Whirlwind!

It's been quite a week! Sorry for the silence, but I'm trying to get into the groove with the job and commute thing. It hasn't been easy and I've been exhausted when I get home. I bought a ticket to use on the MARC train, but it wasn't valid until Thursday. This meant I had to drive for about an hour, then get the metro the rest of the way in. All in all, it was about 1 hour 45 minutes. This sucked. THEN, I got to use my train ticket and I thought life was going to be grand! Well, Baltimore is hosting this stupid grand prix this weekend so all of these roads are closed in the city. It took me 45 minutes to get out of the city, I missed my train and had to wait another 25 minutes for the next one, so that day it took me 2 hours and 15 minutes to get to work! Yeah, that's right. Two hours and fifteen minutes. 2.25 hours. My normal commute time by train should take me around an hour and 15 minutes, door to door. The majority of that is on the train or metro, so it's really not too bad. The ride home is the really nice because the train I get is non-stop between DC and BWI. The best part about all of this is that my employer pays my commuting costs. Getting the train and the metro adds up (fortunately parking at the station is free for monthly ticket holders) and once I saw the cost I was slightly regretting making the decision to commute. But at orientation they told us about the commuter benefits, which was a huge relief. I worked for this employer before, but it was a different location and because parking wasn't an issue they didn't reimburse us for commuting costs. I had completely forgotten that they did this and was sooo happy to find this out! That saves us $230 a month!

It's been hard to try and figure it all out. It's a bit of a juggling act now that I have a husband. It used to be that I'd go to work, hit the gym on the way home, or go to my part time job, come home, eat hummus and crackers for dinner. Basically, it was all about me. Now I just want to get home because we would like to see each other! He's also reintroducing himself in the kitchen and has been cooking me dinner. :) I'd rather sacrifice in the morning, getting up early so I can get to work early and leave early. I haven't bought a gym membership yet because I'm waiting to get settled into a routine. Allegedly there is a gym in our office building and we get a discount, but I need to investigate that further.

With this job brings new things to the household! We bought a car last week and I LUURVE it! We ended up getting a 2012 Honda Civic EX and it's way fun to drive. I did quite a bit of research between some different types of cars, new vs used, etc. We were leaning towards a used one, but finding a used EX is actually quite difficult. Then Honda came out with 0.9% financing on new models so we got a really good deal on it. My favorite features are the fact that we average 35 miles to the gallon and the bluetooth. I love talking to my car! :) I never really thought I'd care much about having bluetooth, but it's definitely an awesome feature. It looks like this, we even got it in black (because that's what was in stock), but ours doesn't stay shrouded in mysterious shadows.

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Today we FINALLY ordered a sofa! I'm pretty psyched about it! Coming home and not having a place to relax stinks. Frankly, the state our house is in right now is not relaxing at all, so I'm hoping that now I'll be able to get this sorted out. I'll do a longer post on the living room updates when the sofa comes in, probably at the beginning of November. It's a darker green color (not sage, but not evergreen either) and it has coordinating floral print pillows that I think will look nice with the striped chair. The legs match the ones on the chair. They had Labor Day sales going on, so we got a good deal. I'm hoping to paint in here before the sofa comes. Here's a picture:

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Oh yeah, and lastly...we had to get a new roof. This is not fun, so I won't go into detail. The fun part is I was able to fix the water damage in the guest room and I bought paint for that today!

It's been an expensive week around here! Ouch!