March 26, 2009: Tax Day for the Millers

I was pretty tired when the alarm went off at six twenty this morning.  But I got up and got right to work.  Luckily today, like yesterday, was a really slow day and I was able to keep up with things just fine.  Unfortunately I had to wake dad up early as he sleeps in the basement where I work so he was not able to get any extra rest even though he is going to be driving all day today.

Dad spent the morning packing while I worked for the office. Dominica got right up and got to work on her classes. She started Perl programming yesterday and dad said that she seemed to really be having a good time learning it.  This morning was another class in Perl programming and she was up early and working on it before nine!

We all tried to go out to breakfast at ten thirty but I spent a bit of the morning on a conference call.  We finally snuck away at eleven in the hopes that dad could be on the road home before noon but no sooner did we all drive out to Pastel’s then I was paged back to the house to get back onto the conference call!

So I drove back as quickly as I could and was on the phone for a full hour.  Then I drove back, now after noon, and ate my lunch rather than breakfast while dad and Dominica (and Liesl) waited for me.  What a pain.

So dad didn’t get on the road until almost one.  Then it was back to work for me.

Dominica took the entire afternoon and worked on our taxes.  What a pain.  It must have been three or four hours of filling out paperwork and hunting down papers that we need.  In the end we have just about everything except for some claims that we need to come up with yet and some paperwork that has to be printed out from online or something like that.  All of this and it is just the paperwork to prepare to send to the CPA!

I am really disgusted by the difficulty in paying taxes in the US.  I’m not really upset about the amount of taxes that we pay.  Yes, I think that it is too high but I can live with it.  But I definitely think that paying taxes should be simple.  Very, very simple.  There should be no surprises, no gotchas, just a simple means of honestly paying your taxes.  As someone who isn’t trying to not pay his taxes I am really offended that the government makes it pretty much impossible for me to know if I am paying what I am supposed to even when I use a CPA.  There is no way for me to be sure that I am not doing something wrong.  It just isn’t possible.  The government doesn’t even set a clear guideline to determine in what state I live let alone how much I owe!

The one really awful thing is that we are absolutely sure that we paid our taxes ahead this year (sending in pre-payment forms during the year) but we are unable to locate any documentation of this.  There appears to be no cancelled checks on my bank account.  So we don’t really know what happened.  Did they get “lost” in the mail like so many things did in Newark?  Did the IRS just not cash them?  Did I lose them between writing them and the mailbox?  I have no way to know.  It is really awful.  So now we have no idea what is going to happen or how you deal with this situation.

At very least the initial tax paperwork has been filled out and things can move forward.  I find the burden and stress of doing taxes to be crippling.  I just can’t get anything done because it is so stressful.

After work we had dinner and watched the final episode of Grace and Favour and then I stayed home with Oreo while Dominica and Liesl went to Stop and Shop to get groceries.  Dominica had to go tonight because we have ten percent off coupons that expire if we do not use them promptly.  So she stocked up.

Liesl loves going grocery shopping.  Dominica wears her in a Moby wrap and Liesl is wide awake checking out all of the stuff going on in the grocery store.  She especially loves looking at the vegetables.

March 25, 2009: Out in Warren

I got up this morning and worked from home for several hours.  It was a pretty busy morning.  I had hoped to have been able to have left home around ten thirty which would put me in Warren, NJ by noonish but I ended up not being able to leave Peekskill until after noon.

I listened to my iPod, the Stack Overflow Podcast Episode 43, on the way out.  It has been a while since I have been able to listen to my podcasts so that was nice.  The drive is just over an hour and a half.

I got out to Warren at twenty after one.  I picked up Dinesh and Harsh and we went straight down to Green Brook to the Hot Thai House and grabbed some lunch.  I only get a chance to get Thai when I am working in Warren.  The food down there was really good.  Very spicy but with a really good flavour.  Lots of kick.

After lunch we came back to the office and I got settled in for a little while but mostly just took care of some emails and had impromtu meetings with whomever I ran into.  I am very out of touch with people in Warren so it is good for me to stop in and see whomever I can when I am there.

At five thirty everyone in the office drove on down to Houlihans on Route 22 to hang out.  We were having a special “party” as a thank you to the people who worked the sixteen hour day when the datacenter went down several weeks ago.

We had a really good time.  We ordered tons of appetizers and beer and hung out at the bar.  There were probably twenty of us or more who went.  The food at Houlihans is really excellent.  Far above the quality that you expect from a chain bar and grill.  I really enjoy eating there.  Today was quite the treat for me as a complete break from my diet.

Everyone took off around eight or eight thirty from the bar.  I was the only person who stayed to have dinner.  Dinesh hung out with me while I ate.  I didn’t want to drink and then drive home on an empty stomach.  Not that I hadn’t had appetizers but I had not had dinner.  Most everyone lives pretty close there so were driving home for dinner but it takes me well over an hour an a half from down there to get home so I wanted to make sure that I had food.  Dad and Dominica ordered in Chinese takeway for dinner.

