The Mandelbear's Musings

I've been using the same software for doing my taxes for somewhere around 30 years. It was called TaxCut back then; the company that made it was bought by H&R Block in 1993, though they didn't rename the software until 2008. For much, if not all, of that time I've been doing it on a Mac of some sort.

Last year I looked at the system requirements and discovered that it would no longer run on my ageing Mac Mini. It also wouldn't run on Windows 7. It needed either NacOS High Sierra or Windows 8.1. So I used their web version, which I remember as rather slow, and enough different from the offline version of previous years to be annoying.

So for this year (which is to say tax year 2021), my options would appear to be:

1. Use the web version again. Ugh, but at least it would import 2020 without trouble. Maybe. It didn't let me upload a 2019 data file; I had to feed it a PDF and do a lot of fixing up.
2. Run it on the laptop that has Win 8.1, or put the Win 10 disk that came with (new) Sable back in and use that. Ugh.
3. Buy a newer Mac Mini. I could get a minimal one for about $100-150, or a more recent one (running Mojave) for around $200-250. (Those are eBay prices, of course.)

(Note that cost of the software is the same for all three options.)

I'm really leaning toward #3. But really that would just be an excuse to buy another computer, and would leave me with two Mac Minis that I'd hardly ever use. More likely I'll dither about it until the end of March and then break down and go use the web version again.

Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
Donation buttons in profile.

A very busy three days. Sunday I finished up the taxes, and e-filed. Should probably have filed the state taxes on paper; the e-filing cost extra. Monday I started with Lee Hecht Harrison, the "career transition" firm that Ricoh is paying for. The initial session on Monday was very useful, since it included a "resume and linkedin jumpstart" segment. The experience section of my resume will need to be completely redone, of course.

I almost all of yesterday online, mostly on LHH and linkedin. Yesterday I took an LHH "webinar" -- in spite of the setup website telling me my browser was fully functional, the actual applet or whatever it was needed to be set up with a JVM and libraries, and couldn't find them on my Debian system. I switched to the Mac, but lost the visuals for about the first 15 minutes. Probably lost more to divided attention. Still useful.

A nice st/roll on Sunday, and a walk yesterday. A little walking Monday, but just a couple of blocks. Still, walkies good.

Some links down in the notes.

So... pretty good, though no walks. (I did some walking in Fry's and parking lots yesterday, but that hardly counts.) Got started on the taxes, which is good. Quiet days, mostly at home. I could get used to that altogether too quickly.

The kitchen was a disaster area when I got home late Wednesday; between the YD running a load of dishes (it's not one of her usual chores) and me washing pots, it is now more-or-less usable again.

I think what I need to do is to reconfigure the kitchen and office into something like their final (post-move) form. Anything that doesn't fit goes into storage.

A lot of stuff is going to have to wait until the taxes are done. I let that slip, as usual. Growf.

Quite a few links. The Google Art Project is way cool! Pictures from dozens of art museums online and browsable, though it has a few navigational glitches. This is a common problem with stuff based on Javascript -- it doesn't have to work the way the user expects.

I want a Pebble E-Paper Watch. Want, want, want. So, apparently, do thousands of other people. And Code Not Physical Property, Court Rules in Goldman Sachs Espionage Case. That can cut both ways -- clearly companies need to be able to protect their trade secrets, but equating wrongful copying of information with theft of a physical object isn't the way to do it. Somebody tell the media industries.

The main thing yesterday was taking my Mac in to work and printing out the tax forms. Needless to say, it was a huge relief. (The stupid machine didn't want to print -- I ended up putting the postscript files on a thumbdrive and printing them from my Linux box, which of course worked perfectly without any fuss.

My arm and shoulder were doing much better, but in the process of getting into my car coming home from work I managed to put a lot of pressure on my right side around the bottom ribs, and did something unpleasant to a muscle there. Cyclobenzaprine and naproxen sodium are my friends.

On reflection and going through the symptoms, I don't seem to have much actual social anxiety, though I probably did at one time. What I have now is a set of very efficient avoidance mechanisms that keep me out of potentially painful or embarassing situations. Possibly it can be dealt with the same way.

I do have a lot of apathy to go with the avoidance. That's from the disthymia, presumably.

It rained all day -- no walkies. Not really a bad day, just not a notably good one.

I started the day with comparatively little pain in my shoulder, but trying to put my shirt on took care of that detail very quickly. Ouch!! It turns out that reaching up or behind my back is what makes it hurt the most; that must have been what I was doing when I damaged it: picking up something a little behind me.

I spent the rest of the day listless and rather foggy. It seems that pain wears me out physically and eats away at my ability to think; probably effects of adrenaline and endorphins, respectively. I could pretty easily identify the adrenaline reaction, since it's similar to anxiety; a little deep breathing helped.

