Happy New Year 2006 - Goals & Comedy Club

GOAL SETTING
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Well, today Matt and I put together a budget. It was an extremely daunting task. We started at 2:00 this afternoon and we just finished. It is now 11:50 pm. We still have some final touches to add to it tomorrow. It pretty much covers any possible thing you can think of. It is just stupid to waste money when you can save it for awesome things. But - it takes looking at a before and after picture to see where the dollaz go to really understand what a person can accomplish if they alter their spending habits. This is a budget that is attainable, but it is altering the way we view our finances so that we contribute to the most important things in our lives. That is the hardest part, changing how we view the items we spend most of our money on.

Matt and I have set some pretty aggressive goals this year, NOT New Years Resolutions, but our yearly goals. We almost always accomplish the goals we set together, when we do it seperately it just doesn't work. We have a binder complete with a contract we made and signed.

Our three most important GOALS that will enable us to live by our budget are:

Strenghthening our Relationships w/

God
Our Marriage (each other)
Family/Friends

By working on our relationship with God as a couple, we will remain focused on what the intention of our budget is. We figure the better we are as a married couple focused on God, the better our marriage will become too. So we will be strengthening our marriage by starting two different things:

A nightly devotial for couples called"Moments Together for Couples" by Barbara and Dennis Rainey

and

Reading and Completing the "Rescue Your Love Life" Hardcover and Small Group Workbook by the guys who wrote the book "Boundaries" - Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend.

This is something ,as a couple, we decided to do on our own. We understand the importance of having a grounded marriage in Christ. Although you can't always tell because we are human and we can sometimes lose sight of this, however, we have also come up with a list of "Goal Enablers" that we agreed will help us stay focused on not just the goals we have, but why the goals we have set are important to us.

NOW FOR THE FUNNY STUFF
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Here are some pics of Matt, Nicole and Jason on NYE. We went to the Comedy Showcase in Ann Arbor. We have done this for 4 years. Last year we did not go because Greg and Nicole came to visit us in BFE. But, it is really fun. We usually eat dinner before and then go to the club. The first year we ate a Palio, then Real Seafood Co., The Earle, and this year we went back to Real Seafood because the Earle could not accomodate our party of 10. The main comedian was Kenny Rogerson. He was pretty funny. Although, I had a difficult time laughing because I HAD TWO VERY HUGE FAT BOILS on my face (I have never had anything like this before) and one of them started to bleed through the bandaid because of the heat. That was realy nice, I sat there holding napkins to my face the entire night. But the Jokes were HILARIOUS.

Matt making noise for 2006















Matt Dancing on Stage for 2006















Jason and his Noise Maker - the other guy in the pic was the headliners brother and he ruined all the jokes for Jason because he kept saying the ends of the jokes before the comedian. It was actually pretty funny. We were in the very first row too.




















Nicole making noise for 2006 too. If you look closely you can see that we had a champagne toast in our very high class plastic champagne glasses. LOL. It is always FUN!