I have used HR Block on line for years..Think it cost 30 dollars or so and its a hand holding simple walk you thru it, read carefully and fill in the blanks. Its free to do it until you go to file and that is when you pay. I dont even have to enter our basic information anymore..Its all saved..of course it gives you the chance to change anything that might need to be changed..ie when our daughter got married and we could no longer claim her. Give it a try!

I don't check in here often, in fact my reply to the Art Depicting Season post was my first ever. I felt very strongly about it because the art in our home is what defines it and we have decorated our home to go with our pictures colourwise. They are definitely the most important part of our home and very carefully chosen. There was a typo in my last post, our pictures are NOT expensive. But we have acquired a few more expensive paintings in later years. However, the most important thing in any home is to love your pictures, whatever they are and for them to mean something to you, something more than adding to the décor. I think having too many common prints is not very personal. I don't understand how anyone can have a van Gogh print. The flat surface shows nothing of his broad brush strokes. And there are literally millions of Renoir prints out there. I think that's what struck me most forcibly. Wisconsin relatives had a Renoir print in a frame that must have cost 10 times more than the piece of paper of the print. Those same relatives took me to a great exhibition of local Wisconsin artists, some of which works still haunt me after 25 years. I am not suggesting that Swedes in general have more original art, many have Ikea prints, but at the same time many older homes display some local artist showing their local environment on their walls. Please excuse any linguistic mistakes I may have made, English is not my first language.

If there's any way we can afford to, we'd prefer to hire it out. Our cutting-in always looks like s*** because neither of us has steady hands (the one lingering aftereffect of DH's bout with Graves' hyperthyroidism is hand tremor, even though he's been in complete remission 10+ years), and I fizzle out way too quickly with repetitive motions like rolling. We painted (and otherwise half rebuilt) our porch this summer and it was pretty miserable. We have a friend rather like Tuesday's, kind of a jack-of-all-trades, who moved back to this end of the state after a few years away and will likely be helping us with a bunch of stuff as the budget permits, and he's agreed to try to teach DH some honey-do kind of things. He's a major hippie with a taste for the ganja (but never while working) - he's slow but quite picky about his work, and thankfully he only asks $15/hr plus materials from friends. He and I put in a lot of hours together working on the master suite-lette in the other house.

Career wise, I was nearly always fine with being told what to do. I can think of one major exception when I was told to write up a report from a conference trip I went on with my supervisor. I asked if I could write it from home as at that time I had severe carpal tunnel issues and was told NO, you can't do it from home and take the time out of office to do this (it was mid-90s.). My home computer had an ergonomic keyboard which was not compatible with the work computer workstation. So... yes, I wrote the report up from home anyway and didn't take the time out of my in-office/lab work time. I brought my report in for my supervisor's review. Mind you, he was at the same conference. I wrote up 10-12 meetings I'd been to. On my own time, over a weekend. Because my wrist would not stand me doing that on company time. He changed ONE sentence I'd written, signed the report with his name first, then mine, and sent it off. He didn't write ANYTHING of his own. I had a severe problem with that, and I really wish in retrospect I'd spoken up. But whose word against whose? **** In other circumstances - I do listen to people when they tell me what I should do, but a lot of this depends on the apparent attitude of the person doing the telling. A lot depends also on how well people realize that some requests for "improvement" are in the eye of the beholder, or not, for instance, understanding what depression, anxiety, and those sort of things manifest. Like their way can get you through everything, because it worked for them!