Graduating!!!

I have approximately three weeks left of graduate school! Yeah!!!!

You know that it is time to be done when your 7 year old looks at you and cries, “I wish you had never started school!” It’s hard to explain to them that I need to graduate in order to be legal to get paid. We need money to live. I wish we needed less money, but the market tanked and we can’t sell them house like I had planned…so I am trying to explain to them that I have to work more. But here’s the problem – they don’t want me to work more. And I don’t want to work more. So how do I make them feel better about something that I don’t feel good about myself?

Three weeks to graduation!!!

Stuff

I feel like I spend most of my time needing to take care of stuff. Putting stuff away, sorting stuff, cleaning stuff, finding a place for stuff - how did stuff start to rule my life? And a good follow up question is why do I always seem to want more stuff?

I feel like I pare down a lot and frequently, yet it never seems to really cut that much stuff from my life. I have several garage sales every year, much to the chagrin of my neighbors. But somehow I still have too much stuff. I can't even park my car in the garage because of it all!

I guess that part of my desire to live more simply and not consume is to not bring as much stuff in my house to begin with. Of course, the money savings is nice too...

One of the things I have been thinking about recently are my priorities. What do I actually want to spend my life doing and how do I want to spend my days. One answer is not taking care of stuff and working to accumulate more stuff. I want to spend my time with my kids, my family, my friends, cooking (when I want to), and spending time in my garden. Working to pay for my house might be a necessary evil, since I don't have an acceptable cheaper option right now.