Taxes

I finally finished my federal income taxes for 2009. 

I've used TurboTax (or equivalent) for about 10 years.  And as I look at the insane number of calculations and forms required to compute my taxes it's easy to remember why.  However TurboTax has a horrible bug this year that wasted a ton of my time.  It likely effects a small % of their users, but if it hits you, it grinds your computer to a halt.  Basically if you have a large number of imported stock transactions AND you need to correct an error in these transactions which is common, the program uses a ton of memory and is very slow loading the imported transactions. Since I have a number of "managed accounts", I hit the limit quite easily.  Fixing up the data that should have taken me an hour or two probably took 15-20 hours.  All that time wasn't active -- much was click a button wait 5 minutes and do something else -- but it was too much.  If I had known how long it would take, I might have taken a different route, like buying their competing software.  Or paying someone to do our taxes.  I'll have to see if they have this bug next year.

But they're done and I'm going to try to get a jump on 2010 taxes by doing a better job of tracking our donations.

Day 11, Cocoa's Birthday

Today was Cocoa's 6th birthday.  He got some steak with breakfast, took a nap, then I dropped him off at daycare to hang out with his friends.  There's a great picture of him on my and Monica's Facebook pages. Cocoa also got some steak for dinner.

Spent most of the day dealing with a couple of issues from the softball league where the rules are a bit ambiguous... and I thought we had fixed all the loopholes and confusion years ago.  Also looked into purchasing a second home, either to flip it or as a rental.  The previous owners started an illegal conversion to a duplex -- they never got any permits -- and then the bank foreclosed on them.  The house is in limbo -- either the conversion needs to get the legal approval and be completed, or it needs to be reversed back to single-family housing and the bank certainly isn't going to spend any money to do so -- so it's selling at a big discount.  Unclear how much work and time would be required to fix it.

Picked up Cocoa.  The day care put a birthday hat on Cocoa and took a picture of him. He's adorable.  Cocoa got more steak for dinner. I think he ate better than I did today.  Then I made dinner for Monica and I -- salmon and brown rice -- and as I type this the brownies are out of the oven and cooling.  Mmm, time for dessert.

Friday and the weekend (long)

Friday I finished cleaning our outdoor furniture and moving it upstairs to the deck.  We now have 10 chairs and a "bench", so it's more work than it sounds.  Though it's mainly tedious -- lots of trips around the house.  I moved our table on Sunday.  It's big, glass, and heavy; that was actually work.  And when I thought I was done, Monica said "hey let's put one chair downstairs so I can sit with the dogs".  Score one point for well-written acceptance criteria.

Met my friend Jay for lunch on Friday and got to catch up.  Jay's sort of like Griffey, Jr. -- he was the face and the star of our softball team for a number of years but was often injured and those injuries have finally led him to retire.  What's that?  Griffey hasn't retired yet?

Spent a lot of time over the weekend working on taxes, mainly stock sales, interest, and dividends.  This is where having managed accounts -- like mutual funds but you own actual stocks -- becomes a pain. Lots and lots of stock transactions.  Import/download is a life saver, but verifying is still a fair amount of work. Yuck!

In more fun stuff, Saturday I helped man the both for Monica at the Redmond pet fair.  My role is basically to watch the booth when she needs a break and keep her company.  It isn't busy enough and I don't really know enough about Ttouch or pet adoption counseling to share the booth.  For the first time she's set up at one of these things, it was actually useful.  I don't know if she'll actually get anyone who calls, but she talked to a number of people who seemed very interested in her services, took her card, and should call her. On of our observations mid-way through the day was that 10-3 was too long for this event.  Everyone started packing up their booths at 2:30, so I guess we weren't alone in that view.  I walked outside at 2:25 to get some fresh air and when I came back 1/3 of the "vendors" were gone.  I think once the first person bailed, everyone else decided it was OK to follow suit.  By 3:00, there was no one left.
 Saturday night we went to a great dinner at Ruth's Chris, separate post coming.  Sunday was mainly running around.  We had softball in the morning and played one of the key games of the season.  Before the 2008 season I split our team in two.  We had developed a group of players who thought recreational co-ed softball was all about winning and not about having fun (OK they liked to have fun, but their idea of fun was winning).  Their attitudes sucked and it made it no fun to play on Sunday.  I kicked a couple people off the team a few of their friends from my team joined them and they decided to recruit a bunch of good players and form their own team.  I wouldn't say this team is our rival but they're one of the better teams in the division, they care a lot about the final score, and half the players used to be on our team, so the game is special.  We scored 3 runs in the top of the first and never trailed though the game was a toss up until we pulled away in the 6th and 7th innings.  We played terrific defense which was the key and got them out running the bases four or five times, though the umpire missed one of the outs.  Final was 13-6.

Sunday afternoon Hunny Bear had an acupuncture appointment.  And then Sunday evening I went to the Storm Opening Night.  The game was sloppy as I'd expect.  Training camp is about 3 weeks in the WNBA and the star players don't get back from overseas until the last week.  So you're watching a team that's practiced together for about 4 days.  It was pretty ugly at times and the Storm had long stretches where they didn't score, but in the end they beat LA, their #1 rival, by about 10 points.

Oh yeh, Sprint 3 planning Sunday night.