Once again, I skipped my Frugal Five last week, this time because I was on a red eye flight to North Carolina to fiiiiiiiiiinally see Erin and Young FIRE Knight get married. They originally had set the date for summer 2020, so you can probably guess how that went. It was a whirlwind trip, landing…
It's been a week now since we returned from Italy, and the grief that gripped me has lessened a bit. As my husband noted, I've never been so heartbroken to return home from a trip before. It was our first big trip (first plane flight) since Covid began, the first time to see our dear…
Happy official beginning of spring! It’s starting to warm up around here (the last of the frosts should be behind us now), and we’re seeing more sunshine. I’ve been out in the garden more as it’s time for planting and the perennials and overwintered crops are starting to emerge in earnest. The world might be…
Today is Regina’s birthday! Happy happy birthday to one of my very favorite people on the planet. We have maybe only met each other in person four times, but that doesn't matter. Something I've learned over my five years of blogging is that it doesn't take in person time to grow some really wonderful friendships.…
You might have noticed (or maybe not), but I skipped posting last week. With everything going on with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, my bandwidth was completely zapped and blogging just wasn't happening. I do still want to keep this "pandemic" (and now war) public journal going, which is what TLRE mostly is at this point.…
Somehow we're already more than halfway through the month of February, and I haven't done my deep analysis of our spending for January yet again. I said I was going to pick it back up in 2022 after trailing off at the end of 2021, but I just haven't mustered the energy of import to…
We now have a seven year old in our house! We celebrated his fifth birthday in the weeks before we shut things down due to COVID-19, so this past weekend was technically his second "pandemic birthday," even though we're heading into the third year of life at the end of this month. Even so, this…
February! We've made it! One month down in 2022. I'm not sure what we're counting down to, exactly.... but here's to hoping that February is better than January? No matter what, the days are getting longer, and having more daylight hours outside always helps me. I've yet to write down my goals for 2022, and…
Next week marks week 100 since I began to track these Covid weeks. One hundred. While many of you may be a few weeks behind me since we were the ground zero outbreak for the United States here in Kirkland Washington, your week one hundred is close at hand. Regardless of how much we want…
It was mid fifties and sunny yesterday (Thursday), which was absolutely lovely. After how cold and snowy the year began, it felt like spring, and we were able to spend much of the day outside. At the same time, things feel pretty dang heavy. It appears that our area has peaked for Omicron, with the…