pups to the dog park today - it was gorgeous out. I look forward to going often this summer, though i really wish Peanut's allergies would clear up. His fur looks awful - all dandruffy and chewed up in parts. Makes me feel like a bad dog parent.

I had lunch with Jenn and she motivated me to get off my butt and sign up for those project management course hours that I need to get the PMP certification. It's something I've vaguely considered for a while, but this week I felt like getting stuff done. My manager agreed that our team's budget could pay for my classes, so I signed up for them this evening. Thanks be to the Internet, so you can get things done without waiting for someone to be in the office.

And now that I can barely keep my eyes open, I'm going to bed. But not before giving Suz a shout out congratulating her on getting her PhD *and* having a kickass job lined up. YAY SUZ!

Oh, and I just finished watching tonight's "Grey's Anatomy". I am *so* not liking this George-Izzy storyline. Callie is totally getting the shaft here, and I completely love her character. Boo. Hopefully she's not leaving the show. Season 3 Finale is next week - what will I watch this summer? Oh wait, nothing. And then maybe I'll get to the gym more often, right?

Fast forward to a few years later

This was a pretty good, relaxing weekend. Here's the (unexciting) list of what I got done:

1. Balanced my accounts and paid off my credit card
2. Did 2+ weeks worth of laundry and put it all away
3. Ate at home all weekend (yay!)
4. Loaded/unloaded/loaded dishwasher (eating at home uses lots of dishes)
5. Gave Spike a bath (clean beagle!)
6. Did 120 minutes (2 whole hours!) of cardio
7. Grocery shopping (yay Trader Joe's)

Not bad. I can make an equally long list of things I wanted to do and didn't.

I went to a talk about productivity at one of the Women's Conferences at Microsoft a few years ago, and the first thing they said was that people have to get used to the idea that they're never going to finish everything on their to-do list. I have a hard time with that. But I try to remember it as often as I can.

How was your weekend?

Well I guess you scared me too

Yay! The credit card thing has finally been sorted out. I have paid off my balance. But now I owe "us" some money, which I'll pay back each month. For a long time. Kinda makes me want to think about working full time again.

This is the first weekend I've been home, with no other plans. I am catching up on laundry. I think I just put in the 6th load for the week. Crazy. We watched an awesome movie tonight, called "Love Actually", a British romantic comedy from a few years ago. It was cute and funny and different. Not the usual crap Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks stuff.

On Thursday night we went back to Canlis to celebrate our 2nd anniversary, which is coming up on Monday. We reserved the "Cache", which is a tiny room upstairs for 2-3 people. It's the same little room we hung out in before and immediately after the wedding. We had a gorgeous view, and of course, the food was great as usual. (drooling thinking about the truffle fries!).

At first it was weird to be in our own room at a restaurant, but as the night wore on, and around the 3rd glass of wine, I realized it was pretty fun - we could be loud and silly and wouldn't be disturbing anyone else or getting disapproving looks.

We always ask the sommelier (Nelson, if he's around) to help us pick a wine (i.e. pick a wine for us), but on Thursday, we let him go crazy and pick a wine for each course. In total we had 6 different wines, from all over the world. It was so cool. The best was the dessert wine, a Cabernet Franc icewine from Canada that smelled and tasted like strawberry jelly. As you might imagine, this was right up TJ's alley, so we're going to try to find some more of it. YUM!

Last night (a busy week for the Creaths, huh?) we went to see Johnette Napolitano (former lead singer of Concrete Blonde) at the Triple Door Cafe, my absolute favorite concert venue in Seattle. We had dinner there while we watched the show. She's an interesting woman. *Great* voice.

I can't wait to go back to the Triple Door next week for Vienna Teng's shows on Saturday!

Peanut is really itchy again, and has been for the past month. I hope this isn't going to last all summer. I'm having my doubts about the dog dermatologist. I can't believe my puppies are 5 (Peanut) and 7 (Spike). And I can't imagine how we lived before we had them! Now that it's getting close to summer, with those glorious long days, we look forward to more trips to Marymoor.

Oh, and this morning I dragged TJ to the gym, which was the first time in a while for both of us. I (literally) worked my butt off on the treadmill and the elliptical today. I couldn't find a magazine to read so I decided to just concentrate on my heart rate monitor and listen to music. Wow, that's a much harder workout than flipping through a magazine while on the cardio machines! I guess I should do that more often. It felt really good, especially when it was over.

Taking the long way around

There's a light at the end of the crazybusy tunnel! This weekend I am flying down to Pasadena for a meeting of an alumni committee at Caltech. But then I have several free weekends, with no travel. Yay!

