Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

I Apparently Owe $25k in Back Taxes
April 16, 2007

We were up until 3am this morning, even with work only a few hours after that. I was working, as usual, and Berta was doing taxes.

I’ve done our taxes using H&R Block’s TaxCut software for the past three years. Strangely, it’s something I kind of enjoy. We haven’t had any problems with it, and we were going to use it again this year except we figured that with the sale of the house and the change in jobs and the liquidation in some of our stock assets to pay for things, maybe we ought to have someone professional do it.

Take Some Time Off
April 13, 2007

You know how I’m always saying that I have so many back-burner projects that I don’t have time for? And how I wish I had a little time here or there to work on any one of them to the point that they could surface to at least see if they would sink or float?

Berta recently had her yearly review at work, and she’s going to be making a little more money. Not a whole lot, but enough to keep pace with inflation and eating out at restaurants. I jokingly asked her if I could quit my job, and of course she told me she wasn’t making that much more. “Maybe we should play the lottery,” she says. Well, the Lottery idea never really worked well in the past, but I have been toying with the possibility of quitting my job anyway.

Drooling Over the Ocean
April 12, 2007

My subscription period for my Verizon phone has come to an end. I’ve had my Treo for 2 years and it has served me well, but I’m wondering what I’m going to do next.

I’ve been paying Verizon the extra money for unlimited broadband access. The sad part is that my Treo is only a 650, and can’t take advantage of the high speed access that I’m paying way too much for. It’s gotten me thinking about what I’m really getting out of my cell phone and phone service.

Tanked
April 11, 2007

FishtankRecently Berta got the idea to pull the twenty-gallon fish tank out of the guest room and clean it up so that we could once again use it to contain fish. The tank still had little rocks in it left over from our last functional tank, but in addition to the dried scum that seemed impossible to remove from the glass, that’s about all we had.

As it turns out, a little vinegar will remove all of the scum from the tank. She removed the rocks into a little plastic trash bin (which sat like some kind of modern art sculpture on our kitchen island for a while) and proceeded to scrub the tank to good effect.

Stuck in my Head
April 10, 2007

When I get tired, weird things get stuck in my head. The soundtrack to Wicked had recently been plaguing me, for example.

Today, I have words stuck in my head. Odd words. I would like to share them with you. Hopefully this release will also free me of them to think of other things. I doubt it, but maybe in sharing others can join my misery.