Long Double Pile-up

I.
A long double, if you don't happen to be one of the two people who regularly marks up our big whiteboard calendar in the kitchen, is a day when I have two services in a faraway place (too far away to drive back) that are as inconveniently spaced out as possible over the day. Today, for instance, I had a 10 AM rehearsal in Buffalo, and now I'm sticking around until whenever our 2nd rehearsal (which starts at 7:30) lets out.

Long doubles are a pain. You're gone the whole day, you have endless hours to kill, and you don't get back until it's so late that you can't do anything other than immediately go to bed and hope you can get enough sleep to be semi-coherent for church the next morning. (Most long doubles are on Saturdays, but tomorrow, fortunately, is a morning off.)

Today, though, was just about the best sort of way you could spend a long double. For one thing, it is snowing like CRAZY out, which completely takes away any possibility of trying to exercise. (Normally I like to at least get a long walk in, if not a proper run, but there would be no way to do it in the blizzard outside.) Secondly, I had a big project that I'd been saving for just such an occasion--the 2018 taxes.

Every year I say that maybe THIS year I'll take our enormous stack of W2s and 1099s and 1098s to a proper tax professional and have them calculate everything that we've been missing, but I tried it again this year on my own and was happy enough with the result that I just bought Turbotax again. It's a big a project, but exactly the sort of slow and satisfyingly complex puzzle you'd want to work out on a snowy afternoon in February.

II.
James:

Things I Will Never Like:
drying off with a cold damp towel, the feeling of seaweed wrapping around my leg, leaving Alexa's house, beans

Little Joys of Life:
reading a new book, petting a happy dog, getting a letter in the mail, eating marshmallows in hot chocolate, visiting Alexa, swiming, eating sprinkles on ice cream

Things That Bug Me:
squishy, icky mud, mushy bananas, worms on the sidewalk, skin on pudding

Owen:

Things I Will Never Like:
black beans, sleeping in our room during naptime, wrapping paper on my face, having less money than James, eating chex mix that was in spicy soup

Little Joys of Life:
getting my dinosaur from Christmas, being loved by my dogs, going to Csehy, eating a bug at Daddy's church ("it was not real"), having fun with Alexa and getting her basketball, having treats like pancakes, eating cake

Things That Bug Me:
bumblebees, bread that has spiders in it, a smushy banana, Felix grabbing my hair, a T-Rex scaring me away