That annual misery in which on the honor system and backed by penal code, Americans devote 4 otherwise productive weeks to trying to remember their highschool math, trying to figure who Fred G Wayne is and why you wrote him a check for 32.34 and called it deductible, and trying, over all, to figure a way the government owes you a refund instead of you owing the government.
I’m not sure, but probably hospitals get an uptick in cases about now…stress-related conditions.
Personally, I think national productivity would jump 10 percent if we just declared a national sales tax and forgot this madness, into which successive legislatures have attempted to inject ‘good spending’ like credits for buying a house and deducts for having a child…woe for the child born at 12:01 AM on January 1. He missed being a deduction for the preceding year.
The whole system is crazy.
When I discovered that I’d have to do Schedule D, because of inheriting part of my mother’s investments, I asked a friend about tax preparers, and got recommended to one who does accounting for local small businesses. It’s more money than, say, H&R Block, but it gets the job done accurately, and I don’t actually have to go in to their office – I can scan my docs and upload them, and I get the return paperwork as PDFs.
we do much the same, but it’s a case of the info has to be there and be right.
No complaints please. As Oliver Wendell Holmes says, Taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society.
We can and do complain as to how the money is spent, but our government has the right to collect it.
Jonathan up here in New Hampshire where it has rained for two days.
Oh, I don’t mind paying: I like police and fire to show up when I need them. I just wish it didn’t involve so much record-keeping and recollecting what was what…my brain is usually on planet 9 and I lose track.
I’m closing on my former house tomorrow. Every taxing entity will get its cut from that, and the closing will resolve back taxes due the county. Other stuff will get handled this month or this year, as soon as I can get to it. (Including, eek, a payment plan for Federal back taxes and probably that through a tax / real estate attorney, so the Fed and all others will end up satisfied and I end up free and clear.) Rent and fees and utils on the new apt. are due at end of month. This week will see me go from zero savings to once again have long-term savings and a cushion for the next six months to two years, while I ge a steady, sustainable income going again. — Note I put no faith in state and federal disability aid actually helping much or coming through in any timely fashion. It has been months, and without funds, I stalled on that, to resume now that I’ll have the wherewithal to, you know, get cab fare or buy groceries. Very odd going from one extreme to the other. Well, back to anything like normal, not rich by any means. … And after what I’ve been through, still nervous it’s not quite “real” yet, or might somehow vaporize. So…gonna be a whirlwind week! — But upcoming good outcome.
Good Luck on the closing, BCS!
Thanks, Raesean! — Well, we closed on the house today and funds will appear in about a day. Then, and before the end of the week, I will get to pay new apt. rent and utils and fees, and begin paying off back debts and taxes — and schedule eye and dental care, because they are too urgent to wait on Fed and state help. I can once again have a basis for life without being so worried/scared. I’ll have some savings again and a way to invest and generate income, while I’m working to create a steady income from actual work. The processs went really well and I’ve ended up with friends and business contacts. Win-win.
Glad to hear the closing went well! Having security of mind and bank account is a good thing.
Off-Topic:
:O Oh, Wow! Hot diggity-dog! (¡Ay, chihuahua!) ;D
Weird day, topped off with a weird whodathunkit.
While clearing out the last house and garage items into storage, the guys saw a Spanish textbook of mine.
Now, I know one was ruined some years back, while my grandmother was still around, in between taking it to her house and back to mine. (It was completely ruined, unsalvageable. I was not happy.)
I had thought it was my original Spanish textbook.
Weird thing today: Surprise! The textbook the guys rescued and brought over — Is my original En Contact, blue and grey cover, 3rd Ed. — I know this because it has my parents’ old home address, where we lived when I was in college (Texas A&M and then junior college).
YIPPEE! I do not have to buy a new textbook! …OK, I still will later, but yay, this will get me going, reviewing and back up to speed on grammar and vocab pretty quickly. This will be nightly required homework for a while, and cramming vocabulary.
The workbook and any and all other language textbooks, dictionaries, phrasebooks, verb books, readings and lit., etc., are all still (somewhere) in storage, and I will urgently want to get those out. Might as well review French while I’m at it, but heavily on Spanish.
But, wow, yay, this is completely unexpected. — So, just what *was* the textbook that got ruined? A later edition? A different textbook? I no longer know.
But this is excellent. I now have a great resource for review to get me up to speed. Meanwhile, I can also get with other resources for listening comprehension. (Yes, local radio and TV, Spanish-language, like Univision, should be great for helping on this. Hmm, there should be some Spanish newspapers locally too, I’ll have to see what’s in the area and ask a few people.
Fantastic! Haha, can’t believe this was right there. Great, right when I needed it. Baji-naji!
I am so, so thrilled.
Other weirdness both up and down today, such that the two sort of make up for each other. But solvable, so I am not too bothered there.
