The hubby and I have been r and we celebrated early in the past weekend.  The hubby booked a full moon kayaking trip in at the Beach House and also reserved us spots for Sunday brunch at Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay.Since I planned I let him plan this trip.  It is only fair.  This is my travelogue for this wonderful weekend.

Half Moon Bay is a coastal San Mateo city about 20 miles from where we live famous for the yearly Mavericks Surf Contest and the Pumpkin Festival where the worlds’ most enormous pumpkins compete.  We set out on Saturday morning and arrived in Half Moon Bay in about 30 minutes.  We stepped in a small local restaurnt called The Flying Fish Grill and got some lunch, and then we headed to our hotel.  Unfortunately, our room wasn’t ready yet so we went to Poplar Beach after checking out the kayaks at Pillar Point Harbor.  Poplar Beach is one of many public beaches along Half Moon Bay and it has a small free parking lot.  If you go to the main beach a block over it has a parking lot that charges a fee.  At Poplar Beach we spent about two hours looking for beach glass.  Before we got married we went to that beach once and I started looking for beach glass.  The hubby never heard of this before and said, “why are you picking up garbage?!” I explained to him that people collect beach glass for fun and make them into jewelry.  Then it turned into a bit of a competition and he helped me collect glass. Funnily enough we saw another couple collect glass, too, and the whole time the hubby was saying he couldn’t believe people liked garbage.   After we got home on that trip I made some of the glass into pendants and sold them for around $50 at a church craft fair.  So this time the hubby thought of looking for beach glass as a treasure hunt. After two hours of hunting, we found a small pocket full of browns, greens, and white pieces.  I also found a tiny cobalt blue piece and a quarter from 1965.

We returned to the hotel and took a bit of a nap since the kayaking event was at 7pm.  After waking up we walked down to Pillar Point Harbor again. Unfortunately, it was quite overcast so we were unable to see the full moon.   There were a group of about 10 people and we were instructed to put on many layers of stuff.  There is a jacket plus a skirt that stretches over the kayak and also a life jacket. The kayaks held two people and were a bit larger than the kayaks we used in Kauai.  The hubby sat in the back to steer and I was in front.  We paddled towards the breakwaters and we saw hundreds of pelicans and seagulls.  Some people paddled a bit too close to them and they flew towards us and plopped in the water.  Some of the pelicans were still shedding their baby furry feathers.  A couple harbor seals also popped out their heads above the water.

After paddling for more than an hour, we cleared the last breakwater and we were in the open ocean.  The sea was quite calm and the waves bobbed the kayaks slightly.  It was quite dark and the glow sticks on our paddles indicated where the other kayaks were.  It was very quiet and we could hear people speak quite clearly.  We were only in the open ocean for a little while and then we headed back into the harbor.  On the way back we made a stop at Mavericks Beach. This is the beach where the annual death-defying Mavericks Surf Contest is held.  The spot where landed had several giant carved pumice stones.  The guide explained that they were monuments in remembrance of those who died surfing there.  It was quite dark so we couldn’t see much, but the guide explained that this was a dangerous place to surf.  The waves could reach more than 25 feet during the winter and there are sharks in the waters.

We left the beach and headed towards the harbor.  It was getting quite dark, but with every paddle a plume of green light glowed in the water.  I have seen this before at Stinson Beach so I knew that it was a kind of microorganism that glows when you disturb them.  I tried to get the hubby to look at the glow but he thought that they were bubbles and I couldn’t quite convince him that something in the water is giving off light.  Finally one of the guides said, “I love this bioluminescent stuff!”  Then I said that my hubby doesn’t see it and other people started to paddle to show him.  Then he sort of believed that the green glow wasn’t just bubbles.  After three hours of paddling we landed back at the harbor and walked back to the hotel.  We were quite hungry and the hubby called the concierge to see if any restaurants were still open.  Apparently a Mexican place called Tres Amigos is open until midnight so we went there and filled our tummies.  Then we returned the hotel and fell asleep.

