Week End

Sometimes people post saying things like "I haven't had time to post about my life because I'm too busy actually living life." And, of course, sometimes that makes me feel like "oh, so I'm posting a lot it means I have no life?!?!"

Sometimes I feel like I am a better blogger when I'm busy - when my mind is racing and I'm driving all over the city every day. If I have a lot going on, then I probably have a lot to say.

This has been a quiet week for us - all our family members left on Sunday and Monday, Bart took his first CPA exam early in the week and doesn't start classes until the middle of next week, and I've been off of work all week, so we've had quite a lot of free time.

We haven't done anything particularly exciting - no cruises or last-minute trips to Europe. Instead we've mostly watched a lot of episodes of House Season 4, saw "Knowing" at the dollar theater (ugh, terrible movie; also I am a wimp), did some shopping, laid on the couch and read a lot, went out to lunch, and went to the gym. I've applied for jobs in Boston and tried to wrap my mind around the idea that I'm done with school, probably forever.

Sometimes there just is too much and too little to say all at the same time.

Entertaining

When my parents, in-laws, and grandparents were here last weekend for graduation, my dad asked if we went to other people's houses twice as often as we had people over here. Bart and I agreed that it was probably more like ten times as often as we have people over to our house.

Nearly all of our friends have children so the vast majority of our activities take place at other locations, where toys and games and large backyards with trampolines and swing sets are plentiful or where kids can go to sleep in their own beds while we visit and eat and watch movies late into the evening.

I haven't minded it at all, but on Sunday morning and then again in the afternoon, when my living room and kitchen were filled with family and all the chairs were taken, and the table was covered in breakfast fare I'd prepared and then later with lunches, I thought how very nice it is to have your own house, the place you live in and, in my case, a house I love whole-heartedly, filled to bursting with loved ones.

(Which is not to say that I didn't love having my house back all to myself yesterday or that it wasn't very pleasant to take a long nap on my couch and eat tortilla chips at 11:00 p.m.).

"Now I Am the Master"

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt

10 of 10: As good a book as you could find anywhere, The Wednesday Wars is the book I would give to every person I know.

A few weeks, while we were in Utah, Bart's dad asked me to give him a list of five really great YA/children books. This book was on that list. That's how much I love it.

I read this book last year and meant to write about it for weeks, but I could never quite get my mind around what to say about it and eventually it had been six months and then a year since I'd read it and some of the details were starting to escape me. So I reread it (this time listening to it on CD), wondering if it would still be any good and discovered that if anything, I loved it more this time around.

This is a book I want to shout about, a book that moves me to tears with its sweetness and then makes me laugh seconds later. The Wednesday Wars has everything - humor, tragedy, friendship, sports, school, family, and even a tiny bit of romance.

The hero of the story is Holling Hoodhood. He is convinced his seventh grade teacher, Mrs. Baker, hates him. See, every Wednesday afternoon the Jewish and Catholic kids in his class go off to their respective religious classes; Holling is the lone Presbyterian and so he's left behind at the school. Mrs. Baker decides they will spend their afternoons together studying Shakespeare; obviously she hates his guts. His father is insistent that he not anger Mrs. Baker because her family owns the Baker Sports Emporium which is currently looking for an architecture firm to design a new building. And Mr. Hoodhood just so happens to be an architect.

Even now having read it twice and laboring over this review for days, I can't find any good way to sum up this book. It's not just about Shakespeare. It's not just about Holling realizing that his dad is deeply flawed and maybe it's because, like Shylock, it's just what is expected of him. It's not just about his quiet town and the contrast with the distant (and sometimes not so distant) turbulance of the Vietnam War. It's not just about the slow recognition that Mrs. Baker is more than a Shakespeare-loving, red-pen wielding teacher. It's not just about giant escaped rats living in the school ceiling or cream puffs or a Micky Mantle-autographed baseball.

It's about all of this and so much more. I don't think of this book as having a narrative arc; rather it's bits of Holling's life added together to make a rich and complex picture of a seventh-grade boy dealing with a life that is, by turns, idyllic and complicated and difficult. Just like real life.

If I could write any book, this is one I would want to have written. The story is perfect and the writing is better than that.

You should read this book.

