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…
Around here, “June Gloom” is a phrase we’re all used to - wet and gray weather through the 4th of July when summer officially starts in the Pacific Northwest. Usually, though, June Gloom feels acute because we’ve had some nice days in April and May (along with plenty of rain). This year, however, we basically…
I’m down in Phoenix for the inaugural Women’s Personal Finance Long Weekend, so I’m going to keep this short. Yes, I realize I could have just skipped writing today, but since I skipped last week, I wanted to put down at least a few words today. For those of you who aren’t bloggers, it’s a…
For anyone who noticed, yes, I skipped my regular Frugal Five last week. After returning from our Italy trip, we had one "normal" week home as we readjusted to our jet lag and caught up on normal life. That following Thursday, my husband started to get sick, and by Sunday, the rest of us were.…
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.…
Well. Today is not going to be an "everything is normal" post in light of what has happened / is happening this week. Russia invaded, unprovoked, a sovereign nation. I do want to say, though, that while we like to throw around the word "unprecedented" a lot these days, there is a lot of precedented…
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…