We are home and preparing to travel while undertaking various chores.  Spring has arrived, supposedly, but not much sign of it here yet.  We enjoyed a few warm days and then cold returned.  We are beginning to eye Colorado where we will be camping in three weeks and shudder as each week brings another blizzard.  This year we clearly left Florida too soon, but the birds are beginning to move and so must we.

Our garage project has been delayed but I have started trenching for the conduit and digging around the tree stumps.  I probably will succeed in installing the conduit, but machinery may have to remove the stumps.  Still I give it my best now that the spring moisture softens the soil.  I work on the stumps in the evening, not too much at any one time.  This morning I began on the conduit.  I had picked the route but was concerned with how I would cross under the basement steps.  I tunneled there successfully but encountered “unforeseen sub-surface conditions near the house.  A blob of concrete in the ground would not yield to the sledge.  I’ll run the pipe over it and use a couple of 45 degree bends to maintain the desired depth.  Now clear of the house, I hope there will be no buried rock under the driveway. 

The RV shop turned our new car into a dinghy this week.  That took longer than expected and required several hours waiting over two days.  The good news is that the shop is about a mile south of the Gettysburg Roundtops and we made good use of our time to walk about the south end of the great battlefield. 

Our candy blue Ford Focus is cute but probably not as good as the last one.  The mileage is a bit better but obtained by making the care less comfortable.  The communications system hogs the dashboard pushing the speedometer almost out of sight.  The radio controls are so complicated that the driver risks hazards changing stations.  We installed a trailer hitch but the manual says the car is not designed for towing a trailer.  Is one supposed to have one car to drive and one to tow the trailer?  We wonder how long all the computer controls will last.

While home we have been away over two weekends.  We visited my sister in Princeton taking my mother so as to join a cousin hosting an Easter Feast with  my last uncle, my mother’s brother.  The visit was wonderful. 

Last weekend we visited our daughter in Brooklyn and worked on wedding plans.  She entertained us grandly.

I finished our taxes and my mother’s.  Hers were confounded by Dad’s death last year.  If it hadn’t been so late, we might have paid a few hundred dollars to a service to calculate that she owed zero income taxes.  That is awful!  Also this year brokers are reporting the bases of securities sold.  For both mine and hers the values were all wrong.  I listed the correct values on the tax forms.  I wonder it this will trigger audits.  Ugh!

Anne worked a week at Apple Ridge and I am completing a small job for Buchart-Horn.  This may be our last year working at all.  Last year we made too much money.  Our largest expense became taxes.  That has not happened since we quit work.  Because of the increased income we could not deduct any of our medical expenses.  Until last year health care has been our largest expense in retirement.  It seems unfair that because we buy our own, there is now tax break for the expense until it exceeds 7% of your income.  The solution seems to be to reduce our income.  Our wonderful tax code encourages unemployment.

So we prepare for our hunt for rare birds in Colorado.