Well, hello again...

I know, I know I have hardly held up my end of the bargain. A blogger that won't blog is pretty boring; I totally understand if you've lost interest. It's been almost a year since I've last written. In knitting news, I finished the spiral socks and was able to wear them over the winter; they were very toasty. I also knitted a hooded sweatshirt from the Yarn Girls' Guide to the Beyond the Basics. It was my first project with sleeves, and I am really excited how it turned out. Currently, I am working on a new pair of socks, knitted from the top down with a regular turned heel. I've never done the traditional turned heel, so it's rather exciting.

The socks are going slowly, however, due to my photography classes. I finished the first black and white film class, took an intermediate class, and a digital photography class. I am now taking my first professional program photography class in portraits. I am really bad at portraits, so this is a stretch class for me. I hope to be able to produce adequate portraits/headshots, but I'm not necessarily looking to be the next Avedon or Leibovitz. I am usually uncomfortable around people without shoving a long, black barrel in their faces; I have not yet found the appropriate balance of getting "that" shot and not being a very large gnat. Hopefully this class will help me get over my people photographing anxiety.

I've been keeping busy with the photography and knitting and baking, but the other sort of news is that my husband and I have made a goal to have our house paid off by the end of next year. We bought our house almost 5 years ago (yeah, almost at the peak of the market), and if we're lucky and stick to it, we will have paid off our house in 6 years time. Part of our decision to do this comes from having listened to Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University that my aunt gave us many years ago, and part of it comes from the fact that I am strongly considering a career change. Dave Ramsey is a conservative, financial talk show host (not exactly the kind of guy from whom we would normally take advice), but he's really good at getting you jazzed up to get rid of debt. His premise is along the lines that once you don't owe anybody interest, you can start building wealth at a much faster rate. I know that, in theory, if you have a mortgage at 5.5% and you can make 8% in stocks, you should keep the mortgage and you will be making a net 2.5%. I, however, am opposed to this scheme for two reasons: 1) there is an emotional cost (for some people) to being indebted and 2) our stock picks seem to suck so bad that we are usually lucky if our interest rate is positive. Anyway, if we can make this work, we will own our home when I am 30 years old, which I think is really awesome, and I would be really proud of it. It's not going to be easy. There will be no vacation until then. Eating out will be kept to a minimum. We are going to try to keep down extraneous expenditures. I.e., for the next year or so, we are not going to be any fun.