On the Big Screen

My sister, Merrick, prefers to watch movies at home. She and her husband have a fairly large TV, which sits right in front of their comfy squishy couches. In her living room which is adjacent to her kitchen, which has a fridge full of food. Just behind the living room is a bathroom, and it is easy to pause the movie should you need to take a visit to the bathroom or the kitchen. So I can understand why she prefers home.

And yet, I would always prefer to go to the movie theater. I love watching the previews. I love sitting in the dark, with strangers all around me. I love seeing the show on a huge screen with terrific sound. I love hearing the crowd laugh or gasp at the screen. I love having the drive home to talk about the movie - what was awesome or what was so mind-bogglingly stupid.

Watching a movie at home on a Friday night seems kind of sad. Going to a movie on a Friday night feels awesome. Watching a movie alone during the afternoon seems like wasted time. Going out to a matinee feels like an adventure.

Going to the theater reminds me of seeing Beauty and the Beast - the first movie I remember seeing in a real theater. It reminds me of going to see Sweet Home Alabama with my mom and sister, where we came in about 10 minutes late, stayed through the whole credits and re-watched the first few minutes we'd missed. It reminds me of the many many movies I saw at the dollar theater my freshman year in college on dates or with my roommates or even the time a group of us WALKED from the dorms to the movie theater in November, a round trip of four miles. In the cold. It reminds me of the movies my mom and I saw together in the theater when I was home for the summer after freshman year. It reminds me of the dozens and dozens of movies Bart and I have gone to see in our local dollar theater since moving here three years ago. It reminds me of going at midnight on opening night for the first Harry Potter films.

I know it won't always be as easy for us to go to the movie theater. When we have kids, it will probably make a lot more sense to get a movie from Redbox and stay home to watch it, instead of paying a babysitter. But I think I'll always prefer going to the movie theater, settling back into a small seat, and hoping I don't have to go to the bathroom during the show.

Wings by Aprilynne Pike

8 of 10: I haven't heard a lot of buzz about Wings, despite it hitting the NYT bestseller list this weekend but I think it deserves more publicity. It was so lovely and spunky; I loved virtually every word.

This is one of those books, like Twilight, where I think the official blurb gives away more of the story than I wanted to know. It's a faerie story, and that's really all you need to know.

I take that back - the idea of faeries is always a little off putting to me. I think I worry that the whole book will be caught up in lots of dull faerie lore and weird magic. This book is nothing like that.

Laurel, the main girl, discovers she's a faerie and watching her discover what she's really like, what being a faerie entails, is just fascinating (I love that kind of thing). I really don't want to give away more than that, because the fun is in watching it unfold for yourself.

It's not a particularly fast-paced book (although there is one pretty high-speed section towards the end), but generally it feels just so relaxed and beautiful. That obsessive, can't-read-fast-enough feeling I associate with books like The Hunger Games or Twilight is entirely absent here. I kept picking it back up not because I HAD to, but because I wanted to. It was just a joy to read.

Fair warning - this book is the first of a four book series, so the ending kind of leaves you hanging (not in a "there's a sword to her throat and then the book ends" kind of way, but definitely in a "there are many many loose ends hanging wide open here" kind of way). Even so, it's still a satisfying book, which I find remarkable.

Also, I know we're all tired of hearing books compared to Twilight when they have absolutely nothing in common with Twilight (except, perhaps, they both have words and are sold at Barnes and Noble). And this book is not really like Twilight, but there are some similarities between Aprilynne Pike and Stephenie Meyer that I find interesting - they both got a several book deal before the first book was even published (the Wings series is going to be four books total), they have the same agent, and they're both Mormon. Um, maybe I'm the only one who finds those kinds of things interesting (did you know E. L. Konigsburg is the only author to have won the Newbery medal AND a Newbery Honor in the same year? Did you know Sid Fleischman and Paul Fleischman are the only father and son to have both won the Newbery?).

By the way, on the UK cover, doesn't it look like Stephenie Meyer is the author?

No Where to Go

During my sophomore year of college, I got a job working on campus for the school's summer sports and dance camps office. It was a lovely lovely job with some delightful coworkers, several of whom were major readers. I hadn't read much for fun in the past few years and it was so nice to slip back into the habit. One of the women in particular would pass books around like candy. During the summer, she lent me the first two Shopaholic books.

