Tax return

Most of you have heard by now that our tax return was rather disappointing this year. Bob always has very little held out of his paycheck, and always gets it back with quite a bit of "interest," especially since the Bush tax cuts which included the "additional child tax credit" that counted as if you had paid in that amount. This year we got back about 25% as much as we had the last few years. The reason being that retirement income, while taxable, doesn't count as "earned" income, and for some reason that I have NEVER understood, the more one makes the more one gets for free (up to a point) in ACTC and Earned Income Credit.

Anyway, we did get our money this week, and Bob was able to get a new tripod. He's been working with a tripod made for a video camera, which doesn't allow for vertical shots. B&H has better prices than our local store, but they also have so many choices that it was really hard to narrow it down, and of course there's the lack of touching and trying it out. So we went to the store in Fayetteville and Bob was able to narrow the choices down pretty quickly. He ended up with a Manfrotto aluminum tripod and a Manfrotto ball head. They had a carbon fiber model which was about half the weight and twice the price, but Bob didn't think the weight would be a problem in studio, and the cheaper one had all the same features.

We will soon be going to get an upright deep freezer, and soon after that we will buy a half of a cow which will probably fill the freezer. That will use the rest of the IRS deposit, and possibly more. But we will have healthful meat for quite some time, so that's a plus.