So I’ve been terribly neglectful of this blog, and I feel a bit badly about that.

The truth is Mr. Tisdale and I have been in hyper-savings mode since my last post, working toward our goal of saving enough money so we can take a mid-career retirement break. So much so that the last time we went out for dinner was October 7 (seven months ago!), when we had artist friends in town for St. James Art Show. (Our last restaurant dinner was at Addis Grill, which has AMAZING – and cheap! – Ethiopian food, and much of it is vegan too. I’ll have to do a review on them this summer when we finally break our “restaurant fast.”)

So anyway, I didn’t feel like blogging about how tight we were keeping the pursestrings, as that would have been awfully boring. Also, over the winter we didn’t do a whole lot. But with summer here, I’ll have more things to write about. (Gardening! Bicycling! Socializing! Dancing!)

While many people may find our lives to have been super boring over the last seven months, we’ve enjoyed entertaining and being entertained by friends at home. And the great news is that in April, we hit our savings goal a few months earlier than expected – yippee!

Barring unforeseen emergencies, we now have enough money saved to take two years off – one year to travel around the world and another year to come back to Louisville and figure out what to do next with our lives. With our savings goal met, we’re not easing up how much we save, as every month that I work means an extra month of mid-career retirement (and another month of 401K/Roth savings).

We celebrated making our goal by grabbing a beer at the Tavern of Old Louisville, which was closed for a year because of an arsonists’ fire. I got a new beer to try – Burger Beer. Just $2 a can! Mr. Tisdale has a bit more refined tastes, so he got a West Sixth IPA, which was $4. Not a bad way to celebrate spring in the neighborhood, the Tavern being back in business, and Mr. Tisdale and me being a huge step closer to realizing our dream of quitting.

Now we just have to wait for the dog to die.