Mission Accomplished

I feel a sense of accomplishment. I finally mailed out my 2008 tax return. I owed $2.00 in taxes, for which I wrote out a check to the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue. I had been meaning to finish it up and send it out for months, since last April really, but I kept putting it off. Finally, with a little free time yesterday afternoon, I resolved to focus on getting it done. I'm glad it's out of the way now. I'd had a post-it note hanging from my computer monitor for the past three months with the word "taxes" scribbled on to it as a reminder. That post-it note is now in the trash. Just in time for me to look forward to tackling my 2009 federal and state tax returns.

So this is the calm before the storm. Today's dry skies and calm wind belie the approaching deluge of snow; the latest predictions (at 3:30am from the National Weather Service) are for 10 to 18 inches in Philadelphia. And this on top of this past Saturday's 28.5 inches, which have barely been cleared, if at all, from roads and sidewalks. From what I recall seeing on the news, Philadelphia only needs 9 more inches to make this the snowiest winter on record. In little over 24 hours, we'll see if we're on our way to that dubious mark.

I read a comment to a news article on philly.com that global warming is causing the greater snowfalls, as a result of massive glacial melting in the North Atlantic, off the coast of Greenland, which cools the waters there and backs up the normally warm flow from the Caribbean, which has always offset, to a degree, the cold air from the Arctic in the winter months. I'm no meteorologist, of course, but that (long-winded) explanation does seem to make sense.