Taxes.

Mailed our PA and Federal tax returns last week. Did our local taxes this afternoon. We didn't owe Munhall anything, so that's good. Too bad we owed the Feds so much this year.

I had had dreams of using our Federal return to maybe upgrade my bike (i.e. get a new one), but then we ended up owing about twice what we got back last year, because we both screwed up when we filled out our W-4s after switching to new jobs. That's been rectified. We might not get much of a refund next year, but we shouldn't owe, either. I'm going to have to keep track of things as the year goes on to make sure we don't need to have more withheld, or set some extra cash aside somewhere or something like that.

We got kind of lucky this year, because we owed all that money, but Heather also got reimbursed for a class she took last fall, so that all went to help pay the taxes. We still had to shell out a lot when we weren't expecting to, but it didn't hurt as bad as it could have.

The end result is that no return = no new bike. And that's fine. My Sirrus has over 3,000 miles on it, and it's had relatively few issues to speak of. I just bought some new pedals on eBay for half of the MSRP on the Crank site.

I've been using the Candy C's for almost a year now, and I like them and all, but I had initially bought them with this crazy idea that sometimes I might want to ride without bike shoes, and as such the platforms would come in handy. I have found that I've never really wanted to ride without bike shoes, and even if I did, the Candys came with these cool little plastic platforms that you can clip onto the the pedals, for regular, non-cleat riding, so I'll always have those. I might see if I can get $20 or something for the old pedals on eBay. Hell. Even $10 would be fine.