Parties and hikes and everything in between

I had a great weekend. Greg and I were supposed to go hiking Friday night, but at the last minute we decided that we just wanted some quality time together lol. He sees his daughter every other weekend and he has been working a second job lately so our time together is pretty limited. We were both looking forward to the hike and have more planned for the future, but it had been quite some time since we’d really spent time together so we flaked out on the hike and had dinner at a deli and then went back to his place for a while.

He is Irish so St Patrick’s day I saw him briefly at lunch time when I surprised him with a traditional Irish meal of corned beef and cabbage/veggies that had been steeped in Guinness, some Irish cream brownies (don’t really know how traditional those are lol, but they were yummy if not a bit on the sweet side), and some Irish soda bread. What was funny is when I got there and asked him what they typically ate on St Patrick’s day (knowing he’s very proud of his heritage, etc) he said “umm, hamburgers, hot dogs?” He actually thought his mom might have made ham or something on St Patrick’s day because his dad didn’t like the corned beef. Anyway, I thought it was a pretty bland meal, but he was nice enough to act like it was edible.

Saturday night, we went to a Madhatter Wine and Cheese Party and had a lot of fun. I didn’t really know the person hosting it, but she was super nice and several people I knew from other meetup groups showed up. Greg mentioned he was a bit nervous about going since he didn’t know a soul, but all I had to do was introduce him and he could carry a conversation with anyone about anything…one thing I love about him :)

We got to sit out on her “deck” which was a 5 tiered monster that led down to her pool. The hostess mentioned that she had 2400 square feet of decking alone. Seriously a party house people! We sat out there with various others and just chatted, sampled various wines (I tried a chocolate red wine…tasted like alcoholic chocolate milk…yes, delicious) and had a great view of the super moon.

This past week has been alright. Frustrations with money predominate. Erik has missed a bunch of work and since he doesn’t have the second job, we are back in the same position with me picking up the financial slack. This means I now have to evaluate my budget (which honestly needed a bit of honing regardless) and stop doing certain things (getting my eyelashes done and possibly stop my nails and pedis) which kind of pisses me off because I haven’t done a heck of a lot for myself the last decade. We owe a huge tax bill next month and I still haven’t finished paying off our bikes. I pretty much announced to everyone that all I wanted for my birthday in April was money to put towards our bikes. The weather has been so beautiful, I’m a bit frustrated with myself that I’ve been spending money on clothes and beauty maintenance and not getting our bikes out of layaway. Oh, I also got word that I was getting a huge pay cut at my second job, so that isn’t helping things. We’ll be ok though. There are MANY areas where we can trim the budget; actually DOING it is the challenge.

I’ve also been getting out quite a bit more for walks/hikes with a friend of mine this week. Going to try to keep the momentum going. I’m tired of hovering at 305…I WANT to pass into the 200’s before the month is over. Stay tuned to see if I do it. Every time I complete a walk I have to admit that I sit in my car for a second and ponder the fact that this time last year, a 10 minute walk through CVS used to leave me so winded and red in the face that I had to take 5 minutes in my car to compose myself before I could even attempt the drive home. Now I'm doing at least a 30 minute hike, many times it is longer than this, and I feel ENERGIZED afterwards. No matter what else might be getting me down, life is still pretty.darn.good!