People often seem to wonder about life after marriage.  Certainly there's the expectations of living with another person, learning their terrifying personal habits, reduced sexual activity (arguable) and eventually the biggest game-changer of them all: offspring.

But before the little ones start popping up, there's a period of time containing on awkward blend of newly-wedded bliss and not so pleasant debt and financial troubles.

If you played your cards right, you might have come out of college scott-free.  You found the perfect job, you have your whole life perfectly planned, and with your perfect signifigant other, you're going to sail perfectly off into the perfect sunset.

Now for the rest of us.  Those of us who are still figuring it all out.  Those of us who haven't yet achieved our dreams and are working to make ends meet while they pursue them.  Those of us who scrimp and save in whatever possible way we can without sacrificing a relatively comfortable lifestyle.

Artists, entrepreneurs, chefs, dreamers - those who didn't get the right job out of college.... we don't all get it right the first time.  We don't all have our future mapped.  We just know what we want and we're struggling to get there.

That's about where I am.

College drop-out with the good fortune to have married to a wonderful man (at least in my humble opinion).  He takes good care of me and lets me mostly stay home so I can work on my writing (see http://quothandquill.blogspot.com/ for more info), and chase my dreams of becoming a published author.

In the meantime, I've also been brushing up on a unique set of skills to become properly "domesticated."  Cooking, cleaning, shopping, etc.  There's more involved than many girls (or guys) realize!  Significant others can be high maintenance, and sometimes require as much care as a child (well, at least they don't fall and hurt themselves every five minutes).

I also nanny part-time, so I get lots of fun exposure to actual children as well...

In short, the focus of this blog will be to share tricks, bargains, reviews, recipes and stories related to the domestic life-style.  There will be excitement (black friday anyone?), terror (who knew you couldn't use plastic utensils when cooking with a wok?), and thrilling new experiences (OMG, is that an actual Dyson vacuum cleaner?!?!).  I hope you all will join me for the ride!

Thanks for reading my first post!

-The so very domesticated (and slightly quirky) housewife Clare