Snippets

It's deadline week again, but things are going well. Once again I am ahead of schedule, and hopefully I can maintain this from month to month.

Otherwise I feel like I haven't had much to say, which is not good from the perspective of you folks who visit here looking for fresh content. I feel some degree of obligation to post semi-regularly, so I thought I would collect some miscellaneous bits that aren't necessarily postworthy on their own.

--I finally have a boss again, after a period of more than six months. He started this week, but oddly, I have not yet spoken to him. You would think that someone would have brought him around and introduced him, but that didn't happen. I saw him yesterday at our weekly bagel breakfast, but as soon as he was introduced to the group, he fell into a conversation with our publishing director and remained so for the next thirty minutes. Even as the gathering was breaking up and people were heading back to work, they were still talking, so I guess I'll catch up with him at some point.

--The Mrs. has a job interview today. While not remarkable in and of itself, this is her first one since she decided to attempt to go back to work, and it's with her former employer, which is a bit ironic, though the position in question is in a different office and is somewhat different in nature.

--My sister is participating in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer next month. I am not soliciting donations on her behalf, but perhaps you too know someone who is planning on walking that you could support. It's 40 miles over two days, and she has been training for a couple of months, walking gradually longer distances with her walk partner, and even going to a gym three times a week. This is impressive because, like me, she is fairly averse to physical exertion in all forms.

--For the first time in several years, the Mrs. and I are getting both a federal and a state tax refund. This was largely due to me being unemployed or underemployed, and one year to my not having enough withheld. For the past couple of years we have used out state refund to pay the balance we owed the feds, but this year we're getting a few hundred bucks back from each.

--We're probably going to use some of that refund for a memory foam mattress, and since Jordan's Furniture is doing their Red Sox promotion again this year, we'll probably buy it from them. Given that Jordan's issued refunds to about 24,000 customers after last year's World Series victory by the Sox, they decided to make it a little harder this time: in order for us to get back whatever we end up spending (excluding tax and delivery charges, of course), the Sox must not only reach the World Series and win it, but they must do so in a four-game sweep. But hey, that's how they won it in '04 and '07, so who knows?