August update 2015

Have you seen our newish board game/book corner? There's a special story behind this. Just kidding. Emily just likes to rearrange furniture.

Our car has personality. One of it's unique traits is that it has a bolt sticking up out of the hood in lieu of a hood latch. This means when I want to check out what's under the hood, I have to unscrew the nuts off the bolt. Well, you see, one day the nuts wouldn't come off. I tried as hard as I could one 90 degree morning with sweat streaming down my face.

We went to Ace to see if they had a nut splitter type of tool that is supposed to exist. This guy at Ace offered to help us get it off, so he ended up using a Dremel cutting tool to cut the top nut off. Then the bottom nut wouldn't come off so he cut off the top part of the screw and the nut still wouldn't come off he cut that off too. Then he got a tool which magically repaired the threads on the screw which fixed it. Maybe we should have tried that first but what do I know!?

We took a trip to the wonderful land of high-elevation-beautiful-summer-weather Snowflake, Arizona to attend my little sister Janae's wedding. Here are some photographs to prove this actually happened. 

Looks like a wedding to me.

That's what you might call a "grandpa"

SELFIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The nieces and nephews are too cute, someone call the police. 

Self portrait

My plan was to take pictures of the camera man to be ironic.

Hailey and Christian dancing

Look we're having fun!

Look we're not having fun anymore!

Emily went to Southern California to go to a fancy work retreat/meeting and to spend time with her parents of the grand variety, a parent of the non-grand variety, and a parent of the step variety. She had some adventurous pizza (and liked it) and hung out on the beach. 

People here in Arizona really like going to California. I think I understand. 

We are very close to being 100 percent debt free. We're down to 7,000 in student loans and we'll have it all paid off somewhere around November, possibly sooner because Emily is going to be making more money in the coming months. 

We're really excited because we have never had an actual spending budget the whole time we've been married. It's going to be weird to actually put fun stuff in the budget (although we're not going to get too crazy because we still have lots of other goals). 

We've even completely stopped eating out recently because we want to make sure every extra bit of money goes towards our future. Our mantra continues to be "Live like no one else so later we can live (and give) like no one else."

Plans for September: If I can get finish with some certain projects by a certain September deadline, I'm going to get a bonus! So I'm probably going to work some extra hours. Other than that, I don't know what's going to happen, and that's ok. 

Really it is.

Why are you still here?