Dinesh and I left Houlihans around nine to head home.  My drive home went pretty well.  For some reason the battery in my iPod died.  I only used it for two hours before it died and it was completely charged just minutes before I got into the car this morning.  I hope that the battery is not dying on me already.  What a pain that would be!  Maybe there was just some charging problem.

I got home a little after ten thirty.  We stayed up for just a little while.  Tomorrow morning I have to work the early shift starting at six thirty so I need to get to sleep on the early side.

Dominica stayed up until a little after midnight.  I took my Acer Aspire One to bed and posted some updates to the SpiceWorks forums from there before calling it a night.

March 24, 2009: Don’t Watch The Mummy 3

I worked this morning while Dad, Dominica and Liesl visited.  Luckily it was a really slow morning in the office so I got to visit in between things as well.

Our meal schedule was all off today so Dominica cooked a huge breakfast of egg beaters, veggie sausage and soy cheese that we ate during a sort-of brunch window and then skipped lunch.

Work was busier this afternoon so I did not get to visit much.  We ordered in dinner tonight after work was done.  We ordered in Italian which was awesome.  Real cheese for a change!

While we ate dinner we watched The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (Mummy 3). Unfortunately, it turned out to be really bad.  Not really entertaining at all.  I was really surprised by how bad it was.  We were not expecting that at all.  The first two films were so good.  And this one even had Michelle Yeoh too but she was not enough to save it.  Dominica thought that it was still better than Indiana Jones 4 which isn’t saying much.  How did this entire genre of films die such a horrible, horrible death this year?  Very sad.

After the movie was over we watched several episodes of Grace and Favour‘s second season before going to bed.  Tomorrow I am going out to Warren for most of the day.  Dad has decided to stay in Peekskill until Thursday.

March 23, 2009: Dad Comes Down to Visit

I got up this morning convinced that I was going to have an awesome weigh-in but ended up coming in .4 pounds over my last weight in which was four days ago.  I do fluctuate several pounds per day so a one day weigh-in is not very telling but I was hoping that after four days that I would have lost enough, especially after my really healthy day yesterday, to have it show up today.

Dad left home around ten this morning.  He is swinging through Leicester, New York to pick up my cousin’s laptop which needs to be reinstalled and from there is heading south to Dansville where he is stopped at Tim Horton’s to pick up a giant tin of coffee for me (ah, the sweet taste of Canada) and from there heading to Peekskill.  We are guessing that we will see him around four or so this afternoon.

There was very little free time today to get any work done around the house.  We never even had a chance to vacuum.  It was a pretty busy day.

The weather got warm enough that by mid afternoon we were able to sneak out for a little walk around the complex with Liesl and Oreo.  We were worried that it was too cold, but Liesl fell right asleep and never complained.

Dad made good time on his drive down and arrived at just after three.  We had just walked in the door from our walk when he pulled into the drive.  It was a good day for a long drive.  No weather problems at all.

Dad brought another big load of our stuff down with him including two huge bags of bedding items, the two SunFire V240 servers that arrived this week, my cousin Sara’s laptop which I need to fix before dad leaves, a load of DVDs and a load of CDs, books, magazines, mail and, the item, our wine fridge!  We are very excited to have our wine fridge again as we have had no place at all to keep wine and our main refrigerator has no spare space at all.  We need all of the space that we can get.  Now we can keep wine in the house again.  Of course, now we have to buy wine to stock into the fridge as well.

Dominica cooked dinner.  We had BBQ Crescent roll things for which I do not have a good name.  They are awesome, though.  She and her mother made them last weekend for the first time.  They are definitely going to be a normal part of our diets now.

We got a chance to visit some this evening.  It wasn’t long before we all migrated to the basement and I spent the evening sitting at my desk attempting to rebuild Sara’s laptop.  What a project that turned out to be.

After several hours of trying to get the machine to stay on long enough to do anything I finally found an operating system CD that would work with it.  Matching OEM CDs is such a pain.

It took several tries but eventually I got Windows loaded and working.  Then it was a matter of updating it and seeing if the laptop would really work.

I ended up working on the laptop until after one in the morning.  What a long evening.  But, once the OS was installed, the laptop kept humming away without any problems all night.  My guess is that there is some serious dust in there someplace causing the CPU to overheat from time to time which is really difficult to diagnose.

March 22, 2009: Dominica Goes to the Candle Party

I got paged out at five this morning.  I had a server down so I got out of bed and went down to the basement office and logged in to work.

I worked for a while and then decided that I was wide awake and that it would probably not make very much sense for me to go back to bed as it would just shorted my day and I probably would not get very good rest.  So I just stayed up.

Being up early gave me a chance to get caught up on SGL updates for a change.  And I spent some time on the SpiceWorks forums.  And I got to do some shopping on Amazon for classical MP3 downloads.  I got some good stuff.

