albatross, charge, deadweight, demand, difficulty, drain, duty, imposition, load, millstone, onus, pressure, strain, task, weight*

Can you tell I did my taxes this weekend? Our big mistake was refinancing our house note last December. We paid $2000 less in mortgage interest this year and didn’t compensate for it deduction-wise, so now we owe Uncle Sam about one toilet seat cover for an Air Force cargo plane more than the Staff Sargent’s annual salary he took out already. I have yet to do the state income taxes yet, who knows maybe we’ll owe them a couple of State Trooper nightsticks…

* typed “tax” in over at Thesaurus.com

Giant Map Of Guam

As I loaded the trunk with the Miata caricature this morning in preparation for taking it to work, my wife asked, “Why don’t you hang it here at home?” I responded with, “Huh?” She said that I could try and hang it here in the “computer” room. So that is where it is now. I pulled the giant map of Guam off the wall and placed it on the exposed nails. It is a little, no a lot, too high, so I guess tomorrow I’ll fill in some holes and drill some more.

Started up, went down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 26

I Took A Day Off

Almost took tonight off too. I have fallen into an old habit – mass market mystery novels. Read one yesterday and I’m knee deep into number 2 today. I have my mother-in-law to thank for this, she also reads the same sort of crap and came back from the library with a stack of about a half dozen of ’em. Yesterday’s book was P is for Peril, as Sue Grafton works her way through the alphabet. Today I am reading Strawberry Sunday: A John Marshall Tanner Novel and tomorrow if all goes as planned I will be knee deep in Janet Evanovich’s Hard Eight, while Stephanie Plum is not a PI like the other two protagonists, she is a bounty hunter who gets thrust into a whole mystery solving thing. My favorite of this genre are Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels. Man I wish I was half as tough and half quick with the snappy answers as Spenser is.

Hibernated All Day

Yesterday it rained in the morning, but cleared up later in the day. For the first time in a long time both Donna and I decided we didn’t want to do a Master’s Miata Club event. We went out to lunch (while it was still raining) to check out a place for a possible Club meeting in a town that is halfway between the two “big” towns that members come from. The food was good, but the atmosphere of the place was just so dumpy that we are thinking of other alternatives. When it came time to go out for the MMM…Time we just didn’t feel like it, even though the rain had stopped.

Today was a normal Sunday, the Miata sits. Hibernated all day except for a quick outing for lunch at Moe’s. They have been open here in Aiken for a while but we like to give a new place about a month or so to settle in before trying it. Not bad, but not so good that we will be hurrying back.

Started up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 25

Share The Road

Big doings today. It was Donna and my 1/2 day off and we had planned to go for a walk in the woods, but we got rained out. Instead we went out to lunch and then headed over to Michael’s to pick up the framed Miata caricature, before heading home. Looks really cool, but it is going into work on Monday because there is no place where it would fit in at home. When we got back to the house there in the mail was the Share The Road license plate. Now if I could only bring myself to go for a bike ride…

Started down, went up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 25

Professional blogger on a closed Internet.

Watched West Wing tonight so you know I have plenty of fodder for here on the absurdity of advertising, but I won’t do it. Instead, I keep coming back to a little thing I saw in this morning’s local paper about folks renewing their wedding vows, they were Alzheimer patients. Couldn’t help but thinking, “How often do they have to do that?” Insert your own insensitive remarks here

What’s Sexy?

Blared the headline on the issue of Teen People at the checkout counter of the store tonight. I didn’t pick up the magazine to see what the article said, as I assumed it was a rhetorical question, everything is sexy to a teenager (except maybe their own parents.)