Plan your own vacations when you want to, and plan a suitable combined vacation with this other family when you want to. If they freak out at your planning your own vacations as you see fit, then let them. Bowing to unreasonable demands because someone will make you pay emotionally if you don't is not a healthy option.

If the guests want to wrest the check away from the host, because the host is also the guest of honor, then the guest who volunteers has to cover the whole thing. A guest can't volunteer -all- of the guests to pay for the host/honoree.

I think a person who arranges the event and orders the food also picks up the check - even the birthday person, even when people at the table insist on paying for the birthday person.

Awkwardness is when there's a risk of a perception gap between what you mean and what you appear to mean.

Moving is hard. Staying is easy. Logistically speaking, at least. And this is true whether you're doing or undoing something.

I do crosswords when I have time to kill somewhere, and am 100 percent successful on filling in the spots I get stuck on - after I close up, do something else, and then go back to it.

There is a connection between environment and stress on both ends, with excessive clutter and excessive attention to detail both holding the power to distract us from our ability to love fully, work productively and relax effectively. So, what makes sense to me is for each of us to think this through on a few fronts: what constitutes a comfortable environment for us, how much effort we're willing to put into it relative to other priorities, and how well-matched we need our partners' preferences to be to ours.