Around seven Oreo came down to the basement to spend time with me. We hung out for a while until Dominica and Liesl got up closer to ten then we went upstairs.

I took care of Liesl and Dominica showered and then went to Bed, Bath and Beyond to do some shopping.  So I was home alone with Liesl and Oreo until noon.

Dominica’s shopping went well and she was able to take care of the items that she had been looking for.  We ate lunch separately today then she and Liesl took a nap from two until around three.  While they were sleeping I took Oreo out and he and I took a nice walk around Chapel Hill.  Not as far as we have all been going recently but enough to count as exercise for the day.  I didn’t really want to take the day off.  I can already feel that Oreo and I can do the hill a lot faster and more comfortably than we were able to do just recently.

We discovered today that Oreo has an open wound where his broken tail is fused against his lower back.  Poor little dog.  It has probably been like this always and we just never realized.  So we are trying to figure out what to do now.  It clearly bothers him.  It must be horribly painful all of time but there is no way for him to reach it or to tell us that it is hurting him.  It is very sad.

Oreo spent most of the day with tissues wedged into the space between his tail and his back in an attempt to wick some of the moisture away to give the wound a chance to dry out, breath and heal.  He is going to have to see his vet about this soon.  We need to know what to do to make it better.  Later on we took a syringe and used it to spray water into the space hoping to clean it out some.  We had no idea previously that his tail was actually as long as it is.  It is so tightly pressed against his back that we had thought that he had almost no tail at all.

At three, Dominica and Liesl hit the road to go over to Haverstraw, New York to Katie’s cable party.  I have been so backed up with work and just overly exhausted in general that we thought that it would be best if Oreo and I stayed home.

Staying home did give me a chance to change Oreo’s dressings on a regular basis which was probably really good for him although he was clearly in real pain by the end of the day.  The tissues are probably really irritating to his tail that has pretty much never felt any direct contact.

I did manage to get some important work done today and got some things out of the way that I needed to do.  I did appreciate having some time to putter around the house with just Oreo and I.  He and I don’t get a lot of bonding time anymore.  I’m sure that he appreciated getting bonding time rather than being left at home or in the car or something.

While Dominica was out I figured out to get the PS3 playing our new music playlist on shuffle.  We are really appreciating all of the music that we have available now to listen to in the living room.

Dominica had a good time at the party and she and Katie went out to a diner for dinner.  So Oreo and I had to fend for ourselves.  Since my plan is to weigh in tomorrow morning I decided to go for a really healthy dinner and just had two large bowls of vegetables.  Overall I had a really healthy day with just shredded wheat for breakfast with high fiber soy milk, non-fat yoghurt, coffee, some rice cakes and my veggies for dinner.  I am very hopeful that my weigh in will go well tomorrow morning.

Dominica and Liesl got home around ten tonight.  Liesl did really well on her outing today.  She was happy and little Miss Social, I hear.  Even being out for seven hours Dominica felt that Liesl did well and that she will be able to take her places more often now.

We watched the very final episode of Major Dad.  Going back now and watching that show is surprising because it was actually a much better show than I had remembered.  It is too bad that it only ran for four seasons.  I am also surprised about when it ran.  This was a show that was from when I was in eigth grade until my junior year in high school.

Major Dad was an interesting point in American history.  A post-Cold War time period when the Berlin Wall was just falling and the Persian Gulf War was just beginning – Major Dad was, in many ways, key American military propaganda directed internally at our own citizens to garner support for our military engagements with Iraq which then, like now, were highly questionable with “evidence” leading to the engagement that was later shown to have been falsified.  The cries that then President Bush had taken us into war just to gain control of oil supplies in the region are echoing still today in our continuing position in the gulf.  It is hard to believe that, in reality, the Gulf War has never totally ended and that we have been engaged with Iraq now for twenty years without any solid resolution.  All we have done is ravage that country past the point of recovery and solved nothing fearing more from them today than we did in the eighties.

Watching Major Dad today, as an adult, the show is a painful reminder that our government seeks to control us through propaganda measures such as this and this must have been extremely obvious to adults at the time.  As a young teenager I did not really see this social engineering in a sitcom but now, looking back, you can’t miss the rose-coloured glasses view of the US Marines at a time when the country was wrestling with some serious allegations of falsifying information to the American public as well as to Congress in order to justify the war.  While the show itself was good and it is a great snapshot of “America at war in 1990” it is also a painful and sad reminder of just how easy it is to manipulate a republic.

It’s interesting that in 1990 the US moved twice as many troops to fight Iraq as we did in 2003 for the all-out invasion.  I guess the military felt that the best defense was a good offense and that we would not need nearly as many people to take over a country as to defend against it.

We went to bed just after midnight.  Dad is leaving in the morning to head down to Peekskill.  We should see him at the house around three or four in the afternoon, I would guess.  The weather has been good recently so hopefully his drive will be an easy one.