At Colleen's suggestion I took a walk around the rose garden. It did help; I found that I could swing both arms naturally. It took out a lot of the stress.

After my walk I did the final data entry on the taxes. I get a little back from my withholding, which was a huge relief. (For those not familiar with the US's horrible income tax system, you can get an extension on filing, but you have to pay up front or you end up paying both penalties and interest on the difference.) I still have to do the printing, and mail in the forms.

I finally put Argo (the Thinkpad) away pending a memory upgrade, and switched over to Barnard (the Dell netbook). Much smaller and lighter, though the keyboard is pretty bad and the touchpad is absolutely loathsome. A mouse largely fixes that.

I spent the evening out in the living room doing things that didn't involve either my right arm or much of my brain: re-arranging files and culling old stuff from my to.do file.

Anyone out there reading this who has chronic pain has my heartfelt sympathy.

On the good side, Colleen walked a total of 87 feet in her morning session, and practiced transferring from the bed to the walker and back in the afternoon. So things are looking hopeful.

Other than that, though it was a day made of fail caused entirely by my own procrastination. I usually rely on the people around me, Colleen and Chaos in particular, to prod me about Things That Need Doing, like taxes and filling out my guest questionaire for Baycon (which I did this morning, a day late).

Taxes were particularly harrowing, in part because of TaxCut's user interface fail (which provides two ways of printing an extension, one of which works and one of which makes it look like you've zeroed out your entire return), and in part because a buyout at the end of the year left me with an unexpected $30K capital transaction. Luckily, it worked out to a $3K loss, which helped. I need to keep much better records and closer tabs on my finances, don't I?

I'm not at all happy about the way I snapped at people while I was doing my taxes. I should probably have just shut the door at the outset, after warning people not to disturb me -- when I'm concentrating on something tricky and disagreeable I seem to be totally incapable of civilized behavior. One thing that did help was that Alison found some gluten-free chocolate cake in the freezer as soon as she heard me cursing at the computer, and had it sitting on the counter when I finally emerged.

It was a lightly-attended Wednesday, but even so I wasn't up for handling it.

I am feeling particularly down on myself right now. Procrastination and failure. Typical.

A good walk, but uneventful. I feel good about singing for Colleen -- she loves it, and I need to get back into the swing of it. I'm feeling totally overwhelmed by the taxes; normally I'd be farther along by now. I can recognize it as avoidance, but don't know why and don't know how to stop. I did spend an hour or so sorting; I guess that's something. I still need to go through four piles of envelopes on the desk.

Thinking about the future scares the hell out of me now; it's becoming harder to avoid. The depression was probably one of my avoidance mechanisms, wasn't it? I can still avoid doing things, but not thinking the things I haven't done and am still not finding the time to do. Bletch.

Put in a little singing practice last night, and this morning I finally totalled up my sales for last year: over $1000, which is at least respectable even if it isn't nearly enough to break even for the year, given the need to pay the royalties I forgot to pay myself last year.

Most of that total went through dealers, so sales tax will be pretty minimal. And most of the non-dealer "sales" were actually gifts, but I'm required to pay use tax on them.

I also wrote a simple perl script to compute the totals from my tab-separated text file. Really ought to compute subtotals by county, too; I was lazy and just used grep.

... so I can at least feel a little bit productive, even though I have things to do that I've put off for months that are almost equally important.

The taxes are, finally, DONE: all that's left is a final look, sealing the envelopes, and a trip to the Post Office tomorrow morning.

Many other things have, needless to say, not been done, but I'm not going to worry about that tonight.

Done with the preliminary data entry.

The next steps are stacking up and sorting all the various forms 1099 so I can enter those, and making sure I have the sales and inventory numbers handy from the sales tax worksheets (09:08). That'll get done tonight. Then I have to actually set up the Mac laptop that I'm borrowing from work, install the software, and turn the crank. Which will change my mood to "cranky".

Added: Production cost: $3.05 each for About Bleeding Time, $3.16 each for Coffee, Computers, and Song. This is physical production and doesn't include royalties. I was originally thinking I didn't have to worry about those because they're all paid to myself, but then realized that I do need to compute them so that I can value my unsold inventory. Gaak!

On the other hand, that's good, because the royalties are all 2007 income for the songwriter (me), but the part that applies to unsold inventory gets subtracted from 2007's cost of goods sold. Um... right? Looks right.

(Anybody know offhand what [T]he statutory mechanical license fee is $.091 for songs 5 minutes or less, or $.0175 per minute or fraction thereof per copy for songs over 5 minutes.)... so that's $1.652 for CC&S, and $0.91 for ABT. So that's nearly $1900 total.

The data-entry is done as of this morning, except for convention travel, in-kind payments (i.e. free CDs for the contributors), and inventory. Then it's a simple matter of tracking down all the various forms (W2, 1099) and transferring subtotals to the actual software. Straightforward, but,... ugh.

