For one thing, since it's both a Sunday and the first of the month in a 28-day February, this makes two months in a row with Friday the 13ths.
As you can see by Itzl's concerned look, this group is for us to check in at to let people know we are alive, doing OK, and not affected by such things as heat, blizzards, floods, wild fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, power outages, or other such things that could keep us off DKos. It's also so we can find other Kossacks nearby for in-person checks when other methods of communication fail - a buddy system. Members come here to check in. If you're not here, or anywhere else on DKos, and there are adverse conditions in your area (floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, etc.), we and your buddy are going to check up on you. If you are going to be away from your computer for a day or a week, let us know here. We care!
IAN is a great group to join, and a good place to learn to write diaries. Drop one of us a PM to be added to the Itzl Alert Network anytime! We all share the publishing duties, and we welcome everyone who reads IAN to write diaries for the group! Every member is an editor, so anyone can take a turn when they have something to say, photos and music to share, a cause to promote or news!
And then there's what my oldest and dearest posted on Facebook on Thursday. I'll talk about that over the orange decorative object.
He found this poem on tickld, which both tangled my tongue and made me laugh.
I did rather well with it, but I do have a couple of advantages - for one, I know that, though they are pronounced the same way, "slough" is something approximating a marsh often with a large ditch involved, and "slew" is one hell of a lot, as in the number of strange words in my vocabulary; for another, I got my hands on The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the Dough a fair number of years ago. And that I could tell from the spelling the author was British did help.
If you think my definitions are strange, I once defined "egregious" for my girls (when telling them they could only kill their girl cousin if she did something really egregious [though my niece has matured well, she was an absolute little shit as a child]) as "bad, really bad, with willful stupidity involved".
I got my taxes submitted the same day I got my W2. It doesn't hurt that my entire income shows up there. The state of Oregon has agreements with several online tax preparers for free submission (with certain restrictions) - and the only one I qualify for also does the federal submission for free if you do it at the same time. The hardest part was making sure I got all the numbers on my W2 entered correctly. According to the DOR, I will probably have my check for my state refund or know why not in about two weeks; according to the IRS site, I will either have it or know why not in three weeks. In other words, about the same as last year, though the amounts are substantially smaller. Can't really say I mind that, since my income has been larger.
I spent Friday working on a couple of things with tight deadlines. The budget for the grant proposal had to get out in final form to Stanford today, and we managed it. Though there were a couple of last-minute changes that I could have done without. And, upon checking and finding out that my boss has been registered with the new animal protocol renewal system, we tried to submit ours. The system refused to allow this, since the protocol that was being renewed was not listed in the renewal - the protocol that was being renewed is not listed in the system, and it will not allow typing it into the field. I left messages for the two people who can probably deal with this, finished volume four of TARDIS Eruditorum (which took about 20 minutes at that point), and left for the day.
Saturday turned out to be a good day. The meet-up was a lot of fun. There ended up being 10 or 12 of us, and we were there for about 2 1/2 hours. Pictures will be posted by someone else at some point.
The accident afterward wasn't fun, but neither I nor my passenger (Sara R), nor the guy driving the other car were hurt (low speed), no airbags deployed, and no glass was broken. I couldn't start my car afterward and we spent a while sitting in the middle of the road - my daughter borrowed a friend's car and showed up before the tow truck did, and took Sara home. The driver of the tow truck said the reason Squatty wouldn't start for me was because something involving the fuel pump needed to be reset and the damage wasn't anywhere near as bad as it looked. He recommended a body shop, which my daughter said was rated 5-star, and when we had everything out of the car that we needed, I told him to go ahead and take it there.
I had started the call to my insurance while I was waiting for the tow, and finished it as soon as I got home. I will start hearing from people about this on Monday.
Yes, I've checked with my health care provider about whether or not I should do more about the minor aches than I already am. My firstborn can be such a nag.