Local Getaway

It's hard for me to believe but next month (May 22 to be exact) will be our 1 year wedding anniversary! This year has absolutely flown by! With our anniversary fast approaching I really wanted to have something special planned. Originally I thought of just making Kristian plan something, after all I planned most of the wedding, so it seemed only fair. But let's be honest, I'm a little bit of a control freak and a lot bit of a planner and as much as I would love to sit back and let him take the reigns that's just not gonna happen.

Ideally I wanted to go on vacation somewhere to keep up with our tradition of heading out of the country in May (Jamaica in '09 for my birthday and St. Lucia in '10 for our honeymoon) but alas our funds have been dramatically depleted from buying the house and since Kristian has only been at his new job a few months he doesn't have the vacation time built up yet.

So I figured maybe just a long weekend somewhere not too far away. I asked my mom if she could use her timeshare to book us a room at the same hotel where we spent our wedding night. It was her timeshare that we used last year to get the room in the first place. Unfortunately there was nothing available there.

However, my fabulous mother came through and booked us two nights at The Wyndham National Harbor. This is the same hotel where I stayed with my mom and her friends during this weekend back in December. So I know how nice the hotel and the surrounding area are.

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We have a two bedroom suite for Saturday night May 21 and Sunday night May 22 (our anniversary). It's only about 30 minutes from where we live but it will be so nice to get away for two nights and have a fun little local vacation. There are a ton of nice restaurants and cute little shops right in that area and we may try to check out this place Saturday night and then spend our anniversary Sunday in Old Town Alexandria right by where we got married, followed by dinner at the place where we had our rehearsal dinner. Maybe this year I won't be too nervous to eat and enjoy my food!

As fun as an exotic vacation somewhere would be it's kind of nice spending our first anniversary close to where it all went down last year.

Opinions Needed

As I may have mentioned yesterday someone *cough*me*cough* has a birthday coming up *cough*May12*cough* and since I'm apparently an amazing wife Kristian wants to get me a really nice present.

Something I've been wanting for a while now is a nice camera. And as it turns out our current camera has gone to photography heaven and no longer works so unless we buy something else I'm stuck taking all my pictures on my blackberry which is no bueno.

Now I don't need something super fancy, super expensive and that will take me forever to learn how to use properly, I just don't have the patience for that right now. With that said I do want something nicer than the basic point and shoot digital camera like the ones I've had in the past. I just don't think they take that good of pictures.

So here is where you come in Internet friends. Do you have any suggestions of nice cameras that we could look into buying? We really don't want to spend more than $500 if we can help it.

It pays to be married

After procrastinating long enough we finally decided it was time to get our taxes done. I kept wanting to put it off after having owed last year I was worried I would owe again this year and our poor bank account can't really handle that after all the money we've spent on the house the past two months.

Since it was our first time filing since getting married and because of some past tax issues we decided it might be a good idea to have a professional do them.  So we headed over to H&R Block and had a nice lady named Jo help us out. And 45 painless minutes later we were done AND we discovered we would be getting a very nice refund.

Jo ran the numbers both ways, filing jointly vs. filing separately to see which would produce a greater refund and filing jointly was the best option. When you're married it's usually better to file jointly but there are some instances where that's not the case so it's good to check both ways.

Going to H&R block wasn't cheap, they charge based on the complexity of your return. Jo told us she's done ones as cheap as $40 and as high as $980! Thankfully ours fell in the lower half of that scale though still considerably more expensive than turbo tax. Luckily our refund will more than reimburse us for the expense, as well as pay off one of the debts that's been a black cloud over our head AND still leaves us extra money which we plan to use to fix our front steps (a story for another post) and landscape our front yard...and maybe help Kristian buy me a nice birthday gift. Did I mention my birthday is in 44 days? Because it is.

So while we may have been able to get the same results on our own using Turbo Tax we both felt a lot more confident having someone do it for us this year and I'm just thrilled we didn't owe again!

Share time- Have you done your taxes? Do you do them yourself or have them done professionally?

Really Mother Nature??

Apparently Mother Nature has not gotten the memo that it's now officially spring and therefore the temperatures in the 30's, snowy mix and morning frost on my car should be long gone by now but alas that's not the case. In fact I woke up Sunday morning to a decent dusting of snow..yes SNOW at the end of March. And I live in Virginia which is technically the south, not North Dakota. Sigh.

On a good note the cold weather has given us an excuse to test out our fireplace. Behold a picture of our first fire in our fireplace last night. We have a wood burning fireplace which Kristian was super excited about. Personally I was quite happy with our old gas fireplace that turned on at the flip of a switch but I guess this is a bit more authentic and definitely cozy.

One month in

It's hard for me to believe but we've officially been in our new house for exactly one month today! In some ways it feels like we just moved in yesterday and in other ways it feels like we've lived here for years. I'm pretty proud of how much we've accomplished on the house in only one month. Yes we still have a LOT left to do and that will take money time but our house feels so homey and nice after 4 short weeks. The guest room and office are still not 100% unpacked but hopefully will be after this weekend. And we've only painted one room so far so I think the theme for April will be PAINT.

