Into October

John, Sergene, and I went for a picnic at Nunn's Park today between conference sessions. Thanks to Mary Ann J. for the picnic basket--isn't it cute?

The reds are not as red as usual, probably because of the lack of rain this month. We're supposed to get rain starting tonight and continuing all week, however.

Yesterday the three of us drove the Alpine Loop, starting in American Fork Canyon, and ended up having sandwiches at Sundance. I forget how breathtaking that drive is (I also forgot my camera).

Friday John and I took off for Detroit, leaving home at 4:50 a.m., in hopes of catching a connecting flight to either Manchester NH or Burlington VT so we could go visit Janet and her husband John P. Unfortunately, by the time we didn't make our standby flight to Manchester, we also realized that we wouldn't be making any other flights, including flights through Atlanta or NYC, flights to Boston and drive 3 and 1/2 hours, or any leg of any flight home on Sunday. So we waited around for the perfectly open flight back to SLC that evening. While in the airport John worked on his computer in peace, I walked from one end of the (interminable) terminal to the other end and back for my exercise, we had a nice Mexican lunch and a nice sandwich dinner, and we each got to watch our separate movie in the relatively roomy bulkhead seats on the way back, so it wasn't a total loss. In fact it was at least mildly fun.

But we decided that our best use of Rob's free flight perk (or is it perq, for perquisite? I never know how to spell it) is to decide when we have flexible time and then look around to see which direct flights to whatever city are open on the day we want to leave and on the day we want to come back--and by open, I mean at least 30 unsold seats. That leaves a lot of options but requires us to be a little more flexible and spontaneous than we're used to. Then if we don't make any of the flights, we just go out to lunch in Salt Lake and drive home. Easy!

The other nice thing in our lives right now is refinancing into the new extremely low mortgage interest rates. Just when I was starting to panic at my inability to save $1K per month for my share of the family budget when we're in England next year, we looked into refinancing our mortgages, and discovered that we can move from 5.5% on our main mortgage and from 8% on our second mortgage to a combined rate of 3.37% and drop our monthly expenses by about $1K! Whew! And if we pay a couple hundred of that directly into the principal every month, we'll be debt-free even faster! I don't know why we didn't think of it before, except we're both financially sub-literate. The only trouble is we have four separate and mutually exclusive ideas for that extra money every month. Or maybe I mean overlapping. Four separate places to spend the same money, anyway. So we'll probably still go bumbling cluelessly along as usual, but with a little more financial flexibility.

I'm still doing well with my fitness and diabetic eating program, although it's harder to not eat more carbs since John has started making bread. I know, isn't that great! He's already taken over the drying and bottling of produce from the garden (I'll have to take a picture of our fruit room), but now he's taking up baking! He made his first batch--five loaves--of whole wheat bread today, and it's delicious. And he cleans the house at least as thoroughly as I do and does his own laundry. Soon the only homemaking advantage I have will be that I can (and do) make a better bed. I don't mind.

Tomorrow we're having his birthday party by eating out at a Korean restaurant and coming home for angel food cake with 7 Minute Frosting. Yeah, yuck, but he loves it.