I was going to Milwaukee with my dad that weekend - kind of a last hurrah together before I got married later that summer - where he was lecturing. I flew in late on Friday evening and when I woke up Saturday morning, he was already gone for the day. With nothing to do, no homework, no responsibilities at all, I pulled the books out of my luggage and crawled back into my hotel bed and spent most of the morning reading. It was a perfect day.

Yesterday, after working from home all morning, I looked up the local dollar theater and saw that there were two matinee showings of Confessions of a Shopaholic. I told Bart, who was hard at work studying for his finals, that I was going and I drove off, slipping into the theater just a few seconds after the show started.

It wasn't the best movie I've ever seen (which isn't surprising since they certainly aren't the best books I've ever read either), but it made me laugh and I felt again that sense of total freedom. Here I was, once again without homework or responsibilities, spending the afternoon alone in a movie theater, feeling ridiculously joyful when Becky asked how Luke had gotten a scarf back when his phone-in bid been had been out-priced by a girl at the auction and he replies, "both of them were me."

It was a perfect afternoon.

Escape! The Story of The Great Houdini by Sid Fleischman

9 of 10: Non-fiction of the best kind. Escape! The Story of The Great Houdini is a phenomenal book for both fiction and non-fiction readers.

My dad is an amateur magician and our hallway is covered in framed magic posters. And, of course, Harry Houdini has always been king. I have heard about him for as long as I can remember.

But many of the details about his life were very very fuzzy to me. I knew he'd been punched in the stomach by a college student a few days before he died, but I wasn't sure if it had caused his death or how or if that was even true. And I couldn't have even told you what decade he died in. Was it the 20's or the 60's? I had no earthly idea.

Sid Fleischman, who won the Newbery award 22 years ago for The Whipping Boy, was, apparently, something of an amateur magician himself and worshiped Houdini (like virtually every other young magician). He even met Houdini's wife, Bess, when he was young, so he had a particular interest in this man.

Like any good magician, Fleischman doesn't give away any of Houdini's secrets - there is little or no discussion on how he does the tricks, but rather the focus is on Houdini's life and career and lasting fame, eighty years after his death. And you know what? I love Fleischman for that.

One of the things that made this book so fascinating to me is the fact that Harry Houdini had a bad habit of doctoring his own history, including in his own diary, making many of the details of his life difficult to pin down. Fleischman does an excellent job noting the places where records don't match up and giving possible scenarios for the reader to decide among.

Houdini is just a spectacularly interesting person and this book made him even more so to me. What a talented, driven, flawed guy he was and Fleischman, though obviously very impressed by him, is also honest about Houdini's vices, as well as his prodigious fame and talent.

I listened to this on CD, so I missed out on the pictures, which is too bad. I'll probably look for the hard copy next time I'm at the library and glance over it. The audio version, though, was terrifically narrated and the introduction and ending were narrated by Sid Fleischman himself, which I thought was very cool.

This book is appropriate, I'd think, for middle-schoolers and early high school students, not because of the content, but just because the language is fairly high level. I'd highly recommend this to anyone interested in magic, Houdini, or a good biography.

How I Manage to Feed Us on $40

Or, why Bart is wasting away before my very eyes. Or a post with many many headings. Or the longest post I have ever written. Or why I should not write subtitles.

Prepping for the Grand Shopping Trip:

First, both of my local grocery stores send out their fliers on Wednesdays. One of the stores (Randalls) has excellent sales, but everything else costs an absolute fortune. The other store, my beloved and cherished H-E-B, is my main grocery store. I usually sit down with the fliers on Wednesday night, circle anything that looks worth buying and write it on my grocery list (with an "R" if it's to be purchased at Randalls).

On Friday or maybe Saturday morning, I sit down with these things:


First, I make my shopping list. My mom used to do hers like this (no idea if she still does) and so I do too.

Second, I write down the days of the week on this pad, with spots for one main dish and two side dishes.

Third, I start filling in main dishes (I write the magazine or cookbook number or website next to it so I can find it again as my approximately 50 issues of Everyday Food all look very much alike). I add the ingredients I need to my grocery list as I go.

Fourth, I fill in side dishes and add them to the shopping list. I add anything from the fridge pad that we need. I ask Bart if he has anything special he needs. And ta-da. Ready to go grocery shopping.

Here is my completed menu and shopping list for this coming week:


You'll notice that there are some major items missing from the grocery list like milk and eggs and more than one meat item. Because I shop every week, I end up buying most things every OTHER week, so last week there were frozen chicken breasts and milk and eggs and beans, where this week was more things like jam and cranberries and butter.

