swim for the music that saves you when you're not so sure you'll survive
OMG I have finally managed to get caught up on my friends page! This might be only the first or second time this year that that's happened. :p Also, I need some new lj icons. Anyone want to help me find some fun ones? I have a whole folder of them on my computer, but they're largely related to old interests or ones that I don't really feel like using anymore. I need some new ones that are more related to things I'm into now. Examples: Glee, Once Upon a Time, uglydolls, knitting, puppies, Canada . . . things with sarcasm or snarky humor are always appreciated, too. I'm in a handful of icon communities and fun things pop up there every so often, but I need something else. But I'm bored of talking about icons and would rather move on to the rest of this entry. :p
So, we have had more house hunting adventures this weekend. Yesterday we went to look at two more places. The first one, I'm not even going to link to, because it was straight up terrible. It was the oldest, most run-down house on its street, and the driveway wasn't even paved!! That really should have been our first clue that nothing great was going to wait inside for us. The guy showing us the house told us it was a historic house in Vaughan, but I'm not buying that. Nothing remarkable about the rooms is really jumping to mind, except that they were in the back portion of the house, with someone else living in the front, I guess. There was a washer and dryer in the basement, which was definitely terrifying. The stairs were of the variety that I guarantee you I'd break my neck if I ever tried to carry a basket of laundry down them, the ceiling in the basement was really low (I could just barely stand straight and I'm only 5'2"!), plus you had to walk across all these wood pallets to get to the washer and dryer. Uhhh, no.
Anyway, we did chat with the guy showing the place after we went outside, and it turns out he's got another property he's looking to rent that sounds a lot more up our alley. Plus, it apparently has a pool! Crazy! He gave us the address, so we'll have to drive by and check it out at some point to see if we like it and want to set up a time to view it. We then went to see this place, which we both ended up rating about a 7 out of 10. It was good in terms of location, size of bedrooms, having a yard, nice sized living room, not many stairs, etc., but again, it was the kitchen that we're kind of ehhhh about. This kitchen was really small with very few cabinets and hardly any counter space, which obviously makes things pretty difficult for regular use. (Notice that there are no pictures of the kitchen on the ad?) The landlord there lives in the ground floor unit below the one he was showing, so that could be both good and bad. The place certainly wasn't bad, but I still feel like we can do better, so I'm holding out for a bit longer. We've still got lots of time, though I do want to find something sooner than later.
We decided that since our taxes are still relatively uncomplicated, we would just do them ourselves this year using TurboTax or similar software. So I started doing them last night, but they're still a pain, even with the software. First, we got this 'audit risk alert' telling us that our medical expenses were over $5000 or 5% of our income, which would be a big red flag and make us likely to get audited. Except, I didn't enter any medical expenses because we didn't have any. It appears that this is just a random error the software is giving a bunch of people, and we shouldn't have anything to worry about since our medical expenses aren't actually over their warning threshold. But then, I also got an error message about Brad's income being zero. It wanted me to confirm whether his income last year really was 0, and basically said that if it was, my refund would go up by a pretty significant amount, but if he'd made more than $10k, my refund would stay the same. Well, I confirmed that yes, his income was 0, but my refund didn't change at all. No one's been able to explain to me what that was all about or why it didn't change, which is frustrating. At this point our options are either to go into H&R Block and pay around $150 or so to potentially have them tell me my refund is exactly what TurboTax is telling me it is, or just go with the TurboTax (for $38) and count on CRA to catch it if they did make a mistake in calculating my refund. I think we're going with the latter, so as not to waste more money for potentially no change in result. But I reiterate, taxes are totally a pain.
Anyway! Have some fun pictures from Aimee's and my trip to Casa Loma last weekend! I took more pictures than I realized, but they're mostly of the skyline or view from various windows, as opposed to the castle itself. Oh well.
I spent this weekend being sick again. I don't know if the cold I had a couple weeks ago ever fully went away, so it could have been that just flaring up again or something entirely new. Either way, I spent all of Thursday blowing my nose every five minutes, then felt like absolute death on Friday. I seriously wanted to call out sick, but I had a group meeting for a project I'm part of, and I didn't want to bail on that. Let me tell you how thrilled I was to get to that meeting and find that 2 of the 5 group members didn't show. So glad I dragged my ass to work for that. I ended up going home around lunch time and taking half a sick day because I felt so awful. Yesterday, I felt less like death but was still blowing my nose all the time. I really hate that, especially because my nose and mouth and skin around them gets all red and chapped and painful. No bueno. Today I'm only needing to blow my nose every few hours or so, which is definitely a big improvement. And good timing because we're out of tissues now. So hopefully I'll continue getting better and this thing won't come back again. Ironically, we've got doctors appointments scheduled for tomorrow afternoon for unrelated things, but I don't really think they could do much for a cold anyway.
