4 Minutes

That's how long far into Star Wars I made it the other night before falling asleep.

I know.  You are horrified.  But that's what a full weekend of sloth and gluttony will do to ya.  It's a vicious cycle of laziness, sleepiness, and pizza.  And it was delightful. 

Hubs came home on New Year's Eve afternoon, and we quickly made up for the suckiness of the last several weeks.  With the weight of the conference lifted from his shoulders, and a full 10 days before he had to be back in the classroom, he and I decided to spend as much unbusy time together as we could possibly spend in a long weekend. 

Let me tell you, Unstressed Hubs is a wholly different person from Stressed Hubs.

We watched roughly 15 episodes of How I Met Your Mother.   We went out to brunch.  We played with Auggie and made him omelettes.  We watched movies and ate pizza and played computer games on the couch for an embarrassingly long time each day.  We saw friends a couple of times, but mostly we were gorging on stay-at-home-slothiness.  We made it to church and tried to make it to a movie, but that was the extent of our striving.

We also managed to have some great conversations about what we really want to be doing with Our Life, and Our Lives.  We made some overdue donations to ministries we love.  We made some lists and some plans and we used the word "we" a lot.  Which has become remarkably rare in our day-to-day lives this year, since we are so rarely a "we" in our day-to-days.

I had to go back to work today, but Hubs and AugDog are holding down the fort.  I can't wait to see them when I get home.  If you would like to see an example of a blissed-out pup in near stratospheric euphoria, come over and see AugDog this week while Les is home.  Aug will likely be nestled into the fold of his lap, head tilted back to gaze at him in adoration.  I tried to get pictures of it, but they were all blurry.

Together is better.  Hands down.  So I'm kind of superhappy that Hubs has (pretty much) decided that he will not go back to Augustana next year, even if they invite him to stay for another year.  He needs time to write and apply for jobs properly.  He's nervous about not "contributing" to our budget and stuff, but I would WAY rather have him home then have the extra money.

We haven't done such a great job of squirrelling away his paycheck this year.  It's like we got so excited about being ABLE to shop at Whole Paycheck and go out for dinner on the weekends, we didn't think too hard about whether we SHOULD.  We can buy Target brand pizza and cool our Ben and Jerry's affections.  We'd probably even get healthier, just by trimming the take-out and Whole Foods extravaganzas from our budget anyway. 

Slimmer, thriftier, AND together?  Win.