What is "Meals Up The Belt"

Hello and welcome. My name is Mike Meals (-M). My fiancee and I live in the Houston Metro, near Houston's Sam Houston Tollway, affectionately known to us as The Beltway or The Belt. We currently are in the Jersey Village / Cypress area of Houston. We both are in the 29-35 year age demographic and are successful professionals in our chosen fields. So when I say Meals Up (as in Wheels Up), that's where the name comes from.

The problem with all of this? We are not living ITL (In The Loop), but we are not fully ready to be suburbanites either. As we have been preparing for the wedding this September, we made a terrible discovery...we were becoming the suburbanites anyway. Far too often, we found ourselves staying at home for the entire weekend, as we prepared wedding plans and worked to make the house as livable and comfortable as possible. Which is a great thing to do, unless you are under the age of 80 and want to experience the things Houston and Texas both have to offer people our age.

This started last night. I challenged my fiancee (her name is Lauren, by the way) to help come up with activities that we could do to make the weekends have more exciting things discovered than a sale at HEB. How did we do this? We pulled 72 note cards from Target and a couple bins. We then went through all the lists we could find online and attempted to find activities that we would want to do. Many of them were things that we wanted to do but had not, things we had put off after talking about, or things that we knew would take each other out of our comfort zones and cause us to grow and enjoy life.

Basic Rules? Sure, we have some. 1st, there are 4 wild cards in the basket. Why 4? There were 4 black note cards and we had no marker that would write on them. This means that whoever draws this card has total freedom in picking a weekend activity. We have decided that when we select something, it must be completed within 30 days. We have decided that we each get 2 vetos...allowing us to make a pick be picked again. They must be used wisely though, as there are some things the other is not going to like. We also have 3 baskets. One contains the undone activities. One contains the completed activities. The third is our "would do again/must reschedule activities".  This is for things that we liked or want to do but can not, based on things like the time of year. It's really hard to catch an Astros game during February. Also, we can not do less than 2 card selections each month. We have to make sure we get through these cards. Lastly, as of now, we have agreed that planned activities with friends or family can overrule these selections. So when we go float a river in July, we can use that instead of picking a card.

But before we end this post, here is a little about each of us. I am 33 and originally from Ohio. She is a native Texan from right here in the Houston Metro. I will not disclose her age, but it's about 4 years less than mine lol. We met over 5 years ago and have been together for almost 2 1/2 years. I've lived in Texas for 2 of those years. Before this, I was in Florida near Orlando. She's been here her entire life, hold a couple years near Kansas City.

So stay tuned. We will be posting as these things take place. We have already picked this weekend's activity, and one for next weekend too.