Meals, you ask? You shall receive:

Breakfast is one of two things. We either have:

• plain Hill Country Fare brand Cheerios (they have the least sugar of any cereal we have found and it costs $1.68 cents for a very large box of them which lasts us a week and a half or two, depending on how often we eat them) with strawberries (about three strawberries each) and skim milk (which I buy by the half gallon because it is the only amount of milk we can even think about getting through before it goes bad and it also is the only size you can buy it in where it isn't more expensive to buy skim milk than full-fat whole milk, which absolutely blows my mind).
  
• If we don't have Cheerios, we each have one of these muffins (I buy blueberries frozen for $2.99 a bag, which makes three batches of muffins).

Lunch is

• a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (I buy the very smallest jar of HEB peanut butter because it is inexplicably the cheapest ounce for ounce) on 100% whole wheat bread (One loaf costs $1.93 and it lasts us almost exactly a week, with maybe a slice or two left over to make croutons or for a late night piece of peanut butter bread for me).
• an HEB yogurt (45 or 50 cents each, depending on the week and maybe the moon). Bart eats his basically every day and I eat about one or two a week because, meh, I don't love yogurt unless I am extremely hungry. I keep taking it, not eating it, and putting it back in the fridge at night. I have not yet gotten food poisoning.
  
• String Cheese. I buy the Cheese Heads brand because, I am sorry, but the HEB brand is too gross for words and I am willing, on this item, to fork over an extra fifty cents. It is $3.27 for a pack of twelve.
  
• A piece of fruit. Bart has recently developed a deep love for oranges (he'll probably tell you he's always loved oranges, but I have not seen it before) and I usually have a half or a whole apple. Oranges are currently between 77 and 99 cents a pound and apples are $1.29 a pound.
  

And then dinner. I plan for five dinners a week because I assume we'll have one night where one of us doesn't really feel that hungry, we get home too late to eat, we go out to eat, someone invites us over, or we have leftovers. I pick one main dish for each night and then I have two bunches of lettuce (usually red leaf or spinach) for salads and a number of fruits and vegetables that I can do for side dishes, depending on what was on sale. I don't like to spend a lot of time prepping side dishes, dirtying up dishes, etc, so I don't do anything very fancy. We do a lot of tomato/avocado/homemade crouton salads, grapes, strawberries, green beans, kiwis, pineapple, etc., etc., etc. Here are the main dishes I've done in the last few weeks:

• Tuesday: Crockpot Tacos (I tossed everything in the crockpot the night before and turned it on before we left for school the next morning)
  
• Wednesday: Stuffed Shells (I left out the chicken because I am cheap; this used up a big chunk of the ricotta cheese I had left over from the lasagna we ate later this week)
  
• Thursday: General Tso's Chicken (I used only one chicken breast because I am cheap. It still made so much that we both had it for lunch the next day)
  
• Friday: Vegetable Lasagna (I made this and put in the freezer several weeks ago. It made a LOT. We had so many leftovers that even after eating it three times each, we finally threw away about a third of it)
  
• Saturday: Went out to dinner
• Sunday: Corn Chowder This is pretty much Bart's favorite food ever.
  
• Monday: BBQ Chicken Salad Likely Bart's SECOND favorite food ever.
• Tuesday: Fend for yourself (there were beef sandwiches at school and I had one in the late afternoon, so I wasn't hungry. Bart had two or three boiled eggs for dinner).
  
• Wednesday: Cincinnati Chili (I made this the night before and then reheated it when we got home from school while the pasta cooked. And I used ground turkey because I never ever buy ground beef because it is expensive and I can't really tell the difference anymore)
• Thursday: Penne Pasta (late night at school, so I made this the night before and we each took a tupperware of it. I also added some chicken that I had left over from. . .something. Now I can't remember what. I also bought dried chickpeas, soaked them over night and then cooked them because its cheaper).
• Friday: Chicken and Biscuits
  
• Saturday: I went out to dinner with some friends and Bart had a shepherd's pie from the freezer
  
• Sunday: Dinner with friends

This week:

• Monday: Risotto with a side of sliced kiwi. I had the kiwi from last week and the only thing I needed to buy for the risotto was the mozzarella ($2.99 for a container of fresh mozzarella). I use regular short grain rice instead of the real stuff because it's about a quarter of the price. This recipe will also let me use up some of my basil that re sprouted in my back porch planters.
  
