My fashionable husband.

Nick's sweatpants are apparently too long. This is his solution.

Yep.

Dundie, ‘Speak.’ …ARF!

Ok well if you’ve ever encountered my dog, you know it’s not quite like that. In fact it’s nothing like that.

It’s more like…

1.) Poor friendly unsuspecting neighbor approaches gate to borrow some sugar and rings bell.

2.)RAFGHFRFHGGH!!!AAAARFGHRRRRFFFFF!!RRAAAARGGGHFFF!!!RAFRFRFRAARGGHHHHHFFF!!!!AARRRGR!RRRRFF!FFAAARRFFFFFGHA!!!RGARHGRAARRFFFF!!!RRGHRAGHHFFFF!GGGGGRRARAARARARGGHGGGGGARFFFF!!!!!!!!

3.) Kim and Nick are left with zero friendly neighbors who come over to borrow sugar.

Normally we frown upon this behavior.

But yesterday, it actually paid off – literally. Dundie’s maniacal barking – 49 barks in 30 seconds to be exact – won Nick some pretty sweet prizes on a radio contest called ‘Bark for Cash’ on the Don Geronimo show. Basically people call in and get their dogs to bark as many times as possible in 30 seconds – they keep count, and the person whose dog barks the most times wins. Oh-ho-ho… moooove on over, pups… we’ve got this one in the bag. 37 barks? Pleeeeease… get outta here with your 37 barks.

So all in all, Nick won: $49 cash (a buck per bark, from Don Geronimo’s own pocket), 2 free passes to the IMAX premier of Tron in 3D, some kind of jewelry package/gift certificate (which I think is the reason Nick entered in the first place, so he would be done Christmas shopping for me…) and a 1 in 20 chance of winning a full-size Tron arcade game. (I’m not so excited about that last one. I suggested if we win, it goes out in the backyard with the dog since it was his prize, after all.)

Thanks, Dog!

Addicted.

To my baby, caffeine (yes, I realize the two shouldn’t go together…), and as of recently: coupons.

I admit that since I started really actively using coupons a few months ago in an effort to cut down on grocery spending, I may have created a monster. I now seek out new and better coupons on an almost daily basis… I use as many as I possibly can in a single shopping trip…  I have been known to cause delays in grocery lines while the checker scans through my pile of coupons (I swore I’d never be that annoying woman, but hey… if it takes a few extra minutes and a few annoyed glances as other shoppers switch to the other checkstands for me to save $50 off my total, I can live with that). I even get a little thrill when I click through the online coupons to see what new offers I might find. One of my proudest moments came a couple of months ago when I discovered that Target offered online coupons – that you can couple with manufacturer’s coupons – and use on top of Target sale prices… oh happy day!

Basically I’m a huge nerd for coupons.

I also love that Nick gets excited about it now too. When I come home from my big shopping excursions I make every couple of weeks, Nick is there at home waiting to see the receipts and hear how many coupons I used and how much I saved. Then he brags to everyone about how cheap – ahem: bargain-savvy – his wife is.

Goals.

Goals.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmingly un-ambitious.

I started thinking about goals (and my personal lack thereof) this past weekend, when Nick and I were sitting in traffic waiting to pass through the tail-end of a marathon headed toward downtown Sacramento. The only people left at this late point in the race were walking. Of course, Nick made fun of them for walking (…and of course he is so entitled to make fun of people completing a marathon as he is obviously so in shape and completes marathons all the time. Right.). I defended these people by telling him, ‘maybe they tried to run the whole way and just couldn’t make it and now need to walk because they had the goal of completing a marathon – they’re still completing it, even if they’re walking – at least they have goals…. What goals do YOU have?!’ His response: ‘to not be one of the people walking at the end of a marathon.’ In all fairness… it was nearly noon… and these people were a good six miles still from the finish line… and they were REALLY holding up traffic.

I typically am very content and proud of what I’ve accomplished thus far in my 25 years of life. And then I’ll go on facebook and see that most of my college friends now also have masters degrees, or watch The Today Show or read an article about someone much younger than me starting their own business or founding a non-profit to save lives of babies in foreign countries or something incredibly noble and meaningful like that. And then I feel lazy. And guilty that I don’t often set actual goals for myself. I wonder: is it just me? Do these other people have a spark inside them that I just don’t have? Is it bad that my ultimate goal is to make Nick make a name for himself professionally so I can just craft and take care of Nora and be a Craft-At-Home Mom?

When I think about goals, I realize that I do have them, just not any which seem that meaningful in comparison to those of the soon-to-be-doctoral candidates, or the super-entrepreneurial-life-saving-non-profit-founders. But still, they’re goals. Like using as many coupons as possible to spend under $60 on two weeks worth of groceries and toiletries for my family of three (yep, it’s been done). Or bathing the baby more than twice a week (….still working on that one… it’s much more of a challenge than one would think). But, I think it’s time to really sit down and spell out some actual, I’M GOING TO DO THIS type of goals. We’ll start out small…

I will exercise for at least 20 minutes, at least three times a week.

I will take a shot at online selling and will complete at least two craft projects each week.

I will get Nora’s baby book up to date (…including starting it…).

I will sell or at least get rid of the oven that’s been sitting in my garage for the past year.

I will find out what we’ll need to do to finally get an actual working oven installed in our kitchen.

I will completely pay off my Old Navy and Ikea credit cards before using them to make ANY additional purchases (…ouch.).

