Summer Lovin’…or Not

Sorry about the long absence, my peeps!  It was due to a multitude of factors:

• I went out of town for a few days for some freelance/contract work,
• When I got back parking & transportation services had moved my car (I was parked on campus) and I (and the police) thought my car was stolen for a horrible, horrible 24 hours,
• I caught a disgusting cold that laid me up for most of a week (stupid airports/airplanes), and
• By the time I was better I’d given it to the BF (and we all know sick guys are wussier and take more caring for than sick girls do), and
• Lance basically hadn’t posted in months and I decided that my responsible and regular posting was only enabling him, so I went on strike to make him post and find out what he was up to.  Hey!  It worked!  You can send your eternal thanks to honey [at] honeyandlance.com

Every day I have said that I’ll write a post when I get home from work, but pretty much all that was happening was that I was experimenting with different varieties of homemade soup (yesterday I made watermelon gazpacho and it was amazing) so here I am writing away at work.  I’m naughty that way.

Things have been pretty stressful lately at casa de Honey, mostly because the BF is still horribly overworked…see, he picked up a bunch of extra projects when he thought they might have layoffs because he was trying to make himself indispensible.  Well, they’re not laying anyone off but now he promised to do all this shit and everyone else apparently felt secure enough in their jobs to go on vacation so there’s no one to give the work to until some folks come back. 

He did say that one guy who needs some projects comes back into town next week and he’s also going to go into work on Saturday and Sunday while I am gone (I’m going to Colorado for 5 days to visit a friend and see her new baby) so hopefully by the end of next week things will have settled down a little.  He’s been miserable enough lately to contemplate quitting, which with new car payment coming due for the first time soon, would not be a good thing.

But in awesome news (at least I think it’s awesome, because I am a personal finance dork) the BF finally agreed that he needed a budget!!!  It turns out his previous strategy was make so much money you never need to track anything because you always have more than enough, but after 2 full years on the job where he either came up short or just under the wire every single paycheck, it clearly wasn’t working.  So he asked me for the Excel file that I designed for myself and we’ll see where that goes. 

Next I’d love to get him using the snowball method to pay off his credit cards, but we’ll see how the whole budget thing works before I get too crazy (I frequently think about almost everyone I know, if you’d just let me manage your life for 6 months you’d be so much further ahead, but a) most people aren’t into that and b) I don’t really have the time, so I have to rein it in pretty constantly).  I am on track to have all my credit card debt paid off in under a year, which I am very excited about (considering less than a year ago I had about $20K), and I’d love to see him make quicker progress too.

Oh, and this isn’t a Save the Date card or anything, but we did decide on a wedding date: May 12, 2012.  We have long loved our anniversary because we have been exclusive since the day we met, and he had mentioned several times that he’d like to get married on that day.  So we looked it up online and it turns out that the next time it falls on a weekend is in 2012, which will be our six-year anniversary.  This is a nice date to shoot for anyway because we can save up enough money to do it right!

We have also decided that the wedding favors are going to be M&Ms with our initials because when we started dating I referred to him by his first initial on my personal blog to anonymize him, and the nickname stuck with all my friends, who have never called him anything else.  We constantly refer to ourselves by our first initials.  Also, after reading this article about wedding cake that Dadshouse linked to, I have officially delegated that task to the BF.  Okay, it could also be because I hate cake and can’t imagine eating a whole piece of it, let alone tasting a bunch of different ones to figure out which I hated least.  He can be in charge of the whole outside and as long as the external frosting matches the wedding colors, we’re good.  Actually, as long as I get exactly the ring I want, I’m sure I’ll be fine

And boy am I glad that we talked about it, however casually!  It turns out the BF’s wedding strategy was going to be insist on being in charge of whatever is easy or sounds interesting and have Honey do the rest.  Um, no.  I actually told him that I wouldn’t feel comfortable making a single decision without his input – just to make him sweat a little.

How do you feel about weddings?  Leave a comment below and then enjoy these other fine posts:

• Honey’s Perfect First Date
• Lance De-Virginizing Service
• Finances and Dating
• Lance’s Marriage Makers