love is blonde

Hello, lovely friends. Whew! I have been busy lately. I’m not sure I ever wrote it down here, but my unofficial New Year’s resolution was to “do more fun things, buy less stuff, & keep life simple and focused on experiences.” Can’t say I’m succeeding in buying less, but I have been doing more. And it makes me happy.

Before too much time passes and I forget, I want to jot these things down. Whenever I start feeling sorry for myself, I need to remember that getting off my rear end and doing and making things feels good.

• I’ve been cooking a bunch of new things: wheat bread, three kinds of soup (smitten kitchen baked potato; thai curry chicken; poblano chicken corn chowder*), chai tea concentrate, roasted red pepper purée (for later use in all kinds of things), a chocolate cake that was a complete failure
• Although I didn’t do it in time for Christmas gifting, I made a few fabric flowers and ever dared to wear them!
• I took Husband to see Joshua Radin at the 9:30 club. The show was perfect: early in the evening, good mix of songs, great audience interaction, swoony singing omg, and my fave venue in DC.
• Took the next steps in this whole crazy infertility journey.**
• Tried to dress semi-decently cute, at least most days. (Thank you to everyone who joined TPTP!)
• Took a trip to Denver to spend time with my family. My sister and I spent one day making a ton of baby food, which was a fun adventure.
• Started planning two different springtime trips with best girlfriends (Chicago and New England are in my future, yay!), as well as our Big, Epic Vacation of 2011 coming up in August. (I am gonna need your advice on this one, so I’ll save it for another post. Also, when you can’t have kids, you get to do things like take awesome vacations, right?)
• Hosted our monthly co-ed book club at our house (15 people in a 14 foot wide house…yikes!)

(There is plenty I am not doing: working out enough, blogging–especially on the other blog, laundry, photography, taxes, calling my friends, etc. All I am say is I’m working on it!)

Last night at the concert Joshua Radin opened up with a song with the lyrics, “Have no envy, no fear,” and it is really sticking with me. I am going to try to tackle the upcoming weeks with that short phrase in the back of my mind.

___

* I promised Jen I would type up the recipe so I will post it here or on flickr if you guys would like.
** How much do you guys really want to know about this? I am still trying to figure out how much I feel okay sharing, but it might help to know if it would be interesting even?

When the husband and I were mapping out a rough budgetary sketch for the year, we set aside a figure for fertility treatments. It’s not like we were excited to spend money on such a thing, but we just hoped it would be worth every penny.

And then! Through some combination of good fortune and the Obamacare Fairy (kidding), I was able to switch to new insurance that would cover our entire fertility treatment plan. The whole freaking thing, minus a few copays. It is awesome.

The only problem is that instead of mentally depositing the budgeted funds back into our savings account, I started to think about it as FREE MONEY. And Free Money is extremely dangerous.

Free Money forced me to buy the single most expensive furniture purchase in my life. Meet my four new Tolix chairs.

Free Money also made me buy a new purse, a bunch of new clothes, and way too many birthday gifts for the husband (which I never do because I am usually a grinch). I can’t decide if I should feel guilty, or grateful, or if I should just go ahead and make out with those chairs already.