Author: kelson

Up too late repeatedly this week. (What else is new?) Tuesday night it was writing down ideas for a joke website (which will remain nameless until it’s a bit further along). Sometimes when I’m trying to go to sleep my mind will start writing. Often it’ll be some rant about something that’s been bugging me, or sometimes it’ll be about something I found interesting, or an email to send someone, or ideas for my website. The problem is that I generally don’t pick these up again the next day, and I had some good ideas. I’m still kicking myself for completely forgetting what I was absolutely convinced would be a great stand-alone website idea, so obvious I wouldn’t have to write it down, and… well, I should have written it down.

So Tuesday night I got up and wrote stuff down.

And last night I finished the taxes. I’d done a rough draft a few weeks ago, just to confirm we were getting a refund that could significantly finance our vacation, but put off finishing the federal taxes and doing the state taxes, which are usually simpler… only the rules about deducting interest paid on student loans are different. CA only lets you deduct interest payments during the first 60 months of repayment, and I graduated in 1999, so I had to track down exactly when the loan went into repayment in order to figure out whether I could deduct the whole amount, or whether I had to estimate 11 months, 10 months, etc. In the end I had to run everything through another 1-page worksheet that exactly cancelled out the decuction, so it didn’t really matter when the 60-month cutoff date fell.

Sometimes I think tax preparers must have lobbyists in Congress and at the state level, trying to make sure the forms are as complicated as possible. I know it’s mostly about incentives, encouraging or rewarding certain types of behavior, but taking a different cut from every type of income seems a bit extreme.

Anyway, about a half hour ago I realized I was staring dumbly at the monitor here. The energy rushes from morning, breakfast, and lunch had each worn off, and when I finally got around to heading for the lunch room I was very glad to find there was still coffee. (I can’t even remember the last time I had work coffee.) It reminds me, actually, of college, when the class I was most likely to fall asleep in was generally the one mid-afternoon. Of course, now that I think about it, the only classes I can remember sleeping in on a regular basis were Early American Literature (with the exception of Ben Franklin’s autobiography, it was a slog) and, a class on Old English. It doesn’t fit the pattern, because it was mid-morning, and the subject was fascinating. And I really hated falling asleep in there, because aside from the interesting subject matter, it was a 10-person class held around a conference table in a tiny office.

Well, I guess it’s back to battling with server hardware.