Easter weekend

Thank goodness for the weekend. We celebrated last night by going to the Beverly Center for a little dinner and shopping. The mall has Tom's favorite place to eat (Chipotle) as well as my favorite clothing store (H&M), so it's actually not too difficult to get him to go to the mall with me. I have discovered that I don't enjoy going shopping quite as much as I used to. Before Tom and I got married, I was a very frugal person . . . except when it came to shopping. I went shopping at least once a week, usually more like two or three times a week. Now, it is really painful for me to spend money on clothes. Since we moved to LA I have only bought a few things that I needed for work and I actually had to get rid of some of my clothes so that all of our stuff could fit into our closet :( Oh well, it's worth it, and it's still fun to go to the mall and look around. I think I know get my shopping fulfillment from grocery shopping. Here's a couple pictures from last night:











































Actually, that last picture reminds me of another picture we took at the H&M in San Francisco in December 2005 in which Tom was also bored and trying on hats:















I have some exciting news (for us at least): we paid off our car. Over the past year I've been putting any money I can find toward paying the car off, and getting our tax return last week finally made it possible. I thought it was interesting that when I clicked the link that said “End of Term” on the website it said, “So what comes next? Negotiating a trade-in with your dealer may be a great way to come up with a down payment for your next vehicle.” I don't think so. I'm just happy not to have a car payment.

My family should think this is interesting . . . This week I was listening to the NPR: Day to Day podcast and the subject of the podcast was illegal immigration. They were talking about how heavily the Texas economy relies on illegal immigrants and they had various Texas business people talking about different scenarios to allow immigrants to work with work permits, etc. All of a sudden I heard, “Hi, my name is Bo Pilgrim. . .” Ha ha. Bo Pilgrim owns Pilgrim's Pride which is a chicken company based in my hometown of Pittsburg, Texas. Anyway, I thought that was pretty random.

I guess we don't really have any big Easter plans. We were going to go to Bakersfield, but Tom has a big assignment due Monday so it looks like we're staying home. We should probably start to try to establish our own holiday traditions, but it's difficult when it's just the two of us, Tom has homework, and we're broke. But, here are some pictures (taken by Tom's brother Brent) of our nieces and nephews on Tom's side dressed up for Easter: