Snow days and taxes....

So yesterday I got out of work at 1:30 due to weather. Which was odd, since the weather was way worse when I left for work in the morning than when I left work. But since more snow and ice was predicted, I guess it made sense to get everyone home before it came down.

Cool, half a day off. I could get all kinds of things done. But of course, I didn't. I got home, surfed the web for a while, and then took a 2 hour nap. Besides about an hour spent organizing my basement, I got absolutely nothing done. I didn't even work out.

When I checked the webpage for the school I work for before I went to bed, we were scheduled to open at noon. So I slept until 9 or so this morning, got up, ate breakfast - and then discovered that they had switched to being closed today. So I then spent the next few hours doing, well, nothing. Besides writing a couple eBay descriptions and spending an hour on the treadmill, I spent most of the day surfing the web.

Finally, at 3:30 I dragged myself outside to shovel the walk and clean off my truck. I had thought about going to the bank and an auction, but by the time I had the truck-sickle de-iced, it was too late to go to the bank, and I figured I probably shouldn't be driving anyway. On the plus side, my mailbox contained the last two things I needed to do my taxes - my 1099-G and my W2. I had gotten my copy of TurboTax from Amazon a few days earlier, so I spent this evening doing my taxes.

It was pretty painless - since I still had my turbotax file from last year, most of the info was imported, and it was just a matter of entering the new numbers. I'm getting back $3961 from the Feds and $1305 from the State of Maryland. Which is quite good. Now I just need to decide if I should throw it at my student loans, my mortgage, some home repairs, or just sit on it. I'm thinking student loans, because I evidently now make too much to deduct student loan interest - although that may not be the case next year if I don't make as much overtime. I do have a few things I need to do to the house, though. Especially since my master bath toilet catastrophically failed today - I'm hoping I can either jerry-rig it or replace the guts, although after about 10 minutes of fishing around the cold water inside, I decided to put it off and use the hallway bathroom instead for now.

So while I would have liked to have gotten a lot more done, I can't really complain - my taxes are behind me, which I thought would be a weekend project. So now I can use my weekend to clean. But I probably won't.