January of the 2016 variety

I don't play a lot of video games because time is valuable and I like to be judicious about how I use my free time. Sometimes I do play video games and Emily likes to watch for some reason (that's honestly the only reason I still play every now and then). That's all just a long winded preamble to say that we played the final saga of Starcraft II and the story and dialogue were HORRIBLE. The game itself was really fun but the dialogue was BAD. However, later in the month we played an old 90's point and click adventure type game called Grim Fandango and the dialogue and story was AMAZING. Isn't that ironic? Video games are awesome because you can temporarily feel like you accomplished something without actually having to do anything! I'm going to start playing video games every chance I get.

We went to go check out places to live in Tempe to see if there was anything good..and long story short we're not sure what we want to do with our lives. We hate moving but we want to move except we don't want to and we should rent a condo instead of an apartment.

There was a couple days this month where it rained non-stop. It was really weird. I took a picture but that's not even remotely interesting but hey I worked hard on that so I'm putting it on here. El Nino is spanish for....the Nino.

We had a game night with our friends who are moving to New York soon. We happened to notice they had "butt" written on their light fixture. They had lived there for two years and had never noticed. That's what we're here for.

What just came in the mail? Oh look, a mattress in a box.

Look, I'm taking pictures instead of helping!

One particular Sunday this month, there was a big marathon taking place on the street our church building is on, so we had only one hour of church and then had to go home. It was...kind of glorious. If you're not LDS, that probably means nothing to you, but that's ok!!!!!!

We went on a hike with the cub scouts on a beautiful Saturday morning. I hope Emily likes that I'm posting pictures of her!!!!!!!!!!!

Driftless: Part 1

I like to sing Tenor, but I only have the courage to do it when I'm singing in a loud group or someone next to me is also singing Tenor. Otherwise I stick with the safe option: Bass.

I consider the Lord of the Rings movies to be some of the greatest films ever. However, I hated the first two Hobbit movies and refuse to see the third one.

Every time a recipe calls for Worstershire sauce, I get very nervous.

I can't stand it it when people talk about politics in church, even when I agree.

"If you reveal TMI, it can make people fell a little less alone." - Justin Hall

I don't care if we have turkey on Thanksgiving and I don't care about Christmas trees.

I'm 28 years old and have never owned a smartphone.

I think I would like to go back to college and get a degree purely for the purposes of education rather than trying to get a job.

The King James version of the Bible makes pretty much no sense to me, I usually read the NLT.

When I'm programming, I love to have the lights off.

I like oatmeal, but I don't cook it. I just pour milk on and eat it raw.

December 2015

December 2015, what a month. The most important thing that happened this month is that..drum roll please.......................

We're debt freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
That's right, we are completely free from any and every form of debt. We feel lighter and happier and....yep, we feel free-er....I mean...more free.

When you get out of debt you have to celebrate. You have to go and buy things because - well, your money belongs to you now, you can do whatever you want.

In this spirit we went to Texas Roadhouse to celebrate. We chose Texas Roadhouse because you can eat peanuts and throw them on the floor. They also have good food.

After you get out of debt, you have to go and get ice cream too so we made a visit to an ice cream place a couple minutes away from where we live called Sweet Republic. They make all their ice cream from scratch with locally produced ingredients and it's just downright delicious. Some of the best ice cream I've ever had.

In becoming debt free, we completed step two of a six step process to get rich slowly. Step one was to save a thousand dollars as an emergency fund. That part was easy for us, we already had 4,000 dollars sitting in the bank.

Step two was to take all our debts and list them smallest to largest, and attack the smallest debt with a vengeance. We only had student loans so there wasn't a lot to list out but we started a 12 month process that made us learn patience, persistence, and delaying of gratification. Twelve months later, we had paid off over 18,000 dollars and completely debt free!

Don't get into debt kids.

We're now in step 3, which is to save an emergency fund of 3-6 months of expenses. We're going for the three month emergency fund because if I lose my job as a software developer I'm confident I can find another job fairly quickly. Our aim is to have 7,500 dollars in the bank and we're more than halfway there already!

Step four will be to start contributing 15 percent of our income to retirement. Step five will be to start saving in order to put our kids through college. Of course we would need a kid to put through college in the first place (we know you want us to have kids ASAP).

Step 6 is to attack your mortgage with a fury and vengeance and get that thing paid off. Of course we don't have a mortgage, so either we save to pay cash for a cheap place and gradually move up, or we get a 15 year mortgage and pay it off as fast as humanly possible. I can tell you we're not too stoked about getting BACK into debt, so I don't know if we'll do the second option.

*I forgot to write in my journal, so here's what I can remember:

We watched a documentary about Elephants. People stalked elephants using dung cams. That's a weird thing to remember.

We went to Bookmans to get some gifts for people. Bookmans is a wonderful land of books and lots of other goodies. And of course we got a calendar full of communist/socialist propaganda!

We flew to Utah and there was A LOT of snow. We wanted to watch Star Wars and ended up celebrating Christmas too! We had Christmas on the 20th or something like that, because really, why does it matter what day you actually celebrate Christmas on? So Star Wars...I really liked it at first, but the more I think about it, the more I realize they were just pandering to the fans without doing anything original. I still think it's a good movie though, Emily REALLY liked it.

We flew back  home, then 24 hours later we flew off to Oregon to spend Christmas with the mom side of the family. That was the first time in my life that I had been in Oregon. It's very green and it rained the whole time we were there. Algae was spontaneously growing on the driveway. Thankfully we didn't have to sleep outside because we were in a nice house within walking distance from the beach! It also happened to have a theater (for reals) and a game room. We totally indoctrinated some kids with the board gaming gospel and it was awesome.

I'm VERY excited about the upcoming year. It's gonna be AWESOME.

Bye,