The next day, we ate a little bit of the complimentary breakfast at the hotel, and went back to our room to nap some more.  Finally we checked out and headed to Sunday brunch at the Ritz Carlton. The Sunday brunch at the Ritz Carlton’s Navio restaurant was beyond our expectations. First of all, we didn’t know that it was a buffet because the hubby booked it after seeing a review somewhere that said the Sunday brunch was good. I also didn’t know that the restaurant overlooked the greens of the golf course and the blue ocean.  There was a huge selection of foods all over the world including sushi, caviar, dimsum, and prime rib.  The  small appetizer sized dishes  were presented in the most delectable and appealing manner.  Our favorite was a small plate of roast duck breast served upon steamed bokchoy.  The dessert station was also amazing.  There were half a dozen types of chocolate truffles and fruits and many beautifully presented tiny desserts.  I heard one man there say, “I want to take this to our table and just look at it!”  There was also a dessert with gold flakes on it and I laughed a bit because the hubby joked about how pretentious people who eat gold are.  Anyway, I took about six or seven desserts and just indulged in the decadence.  After four plates of culinary delight, we couldn’t eat anymore, but we really wanted more.  The funny thing is that I had a dream a couple weeks prior about an extremely fancy buffet with chocolate truffles and meats.  I told the hubby, “this is the buffet of my dreams!” and we sat there laughing like idiots for a bit.

After the food we walked to the back of the hotel and followed a path down to the beach.  The beach is public so you don’t have to be a hotel guest to go there. The beach was extremely small and we combed it for about an hour for beach glass.  Unfortunately, all the pieces we found were quite small.  The hubby said to keep them anyway because he wants to fill a spaghetti jar with sea glass.  We were quite tired after that and walked back to the valet for our car.  This is where the hubby remarked, “why is every car here so expensive looking?”  Indeed, all the cars parked in front of the hotel were Mercedes, BMWs, and such.  Then we saw a Toyota van pull up and I realized that they park the cheaper cars at the larger parking lot.  So I said, “see not everyone here drives an expensive car, they just park the most expensive looking ones in front!”   I guess the Ritz needs to look ritzy, but we definitely had a great time there without the need to look rich.

So that’s my weekend of adventure and gluttony.  It’s great to get away from computers for a while to bond with the hubby and the great outdoors.  It certainly wasn’t cheap, but it was completely worth it and I hope we can do it more often.

Today the hubby and I once again discussed the idea of having one of us stay at home when we have a kid. I have researched the costs of daycare in San Mateo and it is very expensive. We can definitely afford it but from what I read many infant care facilities are not only expensive, but have extremely long waiting lists. One of the Wise Bread writers I met last week used to live in Redwood City and she said that she signed up to be on the wait list of one of the daycares with a better reputation while she was pregnant and she got a call back when her daughter was two! That’s pretty crazy and makes me want to put myself on the list right now. Anyway, the hubby expressed interest in being a stay at home dad before, and I asked him about it again.

Financially, my income is still above the San Mateo median if we became an one income family. I used our actual incomes and plugged it into this at MSN money. According to the calculator if we lose my hubby’s income but he takes care of our kid we would lose about $12500 a year and that doesn’t seem like all that much. The hubby makes a decent income as a game programmer, but we are taxed quite a bit on that second income so the biggest savings we get is on taxes. I plugged in daycare costs at $1200 a month, but that’s actually a pretty low estimate because apparently for their top of the line on campus daycare. I consider my hubby to be a top of the line caretaker considering his intelligence and attentiveness towards kids so when I plug in $2500 a month for daycare obviously we come out ahead by having the hubby stay at home. Additionally, right now the hubby commutes about 50 miles a day to and from work so we will save a few hundred a month on gas. If I were to stay home, we would lose more money because my base salary is about 12% higher than the hubby’s and I have been getting bigger raises than the hubby just because the type of companies I work for pay more. If the hubby stayed in enterprise software he would be making more money than me right now because he has one more year of experience and he graduated from an elite school. However, he is in games right now and every software engineer knows that you work in games for love and not money.

