I am Awake

4:45 alarm did the job - helped that I had awakened minutes before the music started.  My internal alarm never shuts off and all during vacation, I woke up early and just rolled over and went back to sleep.  Several times.  9AM is a really late sleep for me - so will have to look forward to weekends for that.

It's Monday.  Even Chloe seemed surprised someone was up this early with her.

B. lost a friend this past weekend - pretty sure she took her life.  We don't know many details and don't know if he knows.  We think he does.  We saw his green light on Facebook a bit yesterday and resisted the urge to inquire...figuring the few minutes he had on his phone, he could use to talk to others who knew her.  Very sad for a tight group of friends.

It's hard having B. unavailable - it's worse than Basic 'cuz we have no contact or updates about much of anything.  Four more weeks of this.

J. and H. will be trekking to Lumber Liquidators a couple times tomorrow to pick up the flooring - saves $150 in delivery - we probably would have paid for delivery except even if they deliver, you still have to bring the boxes of flooring into your house yourself.  We can drive over the hill two times and schlep it inside ourselves. The two of them will also begin moving stuff out and it looks like the work will start one week from today - so I can pitch in over the weekend.  Once the china hutch is taken care of, the rest is easy.

I think we're going to take Chloe to the kennel for a few days, too - less stressful on her and easier on J. to not have to worry about keeping her where she needs to be while workmen are doing their thing.

We have decided to make an official withdrawal from retirement savings in early January.  We've made it 2.5 years without dipping into long-term savings at all - but it's time.  A small withdrawal will pay for the flooring and beef up our savings a bit.  Next on the list is to acquire new furniture. We've had an empty living room for quite awhile and while our next house will likely only have one 'great room', we see ourselves here for at least another 10 years...and that's a long time to have an empty room.  (Though that empty room is sure coming in handy as a place to put the dining room while the floors are redone).  Heck - we may even decide that we love the new floors so much, we want to redo the living room and family room, too - we'll see.  Either way, having more cushion in our short term savings will really help - and allow for a trip in the Spring, we hope.  Either Paris or Cancun for our 25th - TBD depending on how H. is doing.

Casa Majah is showing her age and she needs some work.  Better to start making small, annual withdrawals that largely end up in savings - spreads out the tax burden a bit and makes things like landscaping, furniture, maintenance and upkeep easier to do.

It's time to get showered and dressed.  Pains me to be done with vacation so quickly but oh well.  The trip to Phoenix in November will be a nice break and then we'll be officially in holiday-madness mode.