About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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April 27, 2014
I just treated Doggle to a longer than usual walk on a bum knee, and indulged myself in ten minutes of vacuuming because I’ve not been up to a good proper housecleaning in weeks despite my love of cleaning and a clean house. It almost makes me miss the days when work was so stressful, I’d rage-clean and not feel it for at least a few hours.
While I’m flopped here trying to absorb as much rest as I can …
My brain wants to know if you’d rather:
Have the use of only your arms or only your legs?
Be able to do 50 pushups or 100 sit ups?
Have amazing aim and never miss at darts or have great balance and dancing rhythm?
Eat perfectly healthily for 6 days and anything you want for 1 day, or have good food 7 days a week with a little treat each day?
Have pancakes for breakfast or waffles for dinner?
Have an hour of free help per month to: cook, clean or wash your windows?
Pay to get help around the house and scrimp on the travel budget, or do it all yourself and go anywhere you want, when you want?
April 21, 2014
Change from March: 5% increase
Change from January/1st Quarter: 20% increase
It was just a minor increase this month from last month, so I had to mess around with numbers some more to make myself feel better about our progress. Spoiled by last month’s bump which wasn’t going to happen again with just a regular month: making the money, saving the money, spending the money. In that order, mind you. Part of both our paychecks have been set to go to savings first, before anything is spent.
I’ve been doing that since I started working, just after I got out of the “didn’t have a penny to spare and savings had to pay the bills” phase.
I’ve also set up a couple automatic payments out of the checking account for the first time. I don’t trust companies to regularly take money out of my accounts without trying to sneak in extra fees or overcharging, but this works because the checking account is set up to send checks, not allow auto-withdrawals.
At some point, we’ll start experiencing that thing where only truly major spending or saving moves the meter. Obviously that’s a good thing but it’s hard to viscerally accept the prospect of being bored with my money. More obviously, I don’t have to settle. I’m going to go find something new and exciting to do to make money once the routine stuff truly doesn’t take up any time or brainpower.
This is actually really important because a) Baglady Syndrome, I have it; b) My job is, more than most in the past, not guaranteed. Our lifestyle, while not lavish, is quite comfortable and I don’t want to jeopardize that by getting too comfortable & lazy, and income-less. So I’ll just get right on that ….
Happily, PiC’s job is in a really good place right now and quite stable for the nonce so we can take that a little bit more for granted. (For now.)
April 20, 2014
The anticipation of getting to go watch Captain America 2 in the theater 2 weeks after release (so we can use our Silver AMC movie passes!) has carried me through a few weeks of feeling less than human.
My brain wants to know if you’d rather….
Follow Captain Mal and Zoey into a caper, or be the Jarvis to Tony Stark’s Iron Man?
Do all the laundry your way, or have it all done by someone else according to how they think it should be done?
Be smothered by a cat’s affection or ostracized by a dog?
Be stocked up on nonfat milk, skim milk, whole milk or chocolate milk? You can only pick one.
Pay $9 (!!!) for matinee movie tickets and wait in line to get your seat or pay $14 (!!!) for both your ticket and a reserved seat at any time?
Have a toaster or toaster oven?
Disneyland or DisneyWorld?
Garlic fries or buttered popcorn?
April 18, 2014
I’d never heard of the EMP Museum before our trip to Seattle, but they hosted a great booth showcasing a homebuilt TARDIS and offered a discount on entry when we were there, so of course we had to give it a go!
It was awesome.
I’m not really into music so failed to really appreciate the depth of the Nirvana exhibit but it was very well done, as was the MegaScreen featuring music videos and horror films (above).
My favorites: the Icons of Science Fiction and the Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic exhibits.
The latter was behind a massive wood and iron door, Hobbit-like but for the height and weight of it. It’s a door you can shut, drop an iron bar across, and be safer and more secure behind than any flimsy modern door and bumpable lock. {I want that door.}
Inside the first corrider, some of the great tropes and tools of fantasy were showcased behind glass: Stormbringer, an Invisibility Cloak; beyond these a great dragon lay coiled around a curved “cave”, red eyes glowing, tail chained to the iron bars separating a resting monolith and an admiring public.
Our plan to give it a quick look-see devolved into spending half the afternoon wandering, oohing and aahing, and making up character cards with our faces and attributes on them. As you do.
In the Icons of Science Fiction exhibit, we were giddy over the Star Trek captain’s chair liberally doused with Tribbles; the replica Klingon bat’leth which made this shirt make so much more sense to PiC; the Dalek!
They played a hilarious short movie for the Time Travel category we’d never heard of and now love: Time Freak. You ought to see it, if you can. It was only ten minutes, but it had us in stitches. Great set up for a hilarious payoff.
Definitely worth the visit. I’d become a member if I were a local and they continued to have exhibits of this caliber.
April 13, 2014
We had a lively Saturday and now Doggle and I are crashed out, me with about 25% mobility, him with wondering why I’m taking five times longer to fill his water bowl while he stares at it, pointedly. Probably I’m the servant he would fire to make a point.
Left to its own devices, my brain wants to know if you’d rather….
Handwash dishes, or use the dishwasher?
Have a robot vacuum, risking a SkyNet/Cylon invasion one day, or just live in a dirty house for weeks?
Use an electric toothbrush or regular toothbrush?
