Wednesday was rather special. I got two cheques in the mail. One was from my ex-employer - the remainder of my severance package arrived, only one day later than promised, and fully a week before I actually expected to see it. After all, payday was April 30; and to receive the payment May 1st was unexpected, considering the time it usually takes for U.S. mail to arrive at my home.

Also on Wednesday, I received my State Income Tax refund in the mail. I had wondered whether my tax forms had arrived at the Income Tax office before the deadline, since I mailed it from Canada, and did not pay extra postage for insured delivery. Now, hopefully, my Federal Tax Return also made it to the office on time.

The grass in the back yard has been growing quite uncontrollably, and it finally got to the point where something had to be done about it. The lawnmower wasn't working properly, so we had to have someone stop by to take it away for service (it's one of those riding mowers). It took some time to get it to the truck, because for some reason, the parking brake would not release. Anyway, once that was taken care of, we decided to rent a mower for the day. The grass in the backyard was over a foot long nearly everywhere, and the front yard was about 5 inches. The rental mower, while having trouble with the longer grass, nevertheless did a decent job, once I started mowing over the same spot several times. Due to this over-mowing, I wasn't able to cover as much ground on a tank of gas as would have been normally possible. I ended up running out of fuel with just about 1.5 square feet of grass still left to be cut at the far back of our property. Since it was just about to start raining, I decided NOT to refill the tank, and I returned the mower without cutting that last area. Yeah, it looks weird, but it saved me some cash.