My top teeth are (supposedly) straight now, but my bottom teeth have three more trays to go after this one. Then I get to wear a retainer to bed for... god knows how long. The retainer is slightly more comfortable, but not by much. It sucks to have to keep wearing trays and brushing not only my teeth, but each tray as well. Having the engagers removed was no fun either, it involved the drimmel... my orthodontist sanded them off, and it hurts when the drimmel starts to warm up (literally warm up...). If I had to do it all over again, I would get regular braces. But my teeth do look better... I'm just dreading all the dental work that needs to be done at this point - lots of cavities resulted from these trays.
Mike and I are still preparing for our future. It's stressful to some degree, but the excitement sort of balances it out most of the time. Just so many balls in the air right now... selling the house, packing it up, still need a truck, RV has a couple of repairs needed, still need to find something to store our stuff in and have it built... and all the other stuff we had going on before that. We both get frustrated and then one or the other of us manages to diffuse the tension somehow to keep ourselves sane.
Part of being prepared for the future is to stock up on supplies so that for a few months we won't have to worry about shopping for most of our staples. This is in part due to uncertainty about our income when I'm not working and he starts his new job, and in part due to the fact that we'll be moving around a lot and things may not necessarily be convenient to us. I've been using Amazon Subscribe & Save and Soap.com to buy a lot of gluten-free products because we also want to cut back on our gluten consumption. We both feel like we may have a sensitivity to it and it's part of our goal to become more healthy. There are a lot more gluten free products around these days, but in smaller towns they may not be as widely available, and we can't necessarily have things shipped to us when we're on the road.
I'm loving Soap.com because they have good prices, they accept coupons (you can mail them in for credit), 2-day shipping is free for orders over $39, and you can create a "5 favorites" list of items that you order regularly then you get 10% off of those 5 items each time you order them. If you use WHEEL22809, you get 20% off your order and they donate $30 to Best Friends Animal Shelter. That code is good for all five sites (they have groceries, drugstore items, baby goods, pet supplies and home goods). I've been really impressed... their prices rival Amazon but the shipping is quicker and everything is packed really well. I also like that I can buy a single item, or a package if it's something I know we'll use (rice and beans for example).
And I'm loving the idea of meals in jars... having 'convenience' foods in the pantry that are quick and don't take much thought, but are homemade and healthy. I'm not just talking about brownies in a jar, cocoa in a jar or ranch dressing mix... I'm talking pasta and soup and casseroles like this recipe on Chef Tess' site for Chili. She's got a lot of great looking recipes, but there are others out there that are wise to this method as well. So I want to start playing around with it myself because I think it will come in handy for us.
So that's about it for now. Watching RV... it's funny but now that we're owners ourselves I can see little (exaggerated) nuggets of truth to it. The Long Trailer is a much better movie in my opinion, and probably a lot closer to the truth.
