Wednesday Hodgepodge - Spring Season

A hodgepodge is a jumble or assortment of things that might not appear to belong together. Joyce at From This Side of the Pond hosts a weekly link-up called Wednesday Hodgepodge that is a little collection of questions for bloggers to answer just for fun and to get to know each other. I always look forward to chatting with friends over coffee, so pour a cup of your favorite and let's visit for a few minutes!

Here are this week's questions - and my answers - for this week's Wednesday Hodgepodge.

1.  Do you complete your own taxes? Besides actual taxes, what's something you've found taxing lately?

 

Yes, we do our own taxes. The first couple years we were in the USA we went to a tax preparer, and the first year after moving to a new state we went to a tax preparer. I use a tax preparation software, of course. 

Something I've found very taxing lately is all my coughing spells. I guess it's something of a chronic cough at this point, because I'm no longer congested and have no other symptoms, and it is allergy season. Most of the time it's fine, but if I get started coughing it can be really hard to get under control and it's exhausting and even painful. My ribs are quite sore, in fact!  

 

 

2. What are three values you treasure most in a friendship?

Loyalty is so important. Laughter and sense of humour are essential! Honesty is another essential. 

 3. Do you meal plan or do you mostly wing it? Share your dinner menus for this week.

 I try to meal plan but I'm not very good at it. Most weeks I plan the meat dish for dinners and figure out the veggies as I go. This week I haven't had a great plan to start off, but I hope my weekend meals will make up for it! Monday is always leftover day. Tuesday I also had leftovers as hubby ate out with everyone from his work. Wednesday evening we will have "breakfast for dinner" which will be bacon and eggs. I haven't got anything specific planned for Thursday or Friday but it will be something quick and light for when we get home from church. On Saturday we are planning to have friends over for lamb and beef kebabs. (Lamb is my traditional Resurrection Sunday meal, but we're having it on Saturday instead.) Our son and his family are coming for Sunday dinner, and he asked for Country-fried steak. Not a traditional "Easter dinner" but that's what we're planning! 

 

4. Thomas Sowell is credited as saying, 'There are no solutions, only trade-offs.' Agree or disagree? Discuss.

 I love Thomas Sowell. So smart and he makes economics easy to understand and even humorous. I think I agree with this statement when it comes to finances and economics in general, because there usually aren't any "perfect" solutions to money and resource problems. It's kind of like "there's no such thing as a free lunch". Everything has a cost of some kind, and you have to decide where and how to spend and invest your resources to get the benefits that you want. The hardest part is that we don't have a lot of say in some of those decisions, like how much we pay in taxes and how those tax dollars are spent by our government.

5.  What's the best perk you've enjoyed at a job?

 

 When I managed the small batch coffee roastery, I got to take home a pound of coffee every week, and I got to drink coffee all day at work. 

 

6. Insert your own random thought here.

I haven't been very productive since getting back from my Canadian trip. I've been fighting that cold and cough, so that's my excuse. I finally got taxes done - just under the wire again, just like every year. I always plan to get it done early in February, even if I don't actually file until later, but it's been a few years since I managed that. We did well with state and local taxes this year, but got sucker punched by federal taxes. Sigh. Taxes kind of sucks the joy out of spring, doesn't it? 

In happier news, I've got a vacation house booked for a weekend in the summer for our family get-together and that was a positive thing to check off on my to-do list! That's something to look forward do a few months down the road, and coming up very soon, we're looking forward to getting together with friends and with family this weekend, and to meeting up with a cousin of mine that I haven't seen in ages next weekend.

Is it springtime where you are? We're thinking about Spring Colours at Wednesday Quotes right now, and you can join in by sharing your post with at least one quote at WQ - The Colours of Spring. 

 

I'm sharing in this week's Wednesday Hodgepodge at From This Side of the Pond.

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