Ouch!

I finally got around to doing my taxes the other day, and boy did I screw up. When I moved out on my own, I neglected to change my withholding on my W-4 form. My exemptions were still set at M-2 instead of S-1. I wouldn't have thought it would have made that much difference, but obviously it did. It looks like I owe Uncle Sam almost $900.

On a good note, my insurance settlement came in the mail Saturday, but almost half of it is now spoken for in the form of income tax. Durn it.

I spent most of the day Saturday out in the garage working on the Harley rear fender. I was in a foul mood. Nothing seemed to be going right. Every time I would weld somewhere, it would burn through and I would have twice as much to fix. Eventually I got all the holes filled that I wanted to fill, but I'm pretty sure the fender has lost some of its straightness in the process. I won't know until it gets some primer on it. Hopefully it will still be fine. I probably should have stopped and resumed on another day when I was in a better mood, but I just kept telling myself that I had to get it done.

Yesterday was so nice out! I went for a ride on my bicycle over to Sarah's house and borrowed Teresa's pruning shears. I went out back here and cut the huge growth of ivy that was encroaching on my patio out. My place still hasn't had its first lawn mowing of the season, but it's overdue, so I figured I'd get that other stuff cut out and leave it for the landlord to take with him when he does the lawn. I can't imagine it will be too much longer before he does it. You never know though.

I bought myself a nice oak display shelf for the living room yesterday from someone on Craigslist. It replaced the old, ugly one that I had there. I took the old one apart and reassembled it inside the storage cubby under my stairwell. It was quite a bit of work emptying it completely out and redoing it, but it was worth it. There's a lot more room in there now. I also put one of those cheesy battery-powered lights inside there so I could see something when I went in.

I drove back over to return Teresa's clippers, while I was there grabbed my small share of books off their bookshelf in the basement. Even though they're mostly sci-fi paperbacks, they do look at home on the new shelf in the living room.

Tamra called Saturday night at about 11:30 (yes, of course she woke me up) and we talked for over two hours. We had a lot to talk about I guess. It's funny when you're talking to your first love for the first time in 25 years or so how many things you remember. It seemed like the more things we talked about, the more those things "tickled" our memories and brought out other things.