Doin' the Ren and Stimpy Happy Happy Joy Joy song, for you Infi :D

My wife just did our taxes (and I'll go back over it myself when I get a chance) and were' getting $1 back from the feds.

For years we have either owed hundreds or have gotten hundreds back, and I made an effort last year to calculate and change my withholdings to get it closer to being on target. I'm pretty pleased with myself that it's within a buck of being accurate.

Nice! It would be funny (well, not for you, but still) if that were a red flag in someone's audit algorithm, that being so balls-on expected with the numbers is like standing a little too nonchalantly near the crime scene.

:eek:

http://cellar.org/2015/shades.gif

You're right about suspicions. December 31st the electric company changed my meter, so the guy took a manual reading to be added to the reading from the new meter. I get the bill and there's all this paperwork dancing around this meter and why I have to pay for it. It all this bullshit they use the example of the average household using 500 kwh. I look at the bill and it's for exactly 500.0 kwh, which I've never even been close to in 35 years. Red flags waving frantically in my head. :haha:

Our electric rates went up, and apparently I missed the town meeting that was broadcast on the local cable because everyone was talking about it and people were bringing pitchforks. Good for them.

But what's making me happy today is what sustains me when I hate myself and my life...my family.

I'm currently at my brother and sis-in-law's house, have been here since Tuesday, dog-sitting. They drove to FL to see my nephew get his wings as a heli pilot in the Marines. He will be flying Hueys and will be stationed in SD (where, as you have probably heard, the weather sucks. ;) )

I love my brothers and my sisters-in-law and my nieces and nephews. I especially love my dad, who has risen to the occasion after losing the love of his life (and the best mom I could have ever asked for) and I'm just so goddamn proud of them all. I'm the worst of them and I'm not even in prison or anything. :o

When things get bad my family sustains me. You've heard this before. But some things cannot be said enough.

yay munkie! just keep on keeping on -I'm proud of you and you being happy makes me happy.

Thanks monster! I appreciate that so much.

It's an effort sometimes to try to be happy...or to remember why I should be, anyway. I feel the negativity and the worry sneaking up on me. I try to use the cognitive behavior stuff techniques and it works but it sure is hard to do sometimes. Hey, what's that behind me, tapping me on the shoulder? Gloom! Doom! Despair! Flood! Fire! Famine!

Look at the flowers, Lizzie. (bonus points for those who get this reference.)

Glad you're feeling happy, infi. You've got a great family. Don't forget you're part of that greatness.

'Black List'?

Reminds me of Ulysses Everett McGill:

Heh, nevermind, got impatient, and looked it up.

:)

I just ordered a new Canon DSLR and got a really good price. I recently sold some older camera stuff on Ebay and had been watching the prices on the new Canon EOS 7D MkII which is especially geared towards sports, action and wildlife as it is an APC sensor (1.6 factor) and can shoot at up to 10 frames per second. I have around $1900 in my Paypal account and I try to be as cost neutral as possible when I add to my gear.

The body has been selling at $1799 but I looked today and Canon dropped the price to $1699. I did some searches and found a website I was not familiar with called CanonPriceWatch and was able to get a new body from a dealer in Canada for $1499 with free shipping and no taxes or fees. CanonPriceWatch got stellar ratings at several photograpy blogs so I felt ok with them.

I will have more then enough to buy a 65gb cf card and the battery grip. :cool:

Compact flash card? I didn't know they still made those. That's what my first digital camera used, almost 20 years ago. With the larger form factor, though, they probably got big gigs before the other, smaller, cards did, now that I think about it.

This body takes SD cards as well as CF cards like the more high end DSLR bodies. You can choose to write different files to different cards, like Jpegs to one and Raw to the other.

This from a webpage on the subject as I had to look up the advantages:

Secure Digital memory cards are significantly smaller than CompactFlash cards, and are equipped with a nine-pin interface as compared to the 50-pin interface of the CompactFlash. The result of having fewer interface pins means that the SD cards are limited to a four-bit data bus, whereas CompactFlash cards have a 16-bit data transfer bus. Another major difference between these two types of memory cards is the absence of a microcontroller in SD memory cards. This puts more of a load on the host device.

Roadtrip begins on Thursday: Chicago, Albuquerque, Denver, Cheyenne, western KS. Good times!