Bottom line is that it looks as though my CD sales made a small profit, at least in the sense of gross sales exceeding cost of goods sold. Whether that translates into a positive bottom line on the Schedule C will depend on just how many of my various expenditures I decide to call business expenses, as well as exactly how inventory gets handled: that's a section of the form I'm totally unfamiliar with at this point.

This post seems to be written in blog order: most recent events first. Seems appropriate.

Just finished off the data-entry for the checkbooks. That leaves the paper receipts, which are a bit more work but also more interesting, and the Amex and Paypal reports.

Tasty dinner: scalloped potatoes, pork ribs with spicy peanut sauce, and carrot-and-raisin salad.

Went for a nice drive with the Cat this afternoon. Good to get out of the house and hang out together. We don't usually talk much; it's all about good company and comfortable silences. Spent some time working on a song -- still marinating.

Did a little shopping. Mostly Office Max for white business card stock for mini-fliers, little colored dots to mark ripped albums, 9V batteries for the travel guitar, and a package-opener. Fry's for a 2GB micro-SD card and a little USB reader that's no more than a 250%-longer plug. Came with a little plastic cover threaded onto a little lanyard of the sort usually used for cell phone charms, but it seemed unnecessary and I took it off.

Did the 4-mile walk by Los Gatos Creek this morning. Felt good. It always does. The weather was cool but a little too humid after last night's rain.

The other major accomplishment this weekend was clearing the boxes of debris off Colleen's old cedar chest in the garage attic, and clearing enough of a path that Kat and I will be able to get it down. As older daughter, Kat will be inheriting it. I believe Colleen got it from her grandmother... It's been in the attic for well over a decade. Of course, it will still have to be passed down over the edge into the stairwell; the "footpath" between the boxes is too narrow, winding, and cluttered to be usable.

A number of things didn't get done, including data-entry for taxes and scratch tracks for the next album. Hopefully I'll get started on those this evening rather than letting them go until the weekend: that's likely to be busy. Not as insanely busy as the weekend after that, though.

All my random, scribbled-on-tiny-slips-of-paper sales "records" have been properly scribbled on large, well-ordered pieces of paper. I still need to go through and make an integrated customer list, but at this point I have enough information -- what was sold where, when and to whom -- to compute my sales taxes fairly quickly. I have a little under 2 weeks (including two whole weekends), so that's OK.

The fileserver still isn't dead, but I don't trust it yet. I'll probably upgrade to a Maxtor 500 just on general principles.

22:15 It died. There's a new disk in my immediate future. In fact, I may just start transfering to the PATA drive I bought Wednesday.

22:37 Hmm. I'm seeing write errors on the mirror drive (sdb). The easy thing to try would be disconnecting it first.

Spent a few minutes this morning sorting receipts. For the first time in decades, I actually have all of last year's receipts sorted before the end of January. Cool! Of course, that doesn't include bank statements and most of the album-related stuff, but it gets a major bit of clutter off the desk. Perhaps more importantly, it keeps this year's receipts from piling up and creating more clutter.

The next major push is sales tax, which I only have about two more weeks to do. Fortunately, all I really have to do for that is to identify each sale by amount and location, so I know which county to assign it to. Should be straightforward; hopefully I can have that done by, say, Friday.

The taxes are done -- all but addressing and mailing the envelopes. I'm getting quite a bit back this year; next year I'll probably take a big hit, between the chaoswolf not being a dependent and possibly, with a little luck, album sales.

I walked the Wolfling through hers on TaxCut -- totally straightforward, though she got unaccountably upset when the time came for writing a $3 check to the Gubernator. I addressed her envelopes for her.

The printer is whining at me. It will stop if I keep ignoring it long enough.

Took the Younger Daughter to Barnes & Snowball to use her birthday gift cards. She looked at gaming books but ended up getting mainly stuff on babysitting and money management. Could she possibly be growing up? Found a couple of mysteries with food in their titles for the flower_cat, and the newest Ursula LeGuin Earthsea book for myself. Put it on the shelf with the other unread books, to be hauled out after the album is finished.

Listened to today's dump CD on the way to B&N (plus a drive afterward, since it was less than half over by the time I got back with the YD). It's getting better -- there was really only one track that was horribly broken (sounded like I was gargling while I was singing -- really needed to have cleared my throat properly and started over), though I think there are several others that could benefit from new vocals. For some reason those are a lot easier for me than guitar. I need more practice at multi-tracking guitar parts.

Good -- the printer has stopped whining. I really like my little mini-ITX systems.

Finished the tax data-entry about 8:30pm and went out for a drive with the flower_cat. I'll probably want to go over a few things in the morning, but between my usual prep and TaxCut's interview mode it all went very smoothly. Had to put up with tiny fonts and the Mac's horrible UI (and TaxCut's slightly botched implementation of it), but it's done now.