Live with less traffic and few friends to visit or have Carmageddon be your norm with lots of friends?
Have a life of adventure or sense of adventure?
Be able to sing one song really well or whistle anything really well?
Hang out with Laurence Fishburne or Mads Mikkelsen for a day?
Spend 6 months traveling your own country, or 6 weeks traveling internationally? Solo or with the whole family?
April 11, 2014
PiC and I had the pleasure of spending a few days in Seattle. It was his first visit, my third, and we had a whole ambitious slate of things we wanted to explore. Predictably enough, my entire itinerary was foods and comics. His was a bit more high-brow: museums, nature, local sights.
We settled on a melange of friends, geekery, comics, trying great foods, and a little bit of sightseeing. Whatever we missed on this trip was added to the list for Next Time. There will be a next time!
And because I’m a sharing kind of person, some of my favorites:
Taylor Shellfish: Has limited seating, mainly high top tables and bar stools, probably fits about 25 people, if they’re awfully friendly, and their oysters are in open cases right next to the dining tables. It’s great. They have this fantastic chowder bar, offering two kinds of chowder, and for $6.50, you can have your fill of classic clam chowder or spicy geoduck chowder, and amazing dinner rolls.
I had to try their oysters, so that was a bit of a splurge as all oysters were > $2/each, and I think we all remember that I’m the greedy so and so who ordered FIFTY oysters the last time we oystered. No kidding, I broke PiC with that and this was the first time he’d even look at one since.
The Calf & Kid: A tiny cheese shop in the Melrose Market area, we literally stood there and gawked at all their cheeses. Egads I love cheese.
Cupcake Royale: We accompanied our friends to this coffee/cupcake/ice cream shop and good gravy but a regular cupcake priced at $3.65 is too rich for my blood. I had one anyway, vacation y’know, but it was just ok. Still, their designs were awesome.
Seattleites and Seattle experts: Do share any other must eat places that we should try Next Time!
April 7, 2014
I declare a Minor Victory. After wading through 20 forms and itemizing deductions for home, charitable deductions, expenses and so on, I’ve finally gotten the taxes sorted enough to file for our extension. Maybe a numbing effect sets in after the first several hours, or the pain is so unbelievable that you entirely forget what it was like, much like how I’ve heard childbirth described. No kidding, that was torment stretched across 3 weekends and I’ve only just bought us a reprieve until October. On the bright side, I always forget that California grants an automatic extension so all that pain was for federal taxes.
While looking forward to working with a good tax preparer/advisor, I get that weird “I have to pre-clean for the housecleaners” feeling. You know what I’m talking about, right? Friends who had housekeepers/housecleaners (or still do) always spend half a day picking up in preparation for people to come clean. It totally baffles me. But Moom inspired me to sort all the just-about filed paperwork so it’s not a file folder chock full of confusion; everything’s scanned and itemized in a spreadsheet now.
This is the second year I’ve used TaxAct and around Hour 13, I started wondering what possessed me to use them again. The relief of being done with taxes must have overcome all memory of my frustrations in using the software last year. Since I’d already committed, I rationalized that this was just my way of being fair, that the frustration really had to do with the software, not just doing taxes.
Let’s be honest, there was a lot of that frustration:
1. Filing an extension requires an estimate of your tax liability and payment by April 15th. Slog through the entire filing process and then send in Form 4868, Application for Automatic Extension of Time To File U.S. Individual Income Tax Return.
2. Finally filing again in October (instead of January or February at the latest) when the last straggler Schedule K comes in: Form 1040; Schedules A-C, SE; Form 6251; Form 2106; Form 4562
3. Filing amendments because the last straggler Schedule K was wrong – Forms 1040x and 540x.
Human error aside, the linear-but-NOT interface was terrible
TaxAct walks you through each of the forms, start to finish, via their questionnaire. Answer yes to this or that question and it opens up the relevant form. This works if you have all your information at hand, organized, and ready to be flipped through.
The problem is, you can’t easily skip certain questions and then just use their “Back” button to weave your way back up the tree. Go backwards that way and you’re liable to find yourself up a creek instead, lost in some random cul-de-sac of form questions, or rowing your way through a whole series of questions that aren’t the direction you meant to go.
New Stuff
When you have a number of new forms or situations to work into the picture, it’s not necessarily intuitive when you should be adding which forms to which sections if you only know which Schedule it should appear on but not much else. I ended up adding and deleting forms multiple times trying to get things into the correct sections/sequence. It wasn’t until the end where I found the summary page for either the Income or Deductions section where it was much easier to fill things out piecemeal; and I still couldn’t tell you where to find that.
Once I further complicate our financial lives with other investments, I won’t have hair left to pull out while doing taxes. Another vote for hiring a pro!
Stupid inconveniences
If you’d, say, spent 4 hours working and turned your attention away briefly, you get logged out. It saves your work, of course, but when you try to log back in, there’s a 30% chance it’ll decide that you disabled cookies (when you didn’t) and insists that you have to accept them again (but I DO!). It’s an annoyance but let’s be honest, every minute wasted trying to do taxes is as frustrating as those minutes and hours spent actually working on them.
Honestly, the software’s probably halfway decent but for the amount of time I had to waste figuring it out, or figuring out where information should go because they failed to provide enough information, I won’t be using them again.