• Tuesday: Honey Teriyaki Chicken (I'm using chicken breasts instead because Bart doesn't like chicken thighs). Will make curried sweet potatoes for a side dish (because my sweet potatoes are probably only moments away from going bad).
  
• Wednesday: Shepherd's Pie. Bart loves this and it will let me use up the last of my celery that I bought last week (this may be the first time I have EVER used up an entire package of celery before it went bad). Will probably do a strawberry/lettuce/pecan salad on the side.
• Thursday: Hawaiian Curry (I bought a big bag of chicken last week, so no need for it this week. I bought one can of coconut milk (99 cents) and more chicken bullion since I was almost out. Everything else I had. Probably just a lettuce/tomato/crouton salad on the side.
  
• Friday: Salmon Pasta (I bought the smoked salmon a few weeks ago and just haven't gotten around to this recipe).
  
• Saturday: Pork Carnitas (I bought the pork last week when it was on sale for 99 cents a pound).

A few other things I bought ingredients for this week because they looked fun to make:

• Orange Rolls. Bought orange marmalade. I have so much orange juice in my fridge leftover from our campout . . . two months ago.
  
• Cranberry Granola. I bought dried cranberries and pecans. I have frozen cranberry juice in the freezer from Valentine's Day.
• Homemade Samoas. I had coconut in the freezer. I bought caramels.

Here is the grocery haul for this week, which came to a total of $41.97:


Any other questions? I'm more than happy to bore you all stiff with my grocery store tales.

What I Did on Saturday Night

Once upon a time it was Mother's Day. You may remember that I don't actually, you know, have children and therefore am not a mother (not that such a detail stopped me from taking a bag of chocolates when they handed them out in church for all the mothers).

That detail also did not stop Bart when our good friend B called him up and said "We're going to do a big Mother's Day extravaganza." (Thanks, B, for forgetting that we have no children).

You can read about the whole shebang on Ralphie's blog because she has taken better pictures of it than I ever would have and she will make you laugh with her funny comments. Also, she says nice things about me, so why should I even bother writing about it?

I shouldn't.

Mother's Day

Over Christmas break, Merrick, Landen, and I did some tricky things in order to get us all in the same city on the same day (we managed to find a single three hour window). The reason for all the sneakiness was that we wanted to take some pictures of the three of us girls for our mom for Mother's Days.

Amber graciously agreed to do them and also to keep them secret for the many many months between Dec 26 and today.








I am so thrilled with how these turned out - thank you again SO much, Amber!

Happy Mother's Day, Mom . . . we love you.

Grocery Shopping

Did you wake up this morning thinking, "I wonder how often Janssen grocery shops?" I thought so.

You know how, on occasion, you make some small-ish change to your life ("I'll start getting up 10 minutes earlier and eating breakfast" or "I will clear off the kitchen table every night before I go to bed") and it, no joke, changes your entire life and you want to tell everyone about it until they start shaking you by the shoulders and saying, "It's just breakfast! You are ranting on about a bowl of cereal. Pull yourself together, woman!" Hmm, maybe it's just me.

My life, this year, has been revolutionized by a new system of grocery shopping. Here was the old system:

1. Go to the grocery store as infrequently as possible. Every ten days is good. Every two weeks is better.
2. Pretend not to notice that the milk has gone bad and that all the vegetables and fruits are shriveled little sad things in the bottom of your drawers. Also ignore the fact that you have basically no food the last few days before you break down and go to the store.
   
3. Cringe when the total at the check-out counter came to more than your budget because, well, you had to buy everything every single time.
   

This was a top-notch system, as I'm sure you can tell. Bart, I think, particularly liked it, especially the part where I would say, "this old almost-expired yogurt is surely enough lunch for you. See you at ten p.m. tonight after class!"

I especially liked the part where I felt guilty when I didn't go to the grocery store and there was no food and guilty when I did go to the grocery store and spent more than I wanted to. Oh yes, it was a win-win.

Which brings me to Operation Grocery Shop 2009. (Of course it has a title. . .what kind of new project doesn't? Fine. I just made it up this minute).

