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Nice Weekend...

June 25th, 2007 at 01:10 am

*Went to pool Saturday a.m. but was closed for maintenance (bah).

Public pool but usually go in the a.m. and pretend like its ours - tends to get packed in the evenings, but quiet the rest of the time.

*Took kids to park instead & 99-cent ice cream at Rite Aid. Dh had noticed it (I didn't even know they had ice cream in there) - and the kids LOVED it.

*I took the kids to Fairytale Town & the zoo today. About 9am - noon, weather was extremely pleasant for a summer day in Sacramento AND no one else was up. Weird. Dh was really wary and I didn't expect it to be a pleasant trip, but wanted to give him some time. Kids were fine (I guess he had a bad trip a couple of weeks back and refused to take them alone again for a long while. I think he was peeved it was so easy for me, but the place was empty and kids were extremely well behaved today. I could easily see it going in the opposite direction so I lucked out. Wink But I think we ALL had a really nice morning.) Anyway it was "free" except the nachos and ice cream we bought.

*ORdered pizza in yesterday because we found another $5 off coupon at Round Table. Sweet.

*Dh went grocery shopping and spent $54. He is getting very adept at getting $50 groceries every trip, which comes with a 10 cent off per gallon gas coupon.

Gas is actually going down here (WEIRD for summer - it is settling around $2.99 - from MUCH higher - and the mild weather is nice for the A/C & electric bill - pleased with the weekend).

*Double checked BM's swimming schedule - he has class all week at 9am. In a wading pool. Nothing fancy, I am not sure how many days he can make it. As a plus he has no preschool so I was thinking I could work more hours/have an easier week with less driving him around. But the whole swimming thing complicates things. We'll see.

*Dh's focus group is at 7pm, not 7am. I had no idea. The good is it won't affect work. The bad is it affects aerobics. Bah. I am wondering if I should just give up and start again July 1. Give me a week to try had to catch up at work, and then commit to myself and all that in July. We'll see.

*I will have to scramble tonight to clean house a bit. Almost forgot that I invited me mid-west coworker over for dinner Monday. Bah. I know it is the nice thing to do. Its just exhausting and all that...

*Dh is going to have to make me a batch of homemade salsa too. MExican theme for Bunco this week - I volunteered the salsa, but dh is the master chef. I think I mention dh usually has all the ingredients on hand (leftover veggies for the week) and just has to buy peppers. We have been eating a lot of salsa. I am not a big veggie fan but I can down the salsa so it is good.

*That reminds me we had a bad week wasting food. Dh left out the canned salsa and it spoiled the night his friend was here. & I dropped our giant glass container of minced garlic, on BM's foot nonetheless. What a mess... He is okay but it is funny that our garage now REEKS of garlic (where we store the trash bins). As long as it doesn't start smelling rotten I guess... The garlic capital around here is Gilroy, you can smell it as you drive past the town, so I told dh our garage smelled like Gilroy today. Wink The container was full (new) and most of it would have been salvageable if not for the whole broken glass thing. Decided to toss it.

*Dh's cousin's adoption of an 18-month-old boy will be official this week. They did foster-to-adopt and couldn't have been easier - they have had him since the day he was born. So happy for them, they are having a big party next weekend. I hope the next one goes even 1/2 as well - they want a big family and so far unsuccessful on their own, so they plan to adopt more. They also adopted an older girl way back (long story) and they have a way of helping kids who really need it. Though they have had the boy from day 1 he was addicted to drugs and has had many issues. They are very good with it though, will probably adopt more troubled children. Incidentally I used to babysit for a single lesbian woman who adopted a crack baby. It is really sad what these little ones go through the first few years. hopefully it gets better... Being willing to adopt these babies though means an easier/cheaper process than otherwise though.

*I cut back my writing schedule a bit and it feels good. I was working on a monster article yesterday (yet unfinished) but I think I am just going to resolve to taking one day off a week - no work whatsoever. I think something I need. I usually don't mind working a little saturday and a little sunday (beats working all day saturday or something) but I think I was a little burned out too. I am realizing more vacation time is great - though I would like to lessen my work hours during the week, it is not going to happen. I will get much more rest taking large chunks of time off. So I am trying to keep that in mind going forward. As long as work is the way it is anyway. I can get out early friday but then I am just behind and have to work harder the rest of the week. In the end it is not as nice as I had hoped. I still have hope I will catch up and things will settle down a bit. Work has never been much for me at this place outside of January through April so I am just thrown for a loop.

*Financially speaking, our efund sits at $11k. I started with $5k late last year. I am rather pleased. I am shifting gears to scrounging the $1800 to do my ROTH IRA conversions. I can not add any money to any of my IRAs until I convert them. At least I can add to dh's IRAs. But I aim to save the tax money for this, this year. I did dh's IRAs last year - which was a good $1500 in tax, so it feels good to be almost done with all of them while we are still in such an insanely low tax bracket.

I will make enough interest to get my efund up to $11,500 easy by December. I only need a few hundred dollars this year then to reach my final goal. If I make the $12k efund and get the $1800 ROTH tax money, we will shift gears to retirement. OTherwise I am getting a $12k contribution from my boss this year so it isn't exactly suffering if I don't get to it. But I want retirement to be #1 come January 1st.

My goal is to start regular retirement contributions 1/1/08, but we may make it sooner... Exciting... I haven't made regular contributions since I had my 401k in 2000. & the whole dollar cost averaging thing was really good on my portfolio. That is what I want to get back to - regular contributions every month. More of a priority than an afterthought (you don't know how many years I dropped in $5k to our IRAs on April 14th just so we could get a tax break - hehe. Trying to make it priority, not last minute tax strategy. Retirement just hasn't been a priority to us before - we have been so focused on getting into a house out here and being home for the kids, so it is a mindshift). I've always had 10% contributions of my salary and thrown in a few thousand here and there, so we haven't done bad at all for our age, but my goal is to triple my current retirement balance in 5 years. & I also want to have a good $300-$500k retirement balance before we hit 40. So we have a lot of work to do!

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