Wow, I haven't blogged properly for months! Life is just busy, I guess. Some highlights:

- Social life is good. Making/keeping/deepening friendships is a LOT of work, but I'm loving hanging out with folks when I can corral them. Next week I'm going to Wisconsin to see my fave band and my Canadian friend!

- AS's big freelance job is still chugging along; she's invoiced for about $8K of the possible $32K. They pay weekly for however many hours she worked the previous week, which has been GREAT for our shared spending!

- We applied AS's increased income plus NT's third upcoming October paycheck to eliminate the shared spending deficit and begin saving up for renovations once again. We've fallen out of touch with our kitchen designer, but we probably won't nudge her until we've built up the savings to more than they are now.

- Most of the goals I set at the beginning of the year have fallen by the wayside, except learning guitar. I love guitar! I still take lessons weekly and practice almost daily. I can play almost 20 songs, I think.

- Another unexpected project I didn't foresee on Jan. 1 but am still working on is planning a novel with an old college friend who lives in NYC. We're slowly bringing the plot and characters into focus and I hope to have a detailed outline done in time to work on the novel in November. Doing a shared project for NaNoWriMo is an iffy proposition but hopefully there's no harm in trying it this once. I just need to figure out a way to keep working even if my friend gets busy or stuck, so I can get to my 50K words by the end of November!

- Also, it's become something of a habit to see more music live! There were a few years when I really didn't feel inspired by music but I'm getting really into it again. In addition to the October show in Wisconsin, I have tickets to FOUR concerts in November! And I discovered another local act I really like; he's taking a 2-month hiatus from playing live, but I'm looking forward to when he starts playing around again.

- My work just started up the pedometer challenge, which is 4 weeks in October. I know I'll do enough steps to get the $25 gift card; the real challenge is doing enough steps to get one of the $100 weekly prizes. We shall see! I did finally order some new sneakers which I've been meaning to do for months.

- We decided to do a staycation in October instead of going to a lake. Still deciding what fun things to do but we've got $750 set aside for the 5 days, so I'm sure it'll be great! Our next trip as a family will be to the UK, leaving the day after Xmas and coming back in the first week of January.

- Work is good, family is good, everything is trucking along!