Jan 23

As always, please check out my website at: http://www.thomnichols.com/
I received my W2s in the mail. That means it is tax time. I’m really not looking forward to it this year. We don’t get earned income credit for any of the kids. We haven’t for a long time now, but this year my daughter in-law worked all year and is filing for the first time. So, that means that we don’t get to use my granddaughter anymore. So I’m hoping that we don’t end up paying. It’s going to be close. But, I’m not going to worry about it until we get my wife’s info and put it all into Turbo Tax. I’m hoping I can work the numbers so it comes out even. My wife is really worried. She thinks we’re going to owe a bunch because it doesn’t look like they took enough out of my checks. We’ll see. We should get her info in the next few days.

My eldest daughter, who is in the army reserves, got a part time job with the army. I’m not sure how that works, but they’re sending her to computer classes tomorrow to get her started.
My youngest daughter, who works at the movie theater, has let her grades slip a little bit. So, I told her to tell her bosses that she can’t work so late on school days anymore. She’ll have to stop working at eleven, which I don’t think is unreasonable. They have been extending her hours later and later and now this week she is scheduled to close nearly every day. That means that she doesn’t get out until between midnight or two in the morning. She’s working on scholarships at the moment and it is better not to have anything interfere with that.
On Facebook, there has been an advertisement for a used book store that I’ve really wanted to take a look at. It said that all paperback books were only .99 and all hardback books started at $2.00. So, I finally went to take a look at it. It was a ways out there, and I actually found it by accident. When I pulled into the parking lot, I had my hopes up. It was a huge building and it also had movies and CDs. So, with a fist full of dollars, I went in. I found quite a few books that I wanted and I even found some brand new books from an author that I really like and didn’t even know about. But, when it came to pricing, it wasn’t anything like what the add stated. There were books for .99. They were in a small bin in the center of the store. It was the same with the hardback books, except there were three bins for them. Of course there wasn’t any organization for them and nothing I wanted to buy. All of the other books were normal or even higher than you would expect at a used book store. Needless to say I left with all of those dollars still in my hand. Bummer. There is a little used book store out by our old apartment. It had a really great selection and was organized really nicely. I’ll probably go back to that one, but the prices were only something like ten percent off of the cover price. Or, I might start getting ebooks. I have a tablet and my wife has a Kendle. I looked through the free books on the tablet, but haven’t bought any yet because it is still new.
I got the tablet for Christmas and for those of you that don’t know, you really need a micro SD card before you can start using it. It doesn’t come with much internal memory. So, over the last month I was pricing cards. I didn’t want to get a 2 or 8 gig card because if I’m going to start using it, I’m going to start using it. So, I wanted a 32 gig card. Well, most places don’t even stock them and of the stores that do, they want eighty or ninety dollars for them. So, I went on line to look around. On Amazon, I found one for $30. Now that I got it in the mail, I’ve been messing around with it. I finally figured out how to put music on it. I have a large 520 gig external hard drive that I store all our pictures and music on, and I tried to mount it to my tablet. Well, it wasn’t working and it took me a while to realize that it was too big for the tablet to handle. So, I had to move a bunch of songs onto a thumb drive and then mount the thumb drive to my tablet and move them over that way. The hardest part was going through my songs and figuring out which ones I wanted because I have a lot of stuff on my thumb drive and I didn’t want to overload it. I’ve had things erase like that. Then, the tablet didn’t like it when I cut and pasted. It gave me an error and wanted me to try again. But, when I tried, since I cut them, they were gone. So, I had to go through all of my music again. This time, I just copied them over. It worked much better. The only app that I’ve downloaded was one with funny ringtones. I’m going to put Tarzan as my main ringtone and a couple others for my wife and kids and work. I tried downloading a TV app, but when I opened it, it only showed Indian TV. Not what I wanted. I tried going to Netflix and Farmville, but neither of them have an app that will work with a tablet. As it turns out, not all phone apps work on it. But, I’m going to mess around with it a lot more to see what I can and can’t do. No matter how it turns out, it is still fun to play with.
The Patriots and New York are in the Super Bowl. We’re going over to my brother’s house to watch it and have our Christmas get together. I’m not crazy about either of the teams, but I’m sure the Patriots will mop up the floor with New York. So, I don’t know how much of it I’ll really watch. (Baseball can’t get here soon enough)
It’s pretty much the last week of January and I’m not sure if River of Magic will be done by the 31st. I either need to spend more than two hours a day on it or I need to learn to project the completion date better. But, it will be done really soon. And, in order to finish it, I better get started. I’m putting Dire Straits, Stray Cats, Men at Work, and Duran Duran in the playlist for background music. So, see you next week.
-Thom