January Highlights / February Plans
January flew by, and February is threatening to do the same!
January Highlights
- Work trip + vacation. I had an international work trip, and managed to tack on a few extra days to explore with some coworkers. I feel like this was moderately controversial (to people who don’t matter), because I went with 4 guys. But I can’t help the demographics of those who work on my project, and I wanted to go – so I went. All 5 of us had spouses who weren’t able to join, 3 of them had kids, yet I still feel like I got the most questions about why/how I was going. But I could be wrong. Anyway, it was a really neat few days, and despite the moderate anxiety I had about it in the days before I left, I’m really glad I went.
- Prepared our taxes and are getting an embarrassingly large tax refund (and adjusting our tax withholdings accordingly).
- Belatedly sent in an $8k mortgage pre-payment and saved $10k in interest! Woo!
February Plans
February was pretty scattered starting out. I was on jury duty for a week, and was unlucky enough to be stuck on the jury as an alternate. At least the trial was very short, and I did not miss my important work meeting. T went to Paris for a week, and I had a domestic work trip for a week. My work trip helped me sketch out what it is that I want to do with my job this year. The puppy dog had his first birthday this month, and we celebrated with a hike and a frozen Kong stuffed with kibble (just like any other day, because he is a dog).
Here are my goals / to do list for the month.
- Schedule a haircut (hopefully get it, too)
- Send more to the mortgage (at least $10k)
- Schedule our last big house project (this is on T’s to-do list)
- Sketch out 2016 budget and goals/plans
A quite short list, but seeing as how it is 2/21 and I’m finally putting up this post, I am not going to add to this! I think this draft was started 2/1. 🙂 I sometimes think of all the monthly goals I’d set 5 or 10 years ago, and wonder if I’m a slacker these days. I probably am. I still have a lot of drive when it comes to specific things, but I’m a little more chill these days about things. Or maybe I elevated work a bit, and let it engage me more than it used to.
I love setting and meeting goals, but I also am satisfied if I don’t have a specific “something big” I’m working on outside of work.
Stacking Pennies 
Yay for traveling despite other people being idiots about men and women traveling together as if the mere act of being in their presence unsupervised will make you fall into bed with them! (I’ve had some terse conversations about how ridiculous this is recently…)
You’re tempting me to do another mortgage prepayment just so that if anything does happen next year, we’ll have benefited from the bigger earlier payments and can recast. I did a really short list of things to accomplish this year, myself, it might even be shorter than your goals for the month 😀 Nothing wrong with being mellow whether for now or for a longer while.
I honestly didn’t even really advertise my trip to my family much. Especially my inlaws probably would have thought it was nuts, they even think it is odd that I am comfortable exploring a city by myself. I mean, I think they understand me a bit by now, but… I don’t need to give them more reasons to think I’m nuts.
To be fair, my mortgage prepayments are really because I was too scared to do them in 2015, so we have the cash mostly waiting. But it does feel so good! Lots more $$ to go on our side….