Speaking of lost items, there is a little town up the road from me called “Plainview” (yes, it does actually have a plain view/view of the plain). Whenever I lose something and can’t find it, I know that’s where it has ended up. Some strange quantum stuff goes on in this part of the flatlands, because now and again, stuff that was in Plainview reappears and I find it.
Place names are often descriptive of landscape features at or nearby, which explains Brownfield, Levelland, Earth, Shallowater, Littlefield, and Plainview.
Or Halfway – which was just up the road from the house my parents retired to. (Halfway between Plainview and Olton, and yes, there’s a Quarterway and a Three-Quarterway as well.
(Halfway has a gin, a church, a farm-supply place, a service station of sorts (no shelter from the weather), a water tower, and an extension station.)
I miss being able to see the weather coming an hour away. Or lights fifty miles away, if the weather was right.
Or Ox-ford, Cam-bridge (over the river Cam). It’s odd when these get repeated out of context: the city north of Boston (Cattle-town?) should be Charles-bridge, not Cambridge.
Anent taxes, I file an extension, my tax acc’t has IRS send us their numbers, and we work from their numbers plus a few things they don’t have, like deductions. So much easier!
Canyon is another aptly named town. I love taking people there who’ve never been. They keep wondering when we’re going to get to the canyon (Palo Duro), must not be much of a canyon and then all of a sudden, there it is. You really can’t see it until you get right up on it, and then all of a sudden its YUUUUUGGGGEEE. Used to be a sizeable river in that canyon and in the one that goes through my town (Yellowhouse Canyon) but the Rio Grande cut north through them and stole all the water. It’s call “river piracy,” oddly enough.
The South Yuba River in CA captured the upper 25 miles of the Bear river, a long time ago. The separation is now somewhere around Lake Spaulding. Stream piracy: it’s real.
My mother and I drove up to Kansas and back, one fall, and on the way back we took 207 south across Palo Duro. It’s impressive, especially since you really can’t see it until you’re right there, about to go over the rim.
Re: Stream Piracy. I recall hearing others are the New River in Virginia, and that before the Andes rose the Amazon drained into the Pacific.
That’s exactly the way I remember Palo Duro Canyon from when I was there as a child. We were on our way home from a driving tour of the Western U.S. and had seen Grand Canyon & Yellowstone Canyon on that trip, and I didn’t see anything on the drive to Palo Duro that led me to believe there was really going to be a canyon nearby. But when we got there it was truly impressive. Interesting to find out how it was formed.
The town I grew up in was next to Marlborough, it was, strangely enough, to the west and called ‘Westborough’. There was also Northborough (to the north of Westborough), and Southborough (south of Marlboro and east of Westboro- the locals all dropped the -ugh ages ago).
To the east was… Sudbury and Framingham, sort of blowing the whole theme…
One of the best things I did was take H&R BLocks’s tax class, usually offered in the fall (so they can offer jobs to those that pass the test for the next tax season). I think it was all of $99 for 8 weeks of instruction twice a week, with homework, and cheaper than the community college. Makes it so much easier to use the tax software with confidence.
One of the things that has helped immensely this year is a program/website called Expensify.com. I don’t have to keep receipts – I take a picture with my cell phone, and it automatically uploads them. It then figures out to whom the expense was paid, how much the receipt is for, and makes a good guess about what category it goes in. Last thing every night when on the road – take a picture of my day’s receipts. I can go in and add comments, assign to projects, etc. It really made it easier this year, and I’ve got all the records available in the cloud – no shoebox full of indecipherable slips of paper.
Looks like I don’t have to even make out a form this year! This is a good/bad thing!
I remember my father and first husband’s father bonded over a long conversation about whether or not they could claim us as dependents the year we married. (We were both students and did get some family contributions for living expenses.) Feels like ancient history now.
Spokane is named after the local tribe, I believe. We also have Loon Lake, (I have never heard the bird call and would love to: it’s a very eerie sound), Medical Lake, Moses Lake, Priest Lake, (priests were early missionaries); Colfax, Colville, Okanogan (native American name), Chelan (shee-lan), Omak, Bonner’s Ferry (to get anywhere in Eastern WA you have to cross a river, and you may have to skirt a lake or climb a hill or so), Yakima, Walla Walla, both of which are surely native American names; Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland, usually shortened to ‘the Tricities’, because one runs into the next; Ritzville, which appears to have the worst weather in bad seasons: if your truck gets past Ritzville it can make it to Spokane. There’s Vantage, which is the Columbia River crossing; Othello, doubtless named by a Shakespeare fan; Pullman, Moscow (Idaho), and Toppenish, again, likely native American. Then there is Fish Trap, probably a translation of a native American name, and Opportunity.