1. I will grocery shop every single week (Saturdays (or Mondays if we're out of town))
2. I will not spend more than $50 per shopping trip
3. I will have food for five dinners a week, plus breakfasts and lunches every day

Ta-da. Easy.

The benefits are many.

1. If I notice we're out of something, it doesn't matter. I can always wait five or six days to replenish it. Bart doesn't have to worry that when I say, "oh, I'll pick it up next time I'm at the store" that might mean that sometime after the birth of his fourth child we'll once again have ziplock bags.
2. I know what's in my fridge and can plan meals based on what I have left over (pineapple left over from this last week? Guess it's time to make this).
3. When things are on sale, I actually have money to buy them and not feel guilty (this is vair bad news for my freezer which is stuffed to the rafters).
4. I actually stay within my budget (well within it, actually - lately, I've been spending more like $40 a week).
5. It has really made me want to cook again - I've been tagging more recipes in my Delicious file and checking out more cooking magazines from the library.
   
6. If we have some event coming up (dinner with friends, a birthday, a camping trip), I almost always know well-enough in advance to add the ingredients to my shopping list, which means it just goes in as part of the weekly budget, instead of requiring an extra trip (and money) to the store.
   

Okay, okay, you can shake me by the shoulders now and tell me, "It's just grocery shopping, Janssen! Pull yourself together."

Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson

9 of 10: For a girl like me, raised on Little House on the Prairie and Caddie Woodlawn, this book was like finding a long lost friend. This is a slightly more grown-up version of those books, but still retains the same feel. I loved Hattie Big Sky from the first moment to the last.

Hattie has been an orphan (of course she is) for years, shuffled between unwilling relatives since childhood. Now, at sixteen, her great almost-aunt is ready to ship her off to work as some sort of maid. Hattie, of course, hates the idea, but finds herself saved when a letter arrives declaring that her uncle (a self-proclaimed scoundrel) has died and left her, his only living relative, his homestead in Montana.

Despite her aunt's protests, Hattie packs her things, leaves Iowa and heads to Montana where she finds herself alone on the prairie in a tiny little shack, with one horse and one cow to her name, plus the responsibility of "proving up" within the next nine months ("proving up" requires her to pay $37 in filing fees, plant 40 acres of the land, and put up several miles of fencing). Normally she would have three years to prove up, but because her uncle started out on the claim over two years earlier, she has only a little time to do what is required.

And all of this set against the backdrop of World War I. You don't hear as much about homesteading and farming in the modern era, after the invention of cars. It's a little disconcerting to have Hattie sitting on her front stoop and looking up to see a motorcycle roar into her front yard.

Hattie has a school friend, Charlie, who is off in Europe serving in the war and she writes to him consistently. To him, she talks not only of her growing love for Montana and the difficult life there, but also the hatred for German-born homesteaders that is becoming increasingly prevalent. The family she is closest to in Montana has a German husband/father and he is often the target of such bigotry as the war drags on.

The idea of going out to homestead at sixteen is just the sort of thing I loved as a child and still find completely intriguing.

And you can't get a better heroine than Hattie. She is so determined to make this all work - the miles of fence posts that have to be put up, plowing, planting, harvesting, keeping up with her chickens, horse, cow, and cat.

I think these kinds of plots are generally aimed at a younger audience, but this one is marked as 10-16 and it's pretty accurate. This book has enough complexity for it to be interesting to those who might have thought they'd aged past the homesteading kinds of books. As a side note, I listened to this book on CD and the narrator, Kirsten Potter, is perfect. Oh, I loved her. She was Hattie.

This was the perfect weekend book - real, honest, and so likable I wanted to cry - I listened to much of it lying on the couch on Friday afternoon. A nice change from the angsty teenage love stories I also love.

We'll Sing a Song That We All Know

Today is Bart's birthday. It's his last birthday in his twenties. So, in his honor, twenty nine things I love about Bart. In the non-mushiest way possible.

1. He has learned that I need excessive enthusiasm about basically everything. Thus, at almost every meal, you can hear him saying, "This is the best meal I have ever eaten in my entire life."
   
2. He will watch and enjoy movies like "Pride and Prejudice" or "Bleak House" and "Cranford." You cannot ask for much more.
3. He acts genuinely interested when I give him long detailed summaries of the books I'm reading.
4. He loves kids and can't wait to have his own, but has never pressured me about having children.
5. Once he makes a decision about doing something, he moves forward quickly.
6. He and I have almost the same tolerance for museums. Thank heavens.
   
