Positively (Im)perfect

Originally Published July 27th, 2012 ...My Investments Are Shot! Well, I learned pretty quickly in Part I of The Contentment Project that when it comes to superficial stuff, it's fairly easy for me to ditch some of the habits that suck the joy out of life. This week, though, I'm diving into something a little more challenging: devoting some real quality time each day to the people in my life. I know, tell me about it. In our society today, time is money, and spending it in ways we don't want can be torture. How we spend our time is vital simply because there's so little of it. Though I get the heebie-jeebies when I think back to any of my college courses that involved numbers, I did seem to internalize two important principles from my economics classes: the more rare something is, higher its value, and the more valuable something is, the smarter our investment is in that valuable item. (Oversimplified, yes...but it works for my analogy. Econ geniuses

Originally published July 20th, 2012 Let me start by saying that we live a very cushy life. It was already pretty cushy when we cut ties with the Army a few months ago. Since then we've embraced a lovely new life and the cush factor has reached an all-time high. We waved goodbye to our world of deployments and war and friends who've laid down their lives for us and stepped easily into the life we've been planning for years. I traded in my uniform for jeans and time at home with the kids; my husband traded in his for suits and ties and nine to five. We gained a house with nearly twice the square footage of our old one, and moved from an isolated community without a support network to a picture-perfect and kid-friendly suburb with grandparents right around the corner. It's priceless to know that we'll never again being separated due to Army missions; even on busy days we still get to see each other at the end of the day. We'd dreamed of this life for so