We've made it to 2023. Will this be a better year? No matter what, it means that I've now been blogging at this little space for seven different calendar years (2017 to today). When I started TLRE, I didn't realize how much it would change my life. But through the relationships I've made by being…
Merry Christmas, all. I hope you’ve had a lovely, restful holiday season. We kept it low key, which is the way I prefer it these days. A couple meals with family spread over a few days, and quite a bit of time just the three of us. Years past I preferred bigger, busier holidays, but…
It's been a couple of weeks since I've posted anything (beyond an update of my Christmas Traditions posts that I originally wrote back in 2017). I didn't want another week to go by, so checking in with a quick update. We spent nine days in Mexico right after Thanksgiving, and then promptly tested positive for…
Christmas traditions absolutely do not have to be filled with stuff to be magical. They don’t even have to be about stuff at all. In the five years since I originally published this post, my feelings on the matter haven’t changed. We still don’t do Santa. We still limit the kiddo’s presents to one “bigger”…
Somehow it is six days until Thanksgiving? Time has been so wonky since COVID began, but it feels like November especially disappeared in a blink. The weather has continued to be strange here, and I think that's part of it. We're on our second week in a row of cold, sunny days, when normally it…
So our marriage is now officially a teenager. We got married really young, so we’ve been married well over a third of our lives at this point. Wild that we thought we were grown enough to make that decision when we did, but I’m so happy we did. Our life is a good one, love,…
It went from summer to winter overnight here - and we're seeing freezing temperatures already. My husband had said that they were predicting a warmer than normal winter, but that's definitely not turning out to be the case. Between that and the time change thanks to Daylight Savings, the cold darkness of late afternoon absolutely…
This week's Frugal Five was all about Halloween, so it's fitting to talk about something truly scary: next week is election week. I honestly can't even begin to guess at how things will go... but I'm glad to be in Washington, where even a shift won't look like a shift compared to other parts of…
After all of my/our collective whining about how it's been too hot/dry/smoky in the PNW this fall, we've skipped right over to winter this week. So much rain - but clear air! I think perhaps this is the first year where I haven't heard anyone complain about the rain yet. (It's still early though -…
Hallelujah! The air is finally clear today! And the rain has returned. I swear, there has never been a year where the whole of the Western Pacific Northwest has been so excited to see the rain. It has been weeks and weeks of mostly awful air quality and temperatures 10-20 degrees above normal. Today is…