Each day at work I'm figuring out my job a little better. It's been a source of frustration for me - being new to the team and the product we're working on, while the rest of the team seems to be so much more knowledgable than I am. I've noticed as I get older, these kinds of transitions seem harder. So I guess it's good that I worked in consulting while I was in my 20s or else I'd have serious trauma everytime I got a new project now!

I have been putting my head in the sand about a credit card issue I'm having. My balance has gotten pretty high, mostly because I haven't made the time to sit down and work on my finances each month, so I don't really know how much money I have, and thus just pay a few hundred dollars rather than the whole balance. After several months of doing this, the balance is now quite significant, and I'm honestly not sure if I have the money in my account to cover it all immediately.

Just a digression here. Yes, as a married couple, *we* are doing fine financially, and have the money to cover our bills. But TJ and I have a system for personal spending money where we each get a small sum to spend on our own, in our own checking accounts so we don't have to "answer" to each other about why he bought another motorcycle part for $200 or why I bought $300 worth of shoes in one day.

So it's that account I'm having trouble with. Which means I need to scale back/budget a bit. I guess the transition from getting paid 100% salary to 75% is finally catching up with me - I knew it would, but I hadn't exactly changed my lifestyle as a result.

But today is the day. I'm going to go through all the unopened mail from my bank on my desk, and get my account in order. (I mean really, it's just one checking account, with one monthly bill, so not exactly rocket science!) And come up with a plan on how to pay off that credit card. Somewhat conveniently, I lost this credit card on my last day of vacation with Kristin and haven't gotten its replacement yet (possibly in the unopened mail?) so I haven't had the opportunity to increase the balance any more. Which is definitely a good thing.

As insignificant as this sounds, it's causing me a whole lot of stress for the past several months because it's been "lurking" in my mind. I got into some credit card debt trouble in college and remember that stress and the feeling of "I'll never get out of this" and not wanting to deal with it. When I finally got a "real" job and could make big monthly payments to pay off that balance, it really felt great. I was ecstatic when I sent in the last payment for that giant debt.

So here's to not getting into that situation again, and getting control of this now before it gets out of control. Wish me luck!

I wanna get away

Wow, it's been nearly a month since my last post. Apologies to my two readers!

I've had a busy month - vacation with Kristin in the Caribbean for almost 2 weeks, then a weekend in Ashland, Oregon for Dave and Lisa's wedding, and a visit from my parents this past weekend. Oh, and trying to catch up from all this time off at work. Which didn't leave much time for blogging.

So I haven't really been using my time off for anything very useful. It's true that I'm doing a bit better with my workouts, but I'm still not in a real groove. And while I'm happy to work less, I'm not dramatically happier in general. So I'm trying to figure out what it is I want to do.

TJ often comments on the fact that I don't really have a hobby. I guess that's true. This blog is *kind of* a hobby, but everything else I do falls into the errand or *should do* categories, like working out or cooking for myself. So in the process of figuring out what I could do with my extra 10-15 hours a week, I stumbled upon a new and interesting hobby while we were in Ashland.

Ashland is kind of a touristy town, with a lot of really cute little shops designed to separate you from your cash. I wandered into a really neat store that sold jewelry and rocks and beads. Lots and lots of beads. So it occurred to me that I could probably master the skills it took to make some simple beaded jewelry. Especially since I learned to wield wire cutters, a soldering iron, and pliers my freshman year of college in Physics I. I bought a string of really cool green glass beads and figured I'd sort out what to do with them later.

Like a good Techer, I purchased a book to learn how to make jewelry. I'm one of those people who needs to read and prepare for something before actually doing the hands-on part. TJ is more the sort to buy the tools and stuff and just figure out how it works while poking at the stuff directly. Anyway, the book I bought is Get Your Sparkle On by Lindsay Cain, a very fun book with a lot of beading projects that I'd actually wear (vs the grandma stuff I found in a lot of the other books).

So I finally got the chance to play around with this stuff. The first project was to make a very basic choker. The instructions were perfect, and very easy to follow. Here's what I made:

Not bad for a newbie, if I do say so myself. And it was fun and relaxing. I do need to get smaller wirecutters and pliers specifically for jewelry, though - the tools I stole from TJ's toolbox are just a bit too big for working with the tiny little findings.

I signed myself up for a beginner beading class at a local bead store next month, which I'm looking forward to. I'm now somewhat appalled at what I paid for a simple glass-bead necklace from the Seattle Art Museum a few years ago. I could have made that necklace in about 20 minutes, even with my limited new skills. But the beads were gorgeous, so I shouldn't complain too much.

Well, here's to a new hobby and hopefully more posts. Cheers! I'll post pics from my trips as soon as I get them posted online.