Finally, March break is the week after this and dear lord, I am so looking forward to it. So far, one of my families has asked me to babysit on the Wednesday and Friday of break, which I'm fine with, because hello almost $200. I'm also planning on going out to Waterloo to visit Becca and the baby for a bit, possibly on Monday, but really, whichever day is good for her. Otherwise, I'm going to read and knit and sleep in and it'll be fantastic. And now I'm off to go read a little before dinner and curling up with Brad for some tv. Hope you all had a good weekend!
So, we have had more house hunting adventures this weekend. Yesterday we went to look at two more places. The first one, I'm not even going to link to, because it was straight up terrible. It was the oldest, most run-down house on its street, and the driveway wasn't even paved!! That really should have been our first clue that nothing great was going to wait inside for us. The guy showing us the house told us it was a historic house in Vaughan, but I'm not buying that. Nothing remarkable about the rooms is really jumping to mind, except that they were in the back portion of the house, with someone else living in the front, I guess. There was a washer and dryer in the basement, which was definitely terrifying. The stairs were of the variety that I guarantee you I'd break my neck if I ever tried to carry a basket of laundry down them, the ceiling in the basement was really low (I could just barely stand straight and I'm only 5'2"!), plus you had to walk across all these wood pallets to get to the washer and dryer. Uhhh, no.
Anyway, we did chat with the guy showing the place after we went outside, and it turns out he's got another property he's looking to rent that sounds a lot more up our alley. Plus, it apparently has a pool! Crazy! He gave us the address, so we'll have to drive by and check it out at some point to see if we like it and want to set up a time to view it. We then went to see this place, which we both ended up rating about a 7 out of 10. It was good in terms of location, size of bedrooms, having a yard, nice sized living room, not many stairs, etc., but again, it was the kitchen that we're kind of ehhhh about. This kitchen was really small with very few cabinets and hardly any counter space, which obviously makes things pretty difficult for regular use. (Notice that there are no pictures of the kitchen on the ad?) The landlord there lives in the ground floor unit below the one he was showing, so that could be both good and bad. The place certainly wasn't bad, but I still feel like we can do better, so I'm holding out for a bit longer. We've still got lots of time, though I do want to find something sooner than later.
We decided that since our taxes are still relatively uncomplicated, we would just do them ourselves this year using TurboTax or similar software. So I started doing them last night, but they're still a pain, even with the software. First, we got this 'audit risk alert' telling us that our medical expenses were over $5000 or 5% of our income, which would be a big red flag and make us likely to get audited. Except, I didn't enter any medical expenses because we didn't have any. It appears that this is just a random error the software is giving a bunch of people, and we shouldn't have anything to worry about since our medical expenses aren't actually over their warning threshold. But then, I also got an error message about Brad's income being zero. It wanted me to confirm whether his income last year really was 0, and basically said that if it was, my refund would go up by a pretty significant amount, but if he'd made more than $10k, my refund would stay the same. Well, I confirmed that yes, his income was 0, but my refund didn't change at all. No one's been able to explain to me what that was all about or why it didn't change, which is frustrating. At this point our options are either to go into H&R Block and pay around $150 or so to potentially have them tell me my refund is exactly what TurboTax is telling me it is, or just go with the TurboTax (for $38) and count on CRA to catch it if they did make a mistake in calculating my refund. I think we're going with the latter, so as not to waste more money for potentially no change in result. But I reiterate, taxes are totally a pain.
Anyway! Have some fun pictures from Aimee's and my trip to Casa Loma last weekend! I took more pictures than I realized, but they're mostly of the skyline or view from various windows, as opposed to the castle itself. Oh well.
I spent this weekend being sick again. I don't know if the cold I had a couple weeks ago ever fully went away, so it could have been that just flaring up again or something entirely new. Either way, I spent all of Thursday blowing my nose every five minutes, then felt like absolute death on Friday. I seriously wanted to call out sick, but I had a group meeting for a project I'm part of, and I didn't want to bail on that. Let me tell you how thrilled I was to get to that meeting and find that 2 of the 5 group members didn't show. So glad I dragged my ass to work for that. I ended up going home around lunch time and taking half a sick day because I felt so awful. Yesterday, I felt less like death but was still blowing my nose all the time. I really hate that, especially because my nose and mouth and skin around them gets all red and chapped and painful. No bueno. Today I'm only needing to blow my nose every few hours or so, which is definitely a big improvement. And good timing because we're out of tissues now. So hopefully I'll continue getting better and this thing won't come back again. Ironically, we've got doctors appointments scheduled for tomorrow afternoon for unrelated things, but I don't really think they could do much for a cold anyway.
Finally, March break is the week after this and dear lord, I am so looking forward to it. So far, one of my families has asked me to babysit on the Wednesday and Friday of break, which I'm fine with, because hello almost $200. I'm also planning on going out to Waterloo to visit Becca and the baby for a bit, possibly on Monday, but really, whichever day is good for her. Otherwise, I'm going to read and knit and sleep in and it'll be fantastic. And now I'm off to go read a little before dinner and curling up with Brad for some tv. Hope you all had a good weekend!