Thinking Long Term

My kids are visting my parents this week, and are no doubt have a blast. They always do. Mr. Snarky and I are having fun, too. Last night, we went and bought curtains! Woo hoo!

Seriously, we miss our kids but really enjoy a week of adult time. One of the nice things that having an entire week of adult time gives us is time to slow down and really talk about things other than what we need to do this weekend or who is going to take the kids to the next birthday party. We try to do this with occasional nights out and our Friday night beers tradition, but life gets busy and the immediate squeezes out time for the long term.

And yet, we both know that good things come from making space to have long, rambling conversations. It was on a long, rambling conversation as we walked down the beach one day that we hatched our plan to take time off and make what we still call our "big trip," which is one of our favorite things we have ever done. We both wanted to do some serious travel but had never thought we could... until we talked about it that day.

So Saturday, over beers at our nearest brewery tasting room, we talked long term. We talked about crazy ideas for what our life might look like, and decided we liked it just the way it is... for now. San Diego is a pretty great place to live. But we are both drawn to the idea of splitting time between the US, New Zealand, and travel when we retire, and we talked about what we'd need to do financially to make that happen.

This is not news, but it is the most specific we've gotten about that idea.

And we talked about how we might take longer vacations again. I miss three week vacations, and it seems like we should be able to make them come back.

We also talked a lot about what we want to do with our backyard. So, you know, our transformation into boring middle age is now complete.

But eventually, we're going to have a really awesome backyard.