Whew… okay, that’s enough goal-setting for now. I’m exhausted. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Bye Bye Boots.

I’ve experienced a loss… today as I made my way back into the office after lunch, I literally tripped over what seemed to be my own feet. In fact, the sole of my boot was starting to peel away from the bottom of the boot and whatever was under the sole started crumbling out. You’re probably asking what I myself am asking as I read what I just wrote: what the hell kind of crappy boots are these that they’re literally crumbling away? Who knows. I bought them for about $20 in Budapest over four years ago, so I should probably be happy that they’ve survived this long. I am still, however, quite sad that they seem quite unfixable at this point, and most unwearable since I’ve been falling all over myself trying to walk around in them all afternoon. Alas, I will need to say goodbye to my favorite black boots… they might not understand English though, so instead: viszlat, boots.

Thinking about my boots and how it means I’ll need to spend the money to go out and buy another pair to get me through the winter (ugh.), I realize that they hold much more sentimental value than anything else (obviously, as I mentioned earlier, they’re clearly not the BEST boots…). It feels like I’ll be getting rid of part of my experience of studying abroad, a piece of the short four months of my life that I spent halfway around the world. My life did change pretty significantly in those short four months… it was my first time out of the country…I learned so much about my family’s history and culture when I had the chance to go visit relatives still living in my grandparents’ hometown out in the middle of the Hungarian countryside... I also got engaged! It was a life-changing experience that I’ll never forget. 

And oh, the shopping. The unbelievable deals and strength of the American dollar in a country not yet on the Euro. And, especially now as we get closer to Christmas, I remember the festive Christmas market in the middle of the city in the weeks before Christmas. Walking around in the cold after class, browsing the handmade crafts, smelling smoked sausage and fresh pastries, drinking a hot mug of mulled wine. We’ve tried recreating the mulled wine at home, but of course, it’s never as good. Plus somehow drinking wine out of a mug in my own house makes me feel a lot less festive and lot more like an alcoholic.

The start to the holidays and real food.

I can't believe it's already time for Christmas trees and decorations and that Thanksgiving has already come and gone. We had a really nice Thanksgiving, spent pretty equally between mine and Nick's families, and it was actually pretty relaxing and enjoyable even with driving back and forth between houses. I just wish I hadn't gotten a terrible stomach ache so I could've eaten more - of course the one day of the year when all I want to do is completely stuff myself is the day I get the worst stomach ache ever... Luckily it eventually went away and there weren't any trips to the hospital or anything like that, but I was still ashamed that I was only able to put away ONE full plate of food. I will definitely need to make up for it on Christmas.

Of course, once Thanksgiving is over, it's Christmas. Which means it's time to get Christmas trees. (YAY!) This is one of my favorite days of the year, since Christmas-time is my favorite time of the year, and this kicks everything off. We had a lot of fun toting Nora around with us this time, and also found a really perfect tree which is now also decorated and proudly standing in our living room.

To finish off a weekend of fun, we decided to venture into new territory with Nora's expanding diet: peas. We started giving her rice cereal a couple of weeks ago, and since she seems to be loving that and is still extremely interested in everything else she sees everyone eating and drinking, we decided it was time to try something new. Needless to say, she now loves peas too, based on the feeding frenzy we experienced tonight. However, I'm still convinced that this child will devour anything since she seems equally interested in her fingers and anything else that she can get near her mouth, including my face. But fingers are her favorite. I think she only enjoys peas as long as they're accompanied by a side of fingers.

Halloween... a little late.

It was a double-treat of a Halloween this year, with it falling on a Sunday. Halloween party with friends Saturday night, and fun with family and baby on Sunday. I must say it worked out nicely to enjoy the best of both worlds.

We of course waited until the very last minute to figure out costumes to wear to our party on Saturday night, resulting in somewhat unimaginative costumes which were mostly non-identifiable to most. The upside: Nick and I both dressed as our favorite TV heroes: Liz Lemon and Don Draper (me obviously being the former and Nick being the latter… although wouldn’t it have been more fun if it was the other way around? Noted for next year’s last minute costume ideas).

I have to say that I think we did a fairly decent job, although as I said, only a handful of people could actually come close to guessing who we were actually supposed to be… hard to believe, since Nick so CLEARLY is a dead ringer for Jon Hamm, and I am without a doubt just as, or probably even more so, as much of a dork as Liz Lemon. I felt like I could identify with Liz Lemon even more than usual that night, as I realized that the major plusses of this costume were (1) that I could leave my hair in its naturally frizzy state and didn’t need to make any effort to make it look any better, and (2) that this costume, unlike so many typical ‘sexy’ female Halloween costumes, did not require me to shave my legs. Liz would be so proud.

We had some much anticipated grown-up fun at the party, enjoying adult beverages (me, drinking all of mine out of my signature ‘TGS with Tracy Jordan’ coffee mug, and Nick drinking all of his from his authentic 1960s-era glass tumbler, in fine Sterling-Cooper fashion) and acting generally silly with good friends we hadn’t seen much since the arrival of Nora.

I think Nora enjoyed her first Halloween weekend – she got to spend the evening with her two Omas while we were at our Halloween party, and even got to stay up extra late (which wasn’t a bad thing since it meant she slept in extra late the next morning and let mom also sleep in after her evening of enjoying her yummy Mommy beverages out of her mug). She was the most adorable pumpkin for Halloween, and we of course took way too many pictures of her in costume… as well as a few of Dundie in his vampire cape, which he didn’t seem all too fond of.