If Only, If Only...

Illinois audited our state return. What a hassle. I spent this week's spare hours filing a pair of amended IL-1040Xs for myself and my Wife, in order to spare ourselves a pointless $1600 expense. Saved money tastes delicious, but lost hours feel like setting my hair on fire.

Suffice to say, I'll not be using Turbo-Tax again. A relatively simple problem with residency was not flagged by their system. Not that I'd be using their system again anytime soon anyways: my Wife and I are now wage slaves, so our income taxes provide no real complications.

At least we've solved one potential crisis...but I've got some serious lawn-work to do. My immense laziness and Mother Nature conspired to create a lake of overgrown weeds along my driveway. This demands immediate remedy, so that's where I'll devote Saturday.

Unfortunately, my front lawn is more or less dead, too. Can't really claim I'm surprised: I never watered it, while I did give the backyard a healthy rain or two during the drier weeks this year. The backyard recovered, and the front lawn did not.

My plan is to use the lawn trimmings from some of the back yard for a makeshift fertilize out front, as soon as I get a healthy liquid coat on those disgusting brown stems. Again, another project for this weekend, and one demanding immediate attention.

Overall, though, I can't complain too much about the yardwork. My 20" Scotts Reel-Lawn Mower kept up with everything just fine. Given the....erm...small size of the lawn, I didn't even get a good workout most days. A few days gave me a good case of the Sweat-Me-Nots, but that's just July sun saying hello.

I'd definitely recommend the reel lawn-mower to other people. In fact, a good friend of mine is looking for a house too, and he's committed to either the Fiskars of the Scotts for his lawn. Rock on!

We're socking away a good $3,000 a month, too. We'll get that up in the coming months, as we look to really trim our household expenses. That's the thing, can't really concentrate on too many things at once or else your work suffers, so we haven't focused on killing our expenses. Given that we want children in the near future and want to really kill some outstanding debt, we want to make sure we have some positive cash flow coming in.

Exciting times to be alive!