Off Work

I love the few days I get off work.Last weekend I spent a ton of time looking at evening gowns. I have to wear one this June, and I think I found the perfect dress!!!

While I was doing that, I found this pattern

Source: simplicity.com via Elizabeth on Pinterest

I'm thinking about making it in white in a jersey fabric. It just breathes summer to me... only catch is, I can't decide to make it into a long maxi dress, or to leave it knee length.  What do you think?

House

I don't know what it is about living in a place that makes it so difficult to keep clean -- case in point, I just jabbed a dry spaghetti noodle into my foot. I don't know what it was doing in the carpet under the kitchen table anyway... I mean I just vacuumed two days ago. Anyway, I'm sure that it has something to do with my new pinterest habit. I recently found out that I will get to attend this year's Miss Provo pageant, and that I'm going to get to wear an evening gown. Talk about fun! I've missed those types of things (they make me want to be a pageant director myself, ha). In any case, I spent most of the day looking for suitable dress. I'm tempted just to wear one of my old dresses, but they either seem out of style, or a bit childish. It's only been 5 years, but I feel like a completely different person. So far this green one is my top pick, but green doesn't look very good on me.

Source: lightinthebox.com via Elizabeth on Pinterest

I went ahead and ordered a somewhat similar blue dress that I'll embellish just a little. Hopefully I'll like it when I see it.

Adding more hours to each day ...

Whenever my manager asks me if there's anything I need, I usually respond that I just need someone to insert a few more hours into everyday.

I hate that moment when I realize I won't be able to get everything done that I want to in a day. And it comes every day, no matter what. At work? Yep. At home? Yep. On the weekend? Yep. On vacation? Yep.

My husbands answer is usually to abridge my to do list, but I think u finally figured it out. Multitasking.... But I really mean multitasking.

It all started when one of our cars was in the shop. Branden would drive me to work, and I discovered that I could save 10-15 min every day by doing my makeup in the car, and today I discovered two new tricks

1. Cooking. I usually have trouble finding time to put things together for our meals. But since I'm on my new budgeting kick, I'm trying to make our food $ stretch, and that means more home cooked meals and bagged lunches. Tonight while fixing dinner (oven-baked chili tilapia, green beans and creamed potatoes) I decided to take advantage of my cooking equipment. After I cubed my potatoes, I cut veggies for our lunches and for tomorrow's meatloaf, and made tuna salad for my sandwich tomorrow. Ass soon as I get home again, I'm planning on mixing up some eggs for an omelette tomorrow morning. Hopefully this will mean a healthier and more budget friendly eating style for me and my family.

2. Me time. This is usually the first thing to go when I'm running out of time in the evenings. So tonight, when I wanted to spend some time checking out pinterest, I could only justify it if I kept it from being a distraction from the things I needed to get done. So what did I do? I downloaded the pinterest app, and did it while on the elliptical, and I wrote this post.

To-Do:

Here's my to-do list for the day:

Budgets

Thanks to budgeting, we have some big news coming up next month. We've been able to cut our day-to-day spending in order to set (and meet) some goals.

After we got married, I was amazed at how easy it was to spend every last penny we made (and no, the information above is not mine, I wish it were). We weren't getting any closer to coming up with an emergency fund, and we were only making minimum payments on our student loans.

To be honest, I don't think I could have done it without mint.com. Their site is really user friendly, and allows me to keep up with pending and posted income and expenditures. It was a fun game trying to make sure that our net income met certain goals each week.

Here's our schedule
January - save up for big news and save up for half of our small emergency fund
February - save up even more for big news and other half of small emergency fund (while also paying to have my car fixed).
March to May - pay off small student loan
May 2012 to May 2013 - pay off big student loan


We stayed on track in January, and hopefully we'll be able to do even better in February! I'll let you know!

2012

New Years Resolutions:

1. I know... I know, I always say I will... but for real, I'm going to blog more (and post the 4 drafts that I haven't actually posted for January).
2. By the end of the year, I want to make sure the house is clean before I go to bed.
3. Learn to eat right - I got into great shape for my wedding, and then decided I would relax a little with my food. Here I am 15 lbs heavier and eating sweets all day long. That's something that I'm going to change.
4. Save enough money for an emergency fund and pay off half of our student loans.
5. Finish my Thank You cards for the wedding. They're coming!
6. Take more photos.
7. Take control of my career.
   

Christmas Decorations (and a peek at our home)

To be honest,my Christmas decorations almost didn't happen this year, and I have given up on trying to actually get everything finished.

I ran around hitting the sales to get some new decorations for our new place. I needed a giant wreath to go above our fireplace, and I needed some ribbon and other little fillers to spice up my greenery; but somehow, I lost the entire bag. I have no idea what happened to it.

In any case - Here's a shot of our place Christmas eve. Hope you enjoy (they're the only pics I got before we took everything down).