So I spent a couple hours Monday transplanting tiny rhodendron seedlings. They were maybe an inch long, root-tip to tiptop leaf. They finally have true leaves, only a “silly little millimeter” long. It’d take about 25 of those end-to-end to make an inch. Their leaves are yet as thin and delicate as a mosquito’s wing. No grabbing them by pinching a handy little leaf! Their roots are as fine as frog hair. No jerking them out of the germination medium! What is to become their “trunk” is about as thick as a whisker from my beard. Fortunately, I can just take my glasses off and see very well at this scale. They’re so small because the seed is. Not a bean or a kernel of corn, a mustard seed is gargantuan in comparison. Rhodendron seed resembles fine ground pepper. Don’t sneeze!
So my tools were a pair of needle-nosed tweezers, and a tiny screw driver as a spade. The screwdriver is a techie thing, swag from a tech show. The length of a ball-point pen, it has a clip for a tech’s shirt pocket. Not a beautician’s tweezers, those my Mom got when she did electronic assembly work. Stainless steel, the tips are an inch and a half long, and they’re lethally pointed! I used those to lift and carry the seedlings much as you’d lift a toddler under the armpits.
They went into a couple “seed starter” trays, 10″ x 20″, with plastic inserts to make 6 x 12 inch-square “plugs”, 72 seedlings per tray, under a clear raised top. A 4′, 2 bulb, fluorescent “shop light” is suspended maybe a foot above them now. So they’re getting 24×7 light until they reach the top. I may lose a few now, but I didn’t take all of them from the little rectangular “fast-food” trays the seed was sown in, not even close! I can soon replace any that don’t make it. When they reach the top, they’ll be “hardened off” and transplanted into 3″ square pots to live outside. That’ll be a risky transition, as will protecting them next winter! This winter we got down to 10F, and several snows. I wouldn’t want to freeze them out.
Interesting. Of course we only ever see them when they have woody stems.
They’ll get there, it’ll just take a while. Three to five years to bloom, with care.
Rhodies are like orchids and oysters–don’t invest too much in any one of your progeny, “make up for it in volume”. 😉
I’ve been working on some more unusual plants lately. After cutting my plumerias way back, I have growing in buckets a cacao tree and a Gros Michel banana tree. We’ll see how they like it here. I’m also trying to sprout tamarinds and rose apples, but those are being finicky. I tried to sprout tea bushes (Camellia Sinensis, not the melaleuca) but got skunked with a batch of poor seeds.
I’m expecting to go by the apt. complex office to pick up mail tomorrow or Friday. On closing date, I missed delivery of something; plus I need to check the mailbox.
I’ve run into bank weirdness regarding full legal name versus nickname in re-issuing a credit card. What any sane, sensible person would expect is not what they do; nor will their bank officer do this in the branch location. So I will be talking with a bank officer higher up and will ask him for whom to write to suggest, politely, that they do the smarter, more secure thing they used to do: Keep *both* the full legal name and any nickname.or aka or dab or alias on file, with which one the customer uses on checks, cards, etc., to avoid the roundabout and time-consuming (over a month!) process I went through last time. If they can’t do it beyond the card I now have in process, then I will be changing bans. But first I’ll have to see if their main competitor has any better sense. I am/was expecting a meeting with the higher-up guy to re-establish things beyond a checking account and credit card, following the sale of my home. Now, I may decide to switch banks.
Got a few other things done today, but not as much as I’d hoped. Dental appt. set up. Eye doctor, no reply yet. Vet’s office (cat) … still shows in business, but the phone’s out of order. So I get to go by and see if he’s still in business and get his new phone, or else go with the vet a new friend uses, closer to my new location. Feeling a lot like Rip Van Wynkle, right about now.
Looking forward to getting some things done tomorrow, Friday, and next week. At last, change in the upward, forward, positive direction!
Giving you grief about B. Cat Ship rather than Blue Cat Ship, or dba BCS 🙂
I’ve been tempted to change banks, as I have slowly become less satisfied with the one who currently handles my accounts. We have a credit card issued by NASA Federal Credit Union, and just for reasons, I’ve been toying with the idea of changing over. it would be a little tricky because they have no local outlet, only affiliates, but on the up side, I could get a debit card with the UFP logo 😀
LOL, Chondrite, but factor in, they want to see/hear “Ms.” me. (No, sir, we need to see your wife or mother or the woman with this name.) (Or the squinty scrutiny trying to tell if I’m transgender or cross-dressing.) (Um, no in all cases. I have my dad’s first name and go by my middle name.) (In one case, I wondered what the supervisor, who knew me, said to the clerk after I was ID’d by him, OK’d, and left.)
My parents gave me my dad’s first name, which everyone reads as a girl’s name, and my own middle name. I go by Ben, from my middle name.
On the other hand, any time someone wants to speak to (my first name) or “Ms.” me, I know they don’t know me personally, it’s either official business or spam.
LOL, but you left out Cat B. Ship or Blue S. Cat. Or is it Bleu or Katz or…. (My last name gets misspelled and mispronounced a lot. Depending on how you look at it, it’s one or two letters off from two much more common English surnames. My last name is pretty rare, though. Most people with it are distant cousins.
“As long as they don’t call me late for dinner.”