Tax Free Weekend, etc.

Most years, Massachusetts has a sales tax free weekend. It's most years because, although the date is set, it doesn't happen unless the state legislature approves it (and they don't always). They did approve it this year and this was the weekend. We had some larger purchases that we hadn't gotten around to yet so it came in very handy.

One draw back, of course, is that the stores tend to be jammed. What we didn't realize, and what most people don't realize, is that the stores are more than happy to take the orders in advance and then process them on the weekend.

Last Tuesday, we had an appointment with a lady at Lowes to pick out window treatments and get a quote. She told us about this whole thing about doing it early (of course, since a contract was involved we did have to come in on Saturday morning).

While Kristen was dealing with window treatments, I wandered across to the appliance department and picked out a washer and dryer (the ones in the house are incredibly noisy) and a chest freezer (for the basement). Once Kristen had a chance to approve, we got those ordered. Once we'll got home, we realized that the dryer wouldn't fit through the laundry room door so I headed back to Lowes with a tape measure and changed our pre-order.

We had been shopping for a pellet stove insert and had made our selection but not ordered. We stopped by the pellet stove store to see if we could pre-order and, of course, we could. We hadn't realized it until then but Tax free weekend excludes car purchases and has a cap of $2500 per invoice. The pellet stove place did some artful repricing of the components so that we had 2 invoices under the limit.

I mentioned earlier that we had to return to Lowes yesterday morning to sigh the contract for the window treatments. We had realized that we also needed a new gas grill so we picked out a nice Weber while we were there.

I'd say that we took pretty good advantage of Tax Free Weekend.

Moving on, I'm not sure if I mentioned it before but, the one piece of furniture that we moved East that wouldn't fit into our house was our L-shaped sectional sofa (queen bed on one side and recliner on the other end). We put it on Craig's List this weekend and, after many responses, sold it to someone who drove up from Connecticut.

Kristen would be unhappy if I didn't mention her new berry garden. She already had one raspberry plant that the farmer gave her when we went raspberry picking. She had received a gift certificate to a local nursery for Mother's Day and spent it (and then some) on another raspberry, a blackberry and 3 different types of blueberry (they say that you need 3 types to cross-pollinate and do well - I could understand 2, but 3?).

This morning, we got out early to create our berry garden. The prior owner had a junk pile off the end of the garage that we insisted be removed. That being the site of the new garden, we got in there and removed the weeds (and junk remnants) and filled the soil. The soil here is amazing. It was wet all the way down and I was able to easily turn it with a pitchfork. I used a pitchfork because of the rocks. There are rock walls everywhere you go around here (including all around our property). Back in the farming days, those rocks had to go someplace. It would be a bit grand to say that our berry garden has a rock wall but it certainly has a rock border.

We still need to stretch some wires across over the raspberries and blackberries. The farmer told us how to train them so that they won't become a thicket and so that we'll actually be able to get to the berries.

While I'm on a roll, I'll mention a couple of other accomplishments that we had this week. We now have Massachusetts drivers licenses, we are now registered to vote in Massachusetts and we now have Oakham library cards.

Also, we had some pretty incredible thunder storms this past week and even spent some time in the basement during a tornedo warning.

-JC-