~Saturday~ I was up at 9:30 this morning, after a wonderful eight hours of sleep. Oh glorious weekend.
I spent a good portion of the day going through mountains of paperwork in preparation for two things: 1) submitting my North Carolina Health Care Flexible Spending Account (NCHCFSA) form, which has to be in by March 31, and 2) preparing my taxes, whose deadline is imminent as well.
I was delighted when I found three receipts for some health-related purchases I made back in January and February of 2010, that I specifically needed to complete my collection of receipts. Now I have two things left to do on Monday with regards to the NCHCFSA: 1) Call Quest Diagnostics to see how much I spent there in 2010 (and hopefully get (a) receipt(s) from them, and 2) Call my primary physician’s office to get an accounting of my co-pays for 2010.
One thing I love about Google is that they are always improving their products and tools, seemingly without being asked in some cases. A case in point is the goo.gl URL shortener tool of theirs.
I use this tool all the time to alert readers, both on Twitter and Facebook, that a new blog entry of mine has been posted. And it’s always the same process with the tool: 1) You put in the URL that you want to shorten, 2) You click the “Shorten” button, 3) You highlight the shortened URL that it has just created, and 4) You copy it to your clipboard to paste elsewhere.
Well, they’ve recently made a change so that after you click that “Shorten” button, it automatically jumps over to the new short URL and highlights it for you, and indicates to you to press CTRL-C to copy it. Love it.
It’s such a small change, but 1) it makes a huge difference to me since I use it so often, and 2) it just shows an interest in making user tasks as efficient as possible.
Today, I thought about this quote (the essence of it, at least, I don’t think I have it verbatim) from the recent TEDxNCSU event:
| Even though most people readily accept that money can’t buy happiness, they systematically do things throughout their entire lives as if it can. |
I waffled all day about going to the gym, but ended up not going, but which turned out to be okay in terms of getting exercise in for today.
At about 9:30, I arrived at Flex for “Southern Country Charlotte Night,” which was requested by the line-dancers of the Queen City as an advertising event for their up-coming Queen City Stomp, which is an annual hoedown drawing hundreds of cowboys from NC, SC, and Tennessee.
It’s been a long time since we’ve danced on a Saturday night, and this gig was billed from 9PM – 2AM. I have to admit that I was both surprised and pleased that they were already on the second line dance when I arrived, and it was one I knew so I jumped right out on the floor in the middle of the dance.
What was equally surprising, but not at all pleasing, was that there was only one dancer from Charlotte there at that time, and that was to remain the case the entire night. Crazy.
With that said, I had a ton of fun and got in a ton of cardio exercise, line-dancing and two-stepping vigorously for over three hours. Late, I think it was just before 1:00, Joe and I went over to Legends, where a show started at 1:00, and was over by 1:20.