7. When he realized I was slowly dying from the lack of my own cellphone (a cellphone which I insisted I didn't need because, oh the cost), we went in and I got a cellphone that very night.
   
8. He kills all the bugs. Even the ones smaller than a pencil eraser which I said I would kill.
   
9. He has drastically changed his life plans to better meet my personal needs (hello, accounting!)
   
10. He is always up for an evening walk or bike ride.
11. He is totally sold on subtitles as the true way to watch a movie. Or at least pretends to be.
    
12. He never minds when I need to be alone or spend the evening reading on the couch.
    
13. He is one of the hardest workers I know - his dedication to CPA prep would blow your mind.
14. He has almost limitless faith in my abilities. As someone who fears failure, this is a huge blessing for me.
    
15. He will almost always concede to my insatiable need for frugality/cheapness.
16. He is a nice dresser, but not obsessive about expensive clothes (except for white dress shirts from Brooks Brothers, which he calls the BMW of dress clothing).
    
17. He gets frustrated at bad driving and heavy traffic (as someone with a bit of a short fuse married to someone with almost limitless patience, it is heartwarming to see him lose his cool over something that rarely bothers me).
18. He enjoys silly things like late-night trips to Wal-mart as much as I do.
19. He loves to travel, and lets me plan almost everything. Huzzah!
20. He has learned that a short-sleeve dress shirt is an oxymoron. Men of the world, take note.
    
21. He makes it easy to be social - I know that most people will like Bart and that he'll make any event fun.
22. He has encouraged me to be more active and healthy.
23. He makes me feel like Superwoman. He constantly praises my ability to multi-task and get things done.
    
24. He lives in fear that I'll decide to be a vegetarian. I find this incredibly endearing.
    
25. He loves my family. There is little else he could have done to make me love him so much.
    
26. He is amazingly generous - he always is suggesting we take some cookies over to friends or write a thank you card or do some small (or large) act of service.
    
27. He knows when the best thing he can say is, "Would you like to go out to dinner tonight?"
28. He makes almost all of the personal phone calls (I make up for it by making all the phone calls to the credit card company, the airline, and the cell phone providers).
    
29. He is even better looking at 29 than he was at 25 (we just watched our wedding videos this weekend, so I speak with great authority). Men just age better.
    

Happy Birthday, Bart! I hope this is your best year ever. Until next year, of course.

Free Membership* (*Limited Time Offer, May Require Right Arm as Payment at a Later Date)

Last night, Bart paid the credit card bill and since it was a bit higher than normal, I told him I wanted to look at it (because, as you know, the spending of money makes my blood freeze up). We pulled it up and looked over it - everything looked right.

And then, almost at the same moment, we saw a line item that nearly gave us both a heart attack:

Amazon.com Prime - $79

The study exploded in a chorus of "Oh no!"s and "Why didn't you CANCEL that?" and "EIGHTY DOLLARS!!!" and "Why didn't you remind me to cancel this?"

As you can probably guess, Bart had ordered a textbook early in the semester, had been offered a free trial of Amazon Prime which would allow him to received free shipping, and had signed up, with the good intentions of canceling it before it expired. Of course, now April 20th, the day it went from being a free trial to a one year membership at the low, low cost of $79, had come and gone. Also, needless to say, we had not ordered one additional thing from Amazon in the past three months and thus not enjoyed a dime of benefit from our free trial.

I said, "Let's try and cancel this right. now." (Please note that it was, at that moment, 11:17 p.m. and we had to get up at 6:00 a.m. Eighty dollars waits for no man, friends).

We waited breathlessly while Bart's amazon.com account loaded, then I was crying, "That button! Push that button!"

Happily, Amazon will let you get a full refund of your money if you have not actually used your Amazon Prime benefits as of yet, which we had not. Two mouse clicks, and our $79 was winging its way back to our credit card.

Bart and I often talk about how, for us, a credit card is more real to us than cash. Cash leaves no paper trail. It's there and then it's gone. A credit card statement tracks everything you spent. You think about what you spent not only in the moment you swipe your card, but again when you have to pay the full balance at the end of the month. We smile smugly to ourselves when people go on and on about how cash is the only way to be accountable and how credit card users will eventually end up paying the interest with their first born son.

Well, one point for you, cash money folks.