After the last couple of months of less than stellar savings rates, it feels good to write an update that comes closer to where we were at the first half of this year. Juuuuust shy of that 50% savings rate goal I set at the beginning of 2018, but it feels better than that because…
A newer tradition in my family has been to visit the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle during the holidays for Wild Lights, and we went again this past weekend. Last year was rainy and windy, so still fun, but it made us really appreciate this year with relatively nice weather. The temperature was in the…
Writing these posts - and inadvertently becoming a specific champion of women's voices in the personal finance space - has changed the way I've looked at things at work and in the rest of my life as well. I grew up in a home where being a women meant nothing different than being a man,…
Once, when our son was a newborn, a couple of our neighbors mowed our lawn when they noticed it had gotten quite long. I was home with our son during the day, but my husband was back to work and regularly gone 12+ hours a day, so cutting the grass just wasn't high on our…
Last Saturday after Thanksgiving, we headed out for our second annual trip to a tree farm outside of Sequim to get our Christmas tree. Since we live in a more urban area, there aren't many tree farms to choose from close by, and even those are a good 45+ minute drive from us, so we've…
I keep telling myself that I will get ahead on finishing posts when I have a guest post featured here, but it has yet to happen. To be fair, even a guest post does take more work to published than I would have ever guessed pre-blogging, but it still is less than writing a full…
The guest posts I've featured so far this year have so far all been sustainability and zero waste focused, which has been my intent since Budget Epicurean pitched me the idea for the first one. Today's post, on the other hand, is about a topic that often overlaps with those but is really its own…
My youngest brother went off to college out of state this fall, but he's in town for the Thanksgiving holiday. He and our son are close buddies and they were so, so happy to see each other this past week. My brother and I are twelve years apart, and the two of them are fifteen…
Short work weeks when we don't have a vacation planned always feel a bit strange; the rest of the workplace also has the days off, so in theory, there shouldn't be extra work compressed into the days like when you're taking individual time off, but it never seems to work that way. Granted, it doesn't…
It's been a few months since my last garden update (the most recent being in August), but my goal is to write these at least semi-regularly so I can keep track of what things look like year round, not just when the garden is in full swing and has plenty ready to harvest. That said,…