Hello all. I thought I'd check in.

Our barn is nearly complete. I looks like we'll com in close to budget. Our roofing/siding crew finished last week, about five minutes before the great Midwestern blizzard of 2016 started.

We have some finishing work to get done inside the barn. Our contractor still needs to hang some gates. He would have had it done already, be he would have had to compete for space with the roofing/siding crew.

We did splurge on one item that was completely unnecessary. I bought a 4'X8' sheet of white Azek. That's a composite material that's popular for decking, because it resists mold/mildew, stays white, and is generally very tough.

I think I spent around $120 on the sheet. DW then drew the outline of an MSU Spartan S on the sheet. We then had our contractor use his jigsaw to cut the S out. Actually, there was enough room on the board that she drew in two S shapes, one big, that's on the barn. One small that we'll use for something else.

One of us COULD have used our jigsaw to cut the shapes, but neither one of us was confident enough in our skills to not screw it up, so we had our contractor do it.

When the project is all finished, I'll tally up our spending an report how we did compared to budget.

I'm going to try to add a picture of the barn, the view from the east.

The good news is that I'm still quitting my smokeless tobacco habit, so there's that.

The other day I mentioned finding a quitters forum. There's also a blog side to that site. I've started blogging there. Right now quitting smokeless is more pressing than guarding my finances, although guarding my finances is no less important than it's been over the past five years.

As I'm sure it's not difficult for you to imagine, the vast majority of participants on the quit site (it's killthecan.org) are males. And what's true here at SA is also true at KTC - the men tend to use the forums, and not the blogs. And, there are no women to use the blogs (It looks like there have been a few women, here and there, but the overwhelming majority of people on the site are men).

So, the blog side of the site is dead. There have been a few valiant tries at getting the blogging going, but it's mostly dead. You can find my blogs at quit4today.com

So far I've got two blog entries, and I'm going to try for a post per day pace.

For some reason, when the most pressing issue in my life was getting out of debt, I found it so much easier to organize my thoughts, and formulate a plan in this blog atmosphere. Now that quitting tobacco is the most pressing issue in my life, I find the same is true. There's a lot of noise on the forum side. It's just that there appears to be no one but the site administrator, who appears to be a good thinking person, following me.

So, I'm trying to promote the blog side in the forums. I'm going to keep blogging, and we'll see where it goes.

I just wanted to drop a line here, and let you all know that I'm still here. I'm still quitting, and I appreciate all that so many of you have done for me over the past five years, but I'll be gone for a while. I'm sure I'll be checking in once in a while. Heck, it's not like I've not dropped out and popped back in several times before. It's just that this time it's a planned drop out.

We filed our taxes this weekend. We're still using the adoption credit, so we're getting a $4K refund from the feds. Our state refund is $390.

It feels like March outside. There were several reports of ice fishing disasters over the news this weekend. Just now, during lunch I heard of an accident involving a dad and a 4 year old. Sounds like they were both under the ice for a while. Sounds like the dad didn't make it, and the young boy is in rough shape.

We filed our taxes this weekend. We're still using the adoption credit, so we're getting a $4K refund from the feds. Our state refund is $390.

It feels like March outside. There were several reports of ice fishing disasters over the news this weekend. Just now, during lunch I heard of an accident involving a dad and a 4 year old. Sounds like they were both under the ice for a while. Sounds like the dad didn't make it, and the young boy is in rough shape.