The main issue is that I am afraid that the hubby would not want to give up his career, but he said that he really would love to be a stay at home at dad. He thinks that he would have a lot of free time for his own projects because he always wanted to make his own games. He also has tons of movies he would like to watch, dozens of books he wants to read, and so much stuff he wants to learn. Additionally, he just loves babies. Then I asked him if he would be lonely, and he said that he could just hang out with all the other stay at home parents he knows. We do know a stay at home dad from church with three kids and several stay at home moms that are our friends. Besides that, one of the hubby’s best friends has a work schedule where he gets home in the early afternoon so they could hang out. In terms of jobs, it is also generally easier for a man to get back to a career after taking a little hiatus. If he really uses his time to create games on his own then he would be even more attractive to future employers., or if he really makes great games he could sell them on the internet by himself.

Anyway, this is all hypothetical because we don’t have kids yet, but it is good to know that the hubby wouldn’t mind being a stay at home parent. I have read many blog posts by women whose husbands tried out the stay at home thing and got ridiculously bored and went back to work, but I guess it’s mostly because they didn’t have any projects of their own. I am not too worried about the hubby having nothing to entertain himself with because he has a ton of games he hasn’t started playing yet and he is one of those nerds that could just sit there and think for hours for fun. The hubby wants to finish the game at his workplace first, and then we may work on actually trying to having a kid and this stay at home dad thing may actually happen.

Well, as you all know now. The #$@#$! is set to pass very soon. I am so annoyed by this, but I can’t really do anything about it. I wrote about the bill in different articles at Wise Bread so I’d love your comments there.

Anyway, some good things did happen this week to me personally. A couple days ago I got a surprise email from one of my previous employers informing that I am receiving a dividend on the company stocks I bought. The dividend is quite significant and it’s equivalent to about 20% of my purchase price. I don’t have that many shares but the dividend is still worth over $1200. It’s like receiving another economic stimulus check! It is a private stock I can’t sell it, but if it gives dividends like these every year I wouldn’t mind keeping it forever for the free money.

Another news item is that the hubby received a small raise. It was around 5% and it is a bit smaller than he expected, but a raise is a raise and that’s great! He left a large soul sucking megacorp a couple years ago and took a large paycut to join this small game studio, and now his pay is finally a tiny bit above his pay at the megacorp. Right now his company is trying to pump out a couple games so I guess they’re not exactly rolling in dough. The gaming business is sort of risky in that if one game fails then the entire studio could die out because they have to invest a lot of resources in the development of a single game. That actually happened to the studio my cousin worked for. So I am hoping that the hubby’s game set to release next spring is a huge success because the hubby has been working on it for 2 years already. He wants his name in the credits! If he has shipped one great game then his chances of finding another job in the game industry greatly increases and we might move somewhere else. Right now their games are looking pretty promising and they are gathering quite a bit of a fanbase.

Besides that, one of my friends from college is getting married tomorrow! My mom bought me a couple dresses for my birthday so I can wear one of them and show up not looking like a baglady. We also planned a kayaking weekend in Half Moon Bay for our anniversary next month. The dividend money came just in time for our trip. We could have covered it easily ourselves, but it’s pretty cool to receive some surprise money.

So despite the government passing another bill that we will pay for until we die, I try to look on the bright side and see that my life is actually quite excellent.

Well, 2008 is really flying by.  Now we are in the first day of July I think it’s time for a mid year review of my goals for 2008 which.
is ordering viagra online legal

is ordering viagra online legal- I am still looking into this, but I think the biggest obstacle is my weird working schedule.  I work from 11am to 7 or 8pm on most days.  Maybe I can find things I can do at home or before I go to work.

is ordering viagra online legal – When I set down this goal I was only writing .  In January I was invited to write for and then I started in March.  So combining all three blogs now I get on average 2000 pageviews  a day. This is a huge improvement.  So I think I will have to revise this goal to getting 4000 pageviews a day on average by the end of the year.
is ordering viagra online legal – Well, since getting the Wii Fit and getting I have been exercising with the hubby almost everyday.  So far I lost about 2 lbs, but I feel that I gained a little bit of  muscle and my thighs are more toned. So I guess we will carry on and see what happens.
is ordering viagra online legal – I am working on this, really.  I try to listen to the hubby when he tells me to clean certain rooms.  This weekend he said that my bathroom is above average in cleanliness.

