It's amazing how fast time seems to fly either when you're busy having fun or when life throws you curves that you barely seem to dodge. It's hard to believe that in the last month, we celebrated Halloween (took Braden trick-or-treating for his very first time), I finished my Dale-Carnegie training, we celebrated Thanksgiving, and I just bought our 2nd vehicle in as many months.

While most people were out hitting the Black Friday sales, I was locked into negotiations with a used car salesman at the local Nissan dealership. I think I ended up getting a decent but not a *great* deal on a used 1998 Nissan Frontier pickup truck. The best thing is that it was loaded with just about every option available and yet only had 47,000 miles on it. Jen has been getting rather tired of having to drive me to work & pick me up on the days she needs the car, so we decided it would be beneficial to get a 2nd commuter vehicle. So I'm the proud owner of a new pickup, although I'm currently suffering buyer's remorse thinking I could've done better. Bah.

Thanksgiving went by fairly well - we worked a lot on the house and actually spent Thanksgiving lunch with some friends of ours from church. It was quite fun and we ended the afternoon with an intense guys vs. girls game of Cranium where the girls won by a nose. We were originally planning on just celebrating Thanksgiving within our little family but we were invited last-minute so we accepted. We ended up cooking our little turkey Saturday and had another instant replay of Thanksgiving dinner.

I hope y'all enjoyed your respective Thanksgiving celebrations and that you were able to spend time with friends and family.

Nothing extraordinary about this entry, I'm afraid. We're just trying to get the house ready for family coming to visit over Christmas. And due to some reasons I won't go into here, Jen and I have decided to renew our committment to each other so we've been trying to spend *a lot* more time with each other. Gone are the days of computer games after dinner, books in bed, and each of us doing our own thing. For the last couple of weeks, 'TOGETHER' has been the focus. And I can say that it's definitely helped our relationship. We're more *into* each other than ever.

It's not to say it hasn't been an emotional rollercoaster at times (at least that's the way it feels), but things are getting better just about every day.

So stay tuned, my dedicated readers...better things are yet to come. Just please be patient and understanding as I work on improving the relationships that are most important.

Almost a year ago today: Accountability