My happy moment of the day

I'm pretty sure that it takes a year to recover from moving to a new house. At least that's what it has felt like each time we moved in the last few years, and since that has been a lot of times, it feels like a good reference point.

I've been working a bit more the last month than I had the previous six, so the funds are flowing a bit more. Today I shrunk my grocery list of non food items, whatever you call that, I call it my Everything Else list, to less than ten items. It made it up into the 40s and maybe even 50 at one point when we first moved to this house in January. It might take a bit longer to knock off those last nine items, but it's surprisingly pleasing to get all those things. It's kind of funny because they're things like sheets and mattress covers and a firesafe box and canning jars and a diffuser, so by no means all that interesting of stuff, but there you have it, the things that make me happy in any given day.

Also, I think I've finally gotten to a place where I like how my working hours go. It's only taken nearly seven years to figure it out, but hey, I'm trying not to count. I used to work only in the mornings, but the kids kept getting up earlier and earlier and I just didn't get the time I needed before they were up and making it take twice as long if not longer, so now I work from 9-10PM during the week, and focus on only work so I get the maximum amount done. Then I wake up at 5:30AM and work from then until I'm done, which with that quality hour the night before means that I'm often done by 7-8AM. It had gotten to where I was taking all morning to get done and that was just unacceptable, so this is a fantastic change. Here's to the goal of someday not working at all, or at least not my current employment, but for now during these grad school years, it is a huge blessing in our lives that I have a flexible job that allows us to be more financially independent. It makes being on a grad school income not seem like such a sacrifice when we aren't piling up loans semester upon semester. And the tradeoff in stress with that is very worth it.