Personal posts page 57

Tax worries again

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This past night I worked on my taxes, a stressful endeavor. I am an independent contractor, which has made things way more complicated than they used to be. I’ve been using the Free File program to use online applications for filling out taxes for years now, usually using TurboTax or H & R Block. They abstract from the forms and walk me through everything, and often provide help when I’m confused, but they can sometimes be worded confusingly. I just do the best I can. The biggest problem with the abstraction is that everything is trapped in this interface, so it’s hard to review it yourself and make sure everything is right.

Every year I worry that I’ve done something wrong, and this year is no exception. Since becoming an independent contractor, having to pay estimated taxes, I don’t really get a “return”, either applying my over-payments to next year or often having to pay additional. This year, though, I have a rather large over-payment, more than enough to pay my first quarterly estimates for 2016. That worries me. I’ve made a fair amount less than last year, so it may be right, but I’m still unsure. I’m going to sit on it and come back to it another night, see what I can do to review it.

Another thing I do every year is say that next year I’m going to work with an accountant. Every next year I wait until it’s too near tax time to comfortably figure out how to do that. I don’t really know how that works or what it would cost. It’s more of a consultation and review of how I’m doing the taxes myself that I need. Maybe next year. We’ll see.

I Ohio voting in democrat primary

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Today, “I Ohio voting”. I got in just about at the last minute. This time, for the first time ever, I took a party ballot for voting in a primary. I dislike the two-party system and how limited our choices are with effectively two not-so-dissimilar options. I think regardless of who is elected, more things that I dislike will come to pass politically than things I like. I don’t really want my name associated with either of the large, powerful parties that control this country. However, I kinda like what Bernie Sanders brings to the table, as compared to the other options. He was an independent for a long time, and still has that feel, at least as much so as a candidate can in this political environment. He’s down, but not out, so I figured I’d give him a tiny bit of help with a vote.

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I feel as if my mind has grown more cloudy and gray as I’ve gotten older. When I was younger, I had ideas coming to me all the time. I was able to take in new things easily, understand things, connect things. I was more idealistic. The future seemed more open. Reality, the mundane operations of going to work, paying bills, cleaning, taxes, all the adult things have taken focