Rick' s Blog on Writing

Back to Work on Tuesday

Well back to work after the long President's Day weekend....these holiday weekends never seem long enough, do they??

Going out to my attorney's office this evening at 5:30PM to get my taxes done....I'm hoping that my wife and I fare a bit better than we did last year...we both has some issues last year as to what we were claiming for dependents (mistakenly using too many dependents for weekly tax deductions) which made us come up short on the total amount of taxes we paid ....needless to say, we ended up paying Uncle Sam about $2500.00 last year....Ouch, that hurts!!! LOL.
We adjusted our number of dependents to zero...and we paid the college tuition for two of our kids...and should have additional energy credits for replacing all the windows of our 11 room (100 year old) Victorian home, and had insulation blown in......aside from the tax credits, the house is a lot warmer this year (and I sure wouldn't have wanted to see what it would have cost to heat the house if we hadn't done it...with the cost of fuel oil this year....probably gonna cost us a good $3000.00 to $4,000.00 in heating bills this year, and that's probably about 1/2 what it would have cost without the improvements......We had to take an equity loan to pay for all of it, but in the long run, will definately be cheaper...also increases the value of the house (which we plan to sell in about three years when I retire...)

Warmed up a bit here in New England today....was a virtual heat wave up into the mid 30's.....Yipeeeeee...well, at least better than the single (and below zero) temps we've been having for the past several weeks.....it's just been "F"ing cold....LOL.

I believe I've finally "got" the right way to place photos on this site...I've wanted to include a photo of me in my port, but being extremely technologically/computer skills challanged, I've had to have help from a few of you here, as well as my wife....should have the pic(s) uploaded soon....I don't know about you all (or is that "Y'Alllllll") but it just seems nicer chatting to someone when you have an idea what they look like....just makes it more personal.....
(I still have a problem with trying to downsize one photo that I wanted to put on this site....way way too big...but haven't figured out yet how to reduce it in size....is a pic of me in uniform (police) at a charity event...The Jimmy Fund walk in Boston (the main charity of the Mass. Chiefs of Police Assoc. as well as the Boston Red Sox...)...was going to send the pic to my wife and let her do it, but believe it or not, it's too big to send through my yahoo email...I have up to 10 megs...buts it's bigger than that....haven't figured out what to do with it yet....

Well, gotta run for now........
chat with ya soon...

Rick