Thank you! This is the stuff that terrifies me lol
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Please tell me you’ll take some of it and do something fun and frivolous?? I know yall have been working hard!! So while the tactical and practical stuff is important make sure to splurge a bit 
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I mean, we normally don’t do much for bdays for each other but husband went big for me this year and headed a project to totally reconstruct our garden. Swanky tall metal beds, fresh soil, wood chipped in between, PVC tap trenched out to the garden and he’s about to install a drip irrigation system. Super splurge project lol. That’s gotta count! (It was a ton of work but looks so good)
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Ooh pictures? I love a garden remodel.
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I keep wanting to pull together a post about it, but it’s been very busy over here. Let me see what I can get together!
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Okay here’s the before. The wood was rotting so bad there really wasn’t any way to trellis stuff in and tons of bunny issues. The biggest issue of all was grass infiltration and no way to remedy it- that became way more clear why as we removed them, there was straight up grass roots, running through the punky wood on the edges. Literally never had any hope of trying to get the grass eradicated.
We did a chip drop in order to fill the bottom half of the beds and go around it for weed suppression in the area. Here I am using latte as child labor
Here’s the area with the sod and beds all pulled out and sort of leveled ha ha, plus the trench covered back over where we ran the PVC line to bring a water tap out to the garden. We also added a French drain through the middle under all the beds, to try to counteract some of the drainage issues with the dense clay we have here.
And a jump to our basically completed short of drip irrigation set up
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Oh that’s nice!
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I’m not the fun spending police lol so whatever you think counts, counts! I just wanted to make sure you get to enjoy some of these huge windfalls you both have worked hard for.
This super splurge project sounds amazing! IIRC one year you planted a bunch of purple things for Latte right? I can’t wait to see what you do with the new setup!
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Yes! That was last year. Purple peas, purple sage, purple kohlrabi, purple bok choy… I’m forgetting the others, but you get the idea. Everything we would normally do in the garden. We included a bunch of purple varieties. To be honest, most of them did super shitty lol. 
but it was a fun experiment! And in retrospect, I think the soil I ended with last year wasn’t very good quality. There were a whole bunch of issues, so I can’t just blame the varieties I tried.
This year I’m kind of going the far end of the spectrum from kitschy varieties and chaos gardening. I’m going fairly neurotic square-foot method with some of my old tried and true varieties. One of the benefits of the tall garden beds is that kid help will be more on my terms rather than on their whims
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How awesome! Very jealous of a tap near the garden.
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We’re hooking up a 4 way splitter and each bed will have its own control.
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niiiice. My husband has bought all the stuff for a drip system for our garden. Now he just has to set it up. So it may never happen lol
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Luckily we tend to be people who just don’t do stuff, but if we do we DO, if that makes sense 
there’s a lot we never attempt to do but if we decide to make the attempt we generally see stuff through really well. Pretty sure once he’s back from his work trip it’ll happen next week sometime.
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I know this is a bit late, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the best place for bonds, bond index funds, REITs, etc. is specifically a Roth IRA or 401(k), and as you’ve all said earlier it all has to do with taxes. Assuming that you will some day take the money out from the 401(k) or tradIRA, it will be taxed at ordinary income tax rates when it comes out. The bond income will be taxed as ordinary income either way in that case. However, if you put all your ‘taxed at ordinary rates’ income producing assets in your Roth, then all that tax disappears.
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Adding on to this, an HSA if you have one, since it’s triply tax advantaged!
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Your garden is gorgeous
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Aww thank you!
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Advise me: do I not want to sign up for choir this season (10 weeks, $120) because I am depressed and doing a thing will make me feel better, or am I justifiably overwhelmed and I should cut something from my schedule?
I know this is more theoretical but I thought maybe you all would have advice about how to tell
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Ooooh this is a hard one. Gretchen Rubin talks about how paradoxically sometimes Adding something makes life flow smoother than subtracting, and it’s so true. I would ask- do you have restorative downtime? How would you use the time otherwise? What do you get from choir that you don’t get elsewhere?
ETA if it was free, what would you choose?
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When you finish with a choir rehearsal, do you feel better/glad you’d gone, even if you didn’t feel like it beforehand? If the answer is usually yes, I’d go for it. If it feels like it’s a net drain on your energy, I’d say don’t.
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