HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, HUBBY

We just celebrated 2 significant dates this past month. We met 7 years ago on the 5th of December and married 4 years ago on the 6th of December. We had a wonderful dinner at Wellington's restaurant in the New Sanno Hotel. As always, the staff at the Wellington's were utterly professional and attentive. We enjoy seeing the same folks & catching up, much like we are at the Army Navy Club in DC: Iwin, our host; Saito-san, who is always "genki" and has a great twinkle in his eye; Jaybee, a fellow Filipino, who reminds me so much of several of my cousins; Franz, who's Indonesian, who charms us with stories about his "naughty" 5 year old son who we know isn't naughty at all, but is just being 5. We ate at Wellington's two evenings in a row. We've begun to think of the New Sanno a lot like a cruise ship. I can get my nails done there. We can hit the gym in the morning before breakfast. We can go shopping. We can just hang out if we wanted or we can wander around town. We love heading up there for a weekend!



In this case, we've both been so busy with work the past few weeks that we just vegged. We're back to almost the beginning of our househunting search so we spent some time going over the San Antonio areas. Although we could afford a big house with a big yard and so on, we don't want to live beyond our means. So, we're considering buying a place "just big enough" for us and we will look into buying other places as investments.



Okay, I started reading financial advice books recently. I'm gulping down Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad and highlighting different areas that might come in handy in the future. Note: I've subscribed to Tim Ferris' blog, the 4 hour work week, and he recently posted clever ways to take notes, good notes. I've started indexing my highlighted areas of Rich Dad, Poor Dad based on Tim Ferris' ideas. Since both of my parents have recently suffered severe illnesses, I've been preoccupied with the thought of being responsible for their medical care in the future as well as the welfare of our future children and not being able to do either well. While money can't buy happiness, it can ease or prevent financial burden.



While we are far from rich, we are also far from poor. We have good, stable jobs and we live within our means, not beyond. We share the goal to live comfortably enough to allow us to travel outside the U.S. often. Now, you may think that we travel expensively as well as extensively. I'll be honest: we have traveled luxuriously and rather enjoyed it! We took a 10 day cruise through the Caribbean for our honeymoon and took another 10 day cruise around French Polynesia for our 1st anniversary. We met some wonderful people on the cruises but we've kept in touch with more folks from the trips where "roughing it" was the norm.