TurboTax 2008 taxes completed

As a follow-up to my previous post, I was able to get logged in tonight to TurboTax and finalize both my federal and state taxes. Yay! It’s nice to have that done and behind me. Now I just wait for the refund so I can turn it over to the credit card people.

TurboTax…I’m annoyed

I was going to do my taxes this evening, but TurboTax isn’t cooperating. The website kicked me out part way through, and I’ve been unable to get consistently logged back in. I was in one more time just long enough to see that my previous entries stuck, but I couldn’t do anything else. I kept winding up at a new login screen. Makes me wonder if the rest of the world is trying to do their taxes online too.

Do any of the rest of you use TurboTax or do you do it the old fashioned way with pencil and paper? I’ve used TurboTax for at least the past three years, and never really had any problem until now.

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman, recreated for me the spirit of enjoyment I used to get years ago when I was growing up and reading the short story collections of Ray Bradbury. I don’t think it is quite as consistent as the Bradbury collections were, but there was still a sense of excitement at the end of every story as I wondered what the next one might bring.

Not everything in the book is actually a short story. Some of the entries are poems, and some are random paragraphs that without reading the introduction you might wonder what was going on. But even those have an entertaining and imaginative quality. One of the entries is actually a supplement for a musical album by Tori Amos where each section corresponds to a song on the album, and another is a companion piece for one of her tours.

I mentioned the introduction above. I think one of the cool things about the book is that for each story or entry he has included a little commentary within his introduction explaining the circumstances by which he came to write that particular piece. Whether it was by invitation from a publisher or fellow writer, or something from his personal history, or to accompany a piece of music. But the added information was enlightening and in some cases cast one of the entries in a new light. I took the approach of reading the stories first, and as I would finish one I would jump back to the introduction and find the page discussing it.

I think my favorites from the collection are October in the Chair, The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch, Goliath, and A Study in Emerald. The first one is kind of a traditional spooky story. The second and third both begin with what seems like a real and normal world, but then events occur to reveal something else going on; either an entirely different reality, or a glimpse into another unexpected reality. The last one is a re-imagining of a Sherlock Holmes like story with a twist.

All in all, not a perfect collection, but still very entertaining for me personally, especially in the way that it recaptured memories of reading from my youth. Also, it is the kind of collection that inspires me, makes me want to keep trying to write creatively myself.

Lubricating the political machine

I did my duty and cast my vote this afternoon. I wasn’t originally planning on voting today, but it looked like I had a good opportunity to take the afternoon off from work and run a few errands. I decided to take the chance and go ahead and cast my vote.

Oh, and I also got the oil changed in my car.

Somehow these two functions seem to echo each other.

Simple and yet endlessly detailed

Marcella and I went back to work this past week after having had the previous week off. The time off seems to have done the trick. There’s some sense of returning refreshed and with a fresh attitude.

We took a short trip up to DC and stayed overnight one night. We stayed in this kind of quirky hotel called the Helix near Dupont Circle. It had cool retro styling, and was sort of fun. Our main objective while in DC was to visit the National Gallery. We felt like a nice dose of art would be good for our souls.

Because we didn’t have a whole lot of time we did the “one hour” tour to focus on some of the most notable works in the gallery. But then we went to an exhibition called Medieval to Modern: Recent Acquisitions of Drawings, Prints, and Illustrated Books and spent our remaining time there, basically until the gallery closed. This is an exhibition I could go back to and spend much more time. It’s a fairly large show, spanning a good half-dozen rooms. I could probably spend an hour per room to absorb more of the fascinating work. The engravings and etchings, in particular, are engrossing in their detail, and then I always become enthralled with simple line drawings combined with watercolor washes. Click this link to see a Winslow Homer called Four Boys on a Beach. It is both incredibly simple and endlessly detailed. This is the kind of thing I love to just stand right up close to and pick out the little details and then go step back and absorb the whole, and then repeat. And there were many many instances of this kind of thing in the exhibition.

So, the exhibition was very good. We also went out to dinner at a local popular grill, and had a very nice meal. In the morning we had breakfast at Kramerbooks and Afterwards Cafe (please note this link opens a page that starts playing a really annoying video/audio file), and browsed the books for a while. Seems like a pretty great place, and I often wonder why similar places don’t seem to exist in other towns I’ve lived. I guess it takes a city of a sufficient magnitude to really support the business model, but I can imagine Marcella and I getting up to go to a such a place pretty regularly.

We also visited Alexandria and I showed Marcella a couple landmarks from my childhood. We saw a couple of schools I attended and a couple of the houses I lived in. It seemed like there were generally more cars parked on the street in the rosemont neighborhood than I remembered. There were always some, but now every block seemed full of cars. Maybe it’s just my memory is faulty.

The only drawback about the whole trip is that I came down with a cold and sore throat just as we were going, so that probably put a small damper on my enjoyment, but it was still a really nice get out of town trip.