Personal Life Slacking

Mr W and I have this phrase personal life slacking. It very much means exactly what it says. We are slacking on our personal lives.

Now I don't mean slacking on our relationship, although our goal of bi-monthly dates sometimes looks like devouring a season of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix [in preparation for the final season starting this Sept!] while I make homemade pizza. I mean we are slacking on the [gestures hands] general area of social life outside of work life.

In risk of sounding melodramatic, if we're not at work, we seem to be recovering from work.  I realize I must be very careful to talk about this because both Josh and I think we have been blessed with slightly greater than average awesome jobs. I wont go into specifics other than a sampling of evidence..

As you can see there are plenty of reasons to spend extra time at work. And if Mr W and I were both single instead of married, it'd probably be a huge perk to us. However, we are awesomely married to each other and don't appreciate repetitive evenings spent at home, alone without our companion when we work at companies located in our neighborhood.  Thank The Lord for short commutes!

California Silicon Valley is so weird in a way in that work appears so awesome that we feel ready to give it all of ourselves. I'm not being melodramatic here, neither of us can recall a big-person job we honestly looked forward to almost every day. If we said so previously, it was because we had yet to be enlightened. 

Our jobs can tempt us pretty hard to spend just a little extra time at work instead of home.  There is a huge problem with this though, we give our best selves to our coworkers instead of to each other. Some days [trying to make this less often but I still totally fail] I am completely spent from having used up all of my social-ness on people at the gym.  On those days I can't listen to Mr W. tell me about his work, successes and anxieties. That is when my patience is drier than the Mojave desert and I'm totally not giving him the fresh-and-able-to-listen-and-respond-wife that I am called to be. Now this doesn't mean Mr W. is a saint; he has his days too but I am not about airing his dirty laundry.  However, mine is fair game.

So I've cut back on my hours at the gym, though I do love what working there does for my inner-child extrovert self. Mr W. has made our [mini] vacations a priority on his calendar. Some morning coffees he spends with me instead of pouring over his inbox. We set two alarms for church on Sundays because we STRUGGLE to get going on the weekends. No plans get made for Sunday afternoon so we can freely chat over lunch. I have made more friends with wifes of Mr W's co-worker's. Mr W and I make time each week for each other that is non-negotiable. However, on the occasion that a once in a lifetime opportunity comes up [funny these come up way more often since we moved out of the Midwest] I totally encourage Mr W to prioritize for it. Usually it means way more hours away from me and our home but I know this is temporary.  Notice I said prioritize, which means we try to ascribe to the whole emotional bank account. Meaning deposit before you over withdraw. Took us a lot of IOU's to figure out we didn't yet truly understand that system.

Living in California has completely strengthened our marriage because it's thrown so many 'nice things' at it that sometimes it feels too easy to be distracted by something new and shiny. But --we've also got a loooooot of work ahead of us!

slack no more

-Mrs W

Absent

I have been very absent lately.  Absent as in absentminded, absent from thoughts, absent from everything. Life.  I've also been absent on here and I don't really understand why.

They see me rollin, they hatin.

See, I like blogging, I love writing down my thoughts, agonizing over the proper word descriptors and I adore reflecting on moments.  However, I haven't been able to do any of that for nearly 2 weeks. I have been every definition of absent.

New things are on the horizon.  Quite like spring seems around the corner in Northern California.  I was sitting outside, watching 2 interesting characters in the park talk very loudly about a secret mission they were going to embark on.  Then one got up and meandered down the middle of the street in a not very straight line.  #IloveCalifornia.  Once they left I had nothing to do but think about how absent I have been lately.

 

While I was sitting there, thinking myself into circles, I felt a warm tangible weight on my shoulder; the Sun.  He was rising, beginning to bake the air into Spring.  There is a sweet smell associated with Spring.  Scents of fallen rain combing through fresh cut grass and an earthiness..  Sort of like when you were 3 and dug up earth warms for the first time in your mom's freshly planted flower bed.  Then, the breeze rushes in; the damp, heavy, mineral air which has been hiding beneath the shade since the last frost. The vibrations of life beginning to bloom.  This movement is elusive until time allows the Sun to cure Green into the colors of his fiery kiln.

So here is my prayer to be less absent and more present.  Especially now as winter seems to be dying to Spring. Let the old me die and be left behind.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old is gone, the new has come!
2 Corinthians 5:17

-Mrs. W.

hello world

At the prompting of my husband, Mr Waytoburn, this space has been born.

I've always enjoyed writing down my thoughts. My first journal was given to me in 1994 by my mom.  It had Tweety Bird on the cover and I was going into 1st grade.  It eventually filled up and I moved onto less cartoon-covered journals.

I've felt pretty overcome by change for the last year and have struggled to write as consistently as I used to. I graduated from college in June 2011.  Mr W. and I were married in August, 2011.  We relocated to Northern California two weeks later and moved in with my Aunt.  Then, we moved into our first apartment and adopted two cats.  2012 was a year spent exploring this new state of being Californians.  Cut to November 2nd, 2012, my first day as a full-time wife/home-maker.  I was full-time, career woman no more.

I just need to breathe after reading through it all.

With each of these changes, I've sort of simply said "yes" to each one.  I didn't pour over my options. There wasn't a whole lot of back and forth discussions and I didn't teeter on the edge of decision.

I also feel like I haven't digested the past two years.  I sort of feel like I swallowed a saltine cracker whole and need to chip away at it before I choke. Which, is what this blog is for. It is also to relieve Mr W. of my cray-cray woman talk.  The poor man can only pretend to be interested in blogs, decorating, photography and all things "woman" for so long in our marriage.


Hello World,

I'll take cream in my life but hold the sugar because sugar is only sweetening what is already delicious and I hate to be wasteful, please.

Yours truly,
Mrs W

Hello World.