II 

I think Spring may be in a hurry to catch up with the calendar.  In the past week alone we have had these beauties start blooming and the hyacinths are putting their colorful dresses on and the tulips are sticking their greens out to check for wamth.

We haven't had much sun but it doesn't take too much to encourage these guys to come out.  (of course this includes pollen but we'll ignore that for the moment).  We've had a week of rain, some of it hard so the flowers are less than perky in some places but the weekend promises to be sunny.  Not necessarily warm, but sunny.  I'll take it.  

I've been at my job for 20+ years.  Yesterday, I got the email saying "thank you for working for us for 20 years.  You have 36,000 points to use so choose a thank you gift".   My thank you gift for 15 years was a watch and it worked out welll so I went for a new watch for this year.  I chose this Fossil Stella watch with "bling" and a stainless steel band (I have metal allergies and have to get stainless steel).  They notified me that it's on its way.  They have all kinds of things but nothing I need/want so it may be boring to get the same kind of thing twice but a new watch is not a bad thing. I don't wear my watch outside of work much but I depend on it all day.

The hard part is "20 years".  I'm not sure how that happened.  People today don't seem to keep jobs for long periods of time but hop around.  I realized that I will probably work here until I retire.   At 57, it would be difficult to find a new job.  The good part is that I like what I do most of the time.  If I could just stay out of trouble for "occurrences" than all should be well.

I am pleased to say that I did our taxes yesterday.  Why do I wait until the last minute?  Because we don't get money back but usually owe money.  This year we broke even with the feds and we'll owe the state 70 dollars.  Not bad at all.  I don't know why I put it off.  It usually takes about an hour total and consists mostly of data entry.  I pay 12.99 for software to do all the math and figuring out for me.  I input our data and it tells me what to pay.  Easy.  This year time just got away from me.  Maybe because it's felt like winter for so long that it's hard to accept that it's really spring.  

Pk was told yesterday that he would have to work tomorrow and I arranged to take a half a day today since he was determined to work from home today to make up for tomorrow.  After keeping him at work until after 9 last night, they excused him from Saturday and he went in today.  I rescinded my half day but we'll leave just a bit early (I worked late yesterday, too) and go hang out at the book store and read magazines and drink expensive coffee.  We enjoy starting the weekend this way.  The rest of the weekend will probably be spent with soccer games and maybe some yard work (there are some late peas to be planted) and just general putzing around.

Right about now, it sounds heavenly.