Official birthday dinners have become a tradition in our family. We always find a time when we can get together to celebrate each birthday as a family. (We missed Ash, who was unable to travel across the country to come for dinner. 🙁 ) When I was a kid, the best part about birthday dinner was getting to choose what Mom would make for dinner that night. I know there was more than one year that I chose homemade mac ‘n cheese as my birthday dinner. That’s kinda funny now that I think about it. With the freedom to choose anything I wanted, I picked a $4 meal that was something we had often. Sometimes when Mom made mac ‘n cheese for dinner, she would make us have broccoli with it. As birthday girl, I wanted just mac ‘n cheese… all by itself.

Dad’s choice has always been a nicer meal. I think he almost always picks pork roast. So that’s what Mom made him on Saturday night… pork roast with potato wedges and veggies. I had intended to take a picture of us sitting down for birthday dinner, but we were really hungry and the food was sooo yummy!

For dessert we had apple crisp. This has always been one of my favorites. Now, with my allergy issues, it is one of the few desserts that I am still able to enjoy. Mom dished out generous portions of crisp while Andrew offered ice cream to go with it.

Happy birthday Dad!! We love you and look forward to celebrating many more birthday dinners with you.

Now that I get to stay home, I have decided that I need to be more intentional about keeping the house cleaner.  Our house usually looks pretty clean at first glance, but more frequent dusting and vacuuming is supposed to really help keep my allergies in check.  So Tuesdays, since we don’t usually have a whole lot happening that day, is a cleaning day.  I do my light tidy like I do every morning after breakfast, and then do a more focused cleaning on just one room.

I was cleaning the living room yesterday morning.  I had the furniture pulled out to vacuum and thought that this would be a good time to change the furniture arrangement.  I pulled out my paper cut outs of our furniture and tried to come up with an arrangement that would work better than our current set up.

*Note: Jesse made these nice, to scale cutouts because we’ve thought several times about how to put the furniture… and he isn’t all to fond of moving large furniture. 🙂

We have a fairly large living room, but it does have some challenges as to where to place our large furniture.  We love the openness of having one big kitchen/dining/living space, but it makes it difficult to have enough space without blocking walkways.  We also love having almost an entire wall of sliding glass doors that let in tons of light and don’t want to cut out our view by putting furniture right in front of the windows.

Every time I came up with an arrangement that looked good on paper, it somehow didn’t work out when I moved the furniture that way.  After trying several locations for the couch, it ended up exactly where it was in the first place.

I did change where the chairs are though. Instead of having one on either side of the entertainment center, there is a chair on only one side. (gasp!) I know, it’s crazy. Asymmetry is really hard for my brain to handle. But we’ll let it sit for a while and see if I can’t get used to it being all cattywampus.

Then the entertainment center got moved down a smudge to make the chair fit better, and make the corner look a little less empty. Maybe a small book shelf or something would look nice there? We could always use the extra storage.

And that… is how one would, unintentionally, go about making cleaning the living room take several hours. After lunch, it was time to hurry upstairs and get my work done for the day. At least I slept very well after all that furniture moving!

Yesterday was our first official day of working together.  We are still working out exactly what my role in the company will be.  So far, I’m now in charge of all the financial/accounting for both business and personal.  We were sharing that responsibility before.  That wasn’t working out so well as we were months behind on our personal finances, and I’ve been working the last couple months on catching up our records for the entire year of business income and expenses.  It sure is hard to remember what a charge was for that happened six months ago.  Our new system feels much more organized and efficient.

Obviously, I don’t have the skills at this point to do the actual site design and setup that Jesse does.  But there is a lot that I have learned from having my own blog that I can help with.  Yesterday I helped with a simple task that just would have taken time out of Jesse’s day.  It was just a matter of going in to each site of all the people on our maintenance plan and updating how their backups are being stored.  I also ordered and picked up a couple of prescriptions we needed that Jesse usually picks up for himself.  It was a super easy day compared to the work days that I’m used to, but it’s small things like that during the day that take up more time that you realize.  If I can take on enough small tasks that Jesse is able to complete one more site each month, then we will be all set.  That is our starting point for now, but hopefully I will also be able to pick up some virtual assistant work later on to help contribute a little extra.

We are very happy is our new office set up.  We (or maybe just me) are too cheap to go out and a but a new desk that would work to sit both of us.  So… we came up with a great solution to make our existing furniture work for what we need.

Don’t you just love how office-y it all looks?  We took the hutch off of my desk so that we could store things that we both want to have access to.  And that way we each have that little bit of extra desk space without crowding each other too much.

Then we bought a project board (which is full right now…yay!) so that we can both be on the same page on what we are working on and what the priorities are.  Of course I still needed to have my scrapbooking supplies easily accessible, if I ever get a chance to work on it.

Lastly, I organized our bookshelf to look all pretty. Jesse does a lot of video conference calls with his clients when he is trying to get an idea of what they are looking for. So we positioned the bookshelf with pretty decorations on top to be his backdrop for the calls. Yep, we’re just smart and professional like that.

That’s about it for our office. Now we just have to wait and see how much work we are able to produce from it.