5. Be awesome at my job – I have been at my job for almost 8 months now and I have pretty much settled in.  I learned quite a bit of new things so now my job isn’t that difficult once again.

Financial Goals
is ordering viagra online legal- I received a  small raise at work a couple months ago.  Since I was a new employee and had only been working there for four months they prorated my raise so it was about 3.5%.  I think after taxes I am earning about $100 more a month. It’s almost enough money for gas! Anyway,  I was pretty happy about it since I was expecting nothing.  My manager actually told me it was a special raise since pretty much all the other people who worked at the company for less than six months got no raise.  I believe him since in my last company all the people that has been at the company for less than nine months didn’t get a raise.  I guess it makes sense.    Anyway, my salary isn’t 100k, yet, but my blog income has grown quite a bit.  So it’s quite possible to break $100k in income this year.
is ordering viagra online legal- Well, we’re actually progressing nicely towards this goal.  Our networth has gone up 21% since 12/31/2007 despite the recent stock market drop. So I think we’re definitely on track for 40% by the end of the year.

is ordering viagra online legal – I think with is pulling in I would have to file taxes as a business at the end of the year so I can write off some of the expenses I have incurred.  I would have to pay income taxes anyway so I might as well deduct some of the valid expenses I had such as hosting and software.

So all things considered, 2008 is turning out to be a good year.  I think writing down my goals really helped me in working towards them. Now I just have to stay the course for the second half of the year!

My husband loves kids. Recently his best man at our wedding had a baby girl and my husband loves to hold her and look at her adoringly. (I’m jealous!) He did this at church and a woman came up to me and said, “your husband is so cute! He is just fascinated by the baby! When are you having one?”

Obviously, the cheapest thing to do is to have no kids at all, but we both agreed that we would like to have at least one kid. Personally, I believe that having kids earlier in life saves money even though I have read advice that said people should wait to have kids. Here are my reasons as to why I think having kids sooner is financially beneficial to a couple.

is ordering viagra online legal – When you are young or just starting out in your career your income is probably not at the peak. So when you have less money to spend, you will probably not spoil the kid as much as parents who have a lot of money. Additionally, if you have to give up some working days to take care of the kid, the amount you lose is small if you don’t earn all that much to begin with.

is ordering viagra online legal – Expenses for food and education are increasing at a much higher rate than the base inflation and wage increases. For example, my college tuition doubled in the 4 years I attended, and food prices are rising at a very high clip lately. If we have a kid earlier, we would probably have to spend less on these things.

is ordering viagra online legal – I have read a lot of stories about women who waited to have kids only to find that it is much harder to get pregnant. This results in fertility treatments that produce unwanted multiple births and other complications. It is also a lot easier for younger women to recover from pregnancy and child bearing so I rather get it over with while I am young. Fertility treatments are expensive, and so are unexpected multiple births.

is ordering viagra online legal – This is related to physical health. While I am still pretty young I have the energy to take care of the kid and handle a job. From what I have seen, young parents seem to handle the sleepless nights a lot better. I think this abundance of energy we have when we are young is helpful in balancing a career and children. I think if you are less phased at work by your kids, then your potential for career advancement is better.

is ordering viagra online legal – My mother in law pretty much retired early when she was a little bit over 45 and both of her children were done with college. She had them fairly early on and now she travels all over the world with her husband. Knowing that your children are already adults at a young age really brings peace of mind during retirement. Additionally, you no longer have to financially support them so your retirement expenses are lowered.

Anyway, most people decide to have kids later in life to save more money and advance their careers, but I think if you really want kids and you can safely afford having a kid then earlier is better. My husband doesn’t think I am ready to be a mom mentally, but one of my coworkers said to me, “No one is ever ready to be a parent!” I think that is really true, and I think we will be just fine if we have a kid within the next couple years.