Dr Copa

Well here we go again. We are supposed to be getting a lot more snow starting tomorrow sometime. My car still has over 2 feet of snow on it’s roof from the storm we got over the weekend. I’ve been driving my truck these past days, the roads are still a mess and I trust my truck a whole lot more than my little Honda in this type of weather.

Guess we will see what happens. It is February.

I just got back from having my taxes done and I am glad to say that I’ll be getting a few bucks back from good old Uncle Sam, I have to say that  it really hurts to have to shell out so much money to the tax preparer. I really don’t have all that much involved when it comes to my taxes. It’s not like I was able to take advantage of the recently extended First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit, although I did have a lot of medical and charitable deductions that certainly helped the situation. Well worth the time and effort it took to keep track of all of those pesky pieces of paperwork for the past year.

There are a lot of options (credits, deductions, etc.) out there for people to utilize for the yearly tax issues. I can’t imagine doing taxes for a living, way too many variables involved there and when you are dealing with other people’s money you really need to be careful! My luck some one would get upset with what I had done and come after me with a shotgun or something crazy like that.

I did find an interesting video on You Tube that I wanted to post here for anyone interested in learning about the Home Buyer Tax Credit Extension. Anything to keep more money in our pockets and not the I.R.S. right?!

I think that a lot of us are down sizing on a lot of things that we used to take for granted a few years ago. I know that I have made several changes with my TV, cell phone, home phone and the Internet, trying to get my budget under control. It is a tedious process, having access to the Internet certainly makes the process a bit easier, but it’s all worth the time and the effort these days.

My sister-in-law has been asking me what kinds of family-friendly shows there are around here.  She’s been thinking about coming to visit us in a couple of months, and wants to bring her kids with her.  She was particularly interested in trying to buy some Sesame Street Live Tickets or Disney on Ice Tickets.  Personally I’d rather get some Kentucky Derby Tickets but I guess that wouldn’t make her very happy!  Besides, the Derby isn’t local, and we don’t have the resources to travel that far right now.  And it will be quite some time before I’m up to traveling that far anyway.  Just my luck I’d travel there and then be in too much pain to leave the motel room!

So it is probably just as well that we look for local entertainment.  I’m sure glad that finding places to see and go and do is so much easier than it used to be – just a few clicks of the mouse and you have fun at your fingertips!

One of the reasons we chose this house to buy was because it had a propane fireplace in the family room. We reasoned that it would be a good emergency heat source in the event that we lost electricity during a storm. Well, we have used it once or twice, just for atmosphere, not really for heat, but let me tell you that fireplace certainly did heat up that room!

Well, we DID lose electricity yesterday due to that blizzard, so I went to turn on the fireplace. Wouldn’t you know that fireplace would not start up? I couldn’t get the gas to turn on! So I brought our kero-sun heater into the house from the garage and lit that up for heat. My wife complained that the fumes gave her a headache and she cracked open a window for ventilation. She was convinced we were going to die of some kind of cabon monoxide poisoning. I’m sure if we had been able to get on the Internet at that point she would have been looking that up!