Looked at the disk usage on the fileserver and saw that I had somehow crept up to 99% on the main partition. Went into the directory where I keep downloaded CD images and deleted a few, mainly from 2005 plus the Debian beta installers, and got it down to 94%. It'll keep until I upgrade the drives, anyway. Could maybe do that tomorrow, even, or at least get started. Shouldn't actually do it until after I've printed the tax forms, at least, though I can start copying data earlier.

No walkies -- it rained most of the day, right up until dinner time. Grump. We need the rain, but grump anyway.

Went to start working on my taxes, only to find that the "free" CD of TaxCut that they sent me in the mail was actually not a CD of TaxCut but only a network installer: it goes out and tries to download the real copy, after trying to get you to pay $5 for "extended download protection" on top of the $29 that you'd normally pay for federal+state -- which means that if your machine croaks sometime after 60 days you don't have to pay to download it again.

Not to mention the fact that it doesn't actually work on the Windows 98 machine I used last year. I'm guessing that it's flummoxed by the fact that I'm using Firefox instead of Internet Exploiter. Since it's really just a downloader and all. If they think I'm going to type my credit card information into IE...

The only currently-working XP machines in the house are in the various bedrooms; I found this out on the Mac laptop that I had the presence of mind to borrow from work. There's a Win98 laptop, but it's currently booted into Linux and serving as the router on my new DSL line. So now I'm off to Office Max and Fry's -- where I was going to go anyway -- to see whether I can find an actual CD.

Then I get to find out whether the Mac version of TC can import last year's data that was prepared on a PC.

I'm suddenly very glad I thought to stop off at BevMo on my way home yesterday and get a fresh bottle of gin. And put it in the fridge.

The tax data-entry is done. There are still a few receipts to be sorted out, mainly from charities, but those are just supporting documentation: the actual numbers come from the check register and the AMEX year-end summaries. I still have the various forms 1099 and the W2 that I need to get out of their envelopes, but those get entered directly because they don't have to be subtotalled.

So I'm going to declare the data-entry finished, and spend most of tomorrow on music (and being social with our various guests -- we've invited three or four, and we often get drop-ins). Call ahead if you want to drop in, and bear in mind that our idea of an Easter celebration involves barbecued rabbit and a ritual showing of The Wicker Man.

Finished the data-entry for the check registers, which includes almost all of the charitable contributions and about half the assorted business expenses. Now I get to go through credit-card receipts for the rest of it. Thursday, maybe.

In case you're wondering, I tend to use the shoebox method of bookkeeping. Every once in a while I transfer invoices and receipts from the shoebox to a bunch of file folders. Around tax time every year I decant all the non-tax folders into 9x12 envelopes and box them up, then go through the receipts relating to deductions and my side business (Schedule C), and type them into a tab-separated text file.

Then I run the file through a Perl script to compute subtotals by category, at which point data entry into TaxCut is basically trivial.

Taxes are mostly done; there are a couple of things I still have to track down, like the Y.D.'s investment income. But the data is entered. I'll get money back, so, yes, I should have done this weeks ago. I procrastinate.

Mild flame: TaxCut has gotten harder to navigate. It keeps trying to display stupid videos. And I can no longer create an itemized worksheet on a form, just in the interview. And I can't get directly to the interview page I need, just to a section. IDIOTS!

But I'll be rid of the wretched stuff tomorrow.

Sorted the banking and investment stuff for taxes -- most of it goes straight to the archive box, since I separate out the tax forms when they arrive, but sometimes I miss something. Spent most of the day when I wasn't procrastinating or doing other things (see below) doing the initial data-entry. I always start with the check registers; the one I've been looking for for the last couple of months -- basically April through November -- turned up lurking in the bottom of the folder it was supposed to be in. Apparently it's been avoiding me.

We're spending the day sitting Amanda while Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff go house-hunting. Mostly flower_cat; she's much better at amusing four-year-olds than I am.

For about an hour in the morning, went with the Younger Daughter to her school, which was holding their annual "Arts on the Green" showcase for many of the performance groups. Not her intermediate drama class, but she did have to rendezvous with the rest of the team she's working with for her science class. (Only one other kid out of the four showed up, so not much got done.)

After a small lunch I went out for my walk. And after that, I took the Older Daughter, chaoswolf, out for her first driving lesson. This consisted of half an hour or so of driving in circles in an empty parking lot, but felt a lot longer. I wasn't nearly as nervous as I expected to be, perhaps because you can't do much damage at 10 mph. I don't think it was much like the Wolfling expected it to be, either. But nothing was damaged, and the Wolfling got a little bit of time behind the wheel. We're giving her 6 hours of professional lessons as soon as we can make the arrangements.

This evening is a house filk at Kanef's, and between now and then I get to start on the credit-card receipts (mostly from Fry's). What fun! :-P