Sandra Graves / Isis Rising

It's always a downer when I can't sleep, and when both DH and I can't sleep, it can be a disaster. I awakened at 1:45 am this morning (that's 4-1/2 hours of sleep) and wasn't able to get back to anything close to good sleep until my alarm told me to get moving at 3:15 am. Yes - that's my normal wake-up time. I'm a 6-hour sleep person. But ... to not get too far off base ... 

I found this interesting. I've always been on the short
side of hours of sleep. I sleep almost 12 hours on
Saturday night into Sunday morning, and that makes up
for sleep lost during the work week. Supposedly
that's not good for me, but I've read things on
both sides of this. 

When I awakened at 1:45 am, I noticed the computer room had light coming from the door sill. That meant DH wasn't able to sleep, so he was up playing computer games - basically, "Lord of the Rings Online", our go-to game for almost twelve years now. When my alarm went off, he was still playing. In fact, he's still playing now. He knows it's worth his life to disturb me in the morning, so he's killing things and I'm writing and trying to catch up on emails. 

As we get older, the amount of sleep we need becomes
less. I'm not really sure why that is, but I'll take it. 

I'm not really sure what happened to the great "Tax Reform" crap that passed with such hoopla through Congress. I think some people got more money up front - saw more in their paychecks. That's great. But we're all feeling the other part of this now. Instead of getting something back from the government for Income Tax refunds, we're not seeing squat. We're caught up in this too. We're probably not going to get anything back this year. 

A lot of people count on their income tax refunds to pay for
little extras, or just give them a bit of financial cushion.
This year, those cushions may have been thrown out into
the trash. 

Originally our tax return (DH picked it up on the way to work yesterday) showed we were getting a refund. It was smaller than other years, but still existed. However, DH went through the return in detail, and found a major error that originated from our investment firm. He contacted them, they said "Oops!" and the correction will basically wipe out the refund and may even leave us owing. *sigh* Such is the stuff of nightmares, not dreams. 

Oops! Looks like we're caught, just like so many others. We
won't be getting a tax refund either - but this is because of
a mistake added to the new Federal Tax structure. Sucks! 

So on that note - sleepy and broke - I'm going to wrap this up, get pictures plugged in, and call it a day. The machines are calling me to the gym, so I might as well drown myself in exercise, sweat and music for an hour. Have a wonderful Tuesday and I'll be back tomorrow!