I know it's only been a month but I really do love our home and I'm so happy we moved here. In honor of our one month houseiversary I thought I would share what specifically I love about my new house. Maybe I'll share the things I don't love about it in another post because yes there are things I don't love about it.

**I love that we now live in a neighborhood. At the condo we lived 1 mile off of I-95 and another major road so there really wasn't a neighborhood around us and the closest one to us wasn't the nicest. We now live at the end of a long street surrounded by cute houses, playgrounds and woods. We are always seeing people out jogging, pushing strollers and walking their dogs. It's a very family friendly area.

**I love our neighbors, everyone that we've met so far has been so friendly and helpful. Most of them are couples in their 30's and 40's with young kids. The kids all seem to be really friendly and well behaved. And they all love our cats and come over asking if the cats can come out to play. HA!

**Our view. I've written about it before but we can't get over how great our view is of the water. In the afternoons we get to watch the crew teams from the local schools practice rowing down the river and it's just so quiet and peaceful.

**Stairs. This is probably an odd thing to love and I know many people would feel differently but I love living in a 3 level house with stairs. Not only does it make the house seem bigger but I actually enjoy the extra exercise, especially on the weekends when I feel I go up and down the stairs 25 times a day. I realize this will get old quick and once we have a kid I'll probably hate it but for now my legs are getting a much needed workout.

**Eating at the dining room table. Yes this is probably another odd thing to love. In our condo we rarely ate at the dining room table because when we did we couldn't see the t.v. and we I like to watch the news (okay it's E! News but still news) when we eat dinner. We use to eat at the coffee table but now we can eat at the dining room table like grown ups and watch the t.v. at the same time.

**Decorating together. When I moved into Kristian's condo it was pretty much all furnished/decorated. Yes I made some changes here and there but it was mainly HIS style. In the new place we've been able to decorate together and really make it OUR style.

**More space. With three levels and multiple rooms we have plenty of room to spread out and get away from each other when need be. Let's be honest even the closest couples need their alone time. And while I sometimes miss us hanging out ALL the time at home it's nice to be able to go to our own spots and just relax, watch what we want to on t.v. and recharge. I think it will definitely help our marriage last :)

**Room to entertain. It was tough having more than a few people over at one time at the condo, but here we have plenty of room. We've already had a few visitors and I love being able to show people our new house. We also plan to have a housewarming party soon and we've talked about hosting a Christmas and Superbowl party later in the year.

That's just a short list, I'm sure it will grow the longer we live there.

What do you love most about where you live?

The best way to convince the boy to do the cooking....

Buy a grill! Yep this weekend we were inspired the 70 degree weather we had last Friday to buy a new grill for the house. When we lived in the condo we weren't allowed to have a grill on the balcony and we both couldn't wait to have one for the townhouse and start inviting friends over in the summer for cookouts on the deck overlooking the water.

We went to Lowe's and found what Kristian felt would be the perfect grill for our deck. He wanted charcoal instead of gas and since he's the one that will be doing all the grilling I left that decision up to him.

So far we've used it twice already, on Sunday night for steaks. And then last night for hamburgers. I must say that the food does seem to taste better. Now we can't wait to go to Costco to stock up on different meats and start inviting friends over.

Kristian preparing to christen the new grill with some killer steaks.

Hamburgers, a beer and an amazing view. Doesn't get much better.

Who needs Five Guys??

The Games

I admit I was a bit slow jumping on this bandwagon but I'm so glad I finally did. This weekend I finished reading the last book in The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

I have to say I loved loved loved this series. Probably my favorite of all the ones I've read including Twilight *gasp* and the Millenium series. I loved Twilight but honestly Bella annoyed the shit out of me through most of it and while I loved Lisbeth Salander's character in the Millenium series there was so much other stuff about those books that I didn't like. With this series I loved pretty much everything about it. From the moment I started the first book I couldn't put them down and continued to think about each book long after I finished reading.

Of the three I will say that Mockingjay was my least favorite, reading about the war itself was less interesting to me than reading about the Games in the first and second book. With that said I was still engrossed and couldn't wait to see how the series would end and who would survive.

I read a lot of negative reviews about the final book on Amazon and how the series ended and while I agree with a few of the complaints overall I was happy with the ending and felt it was a lot more realistic than most young adult novels these days. I was pleased with how things were left with Katniss and how the love triangle was resolved. The only thing that I'm really disappointed about is the fact that there aren't anymore of these to read. Now I guess I will just have to look forward to the movies and see how the books get interepreted onto the big screen.

I definitely would recommend these books to anyone. Yes there is a lot of violence and yes it does talk about children being killed and war but it's very fast paced, action packed and engrossing. Oh yeah and there's a love triangle in there and who doesn't love a love triangle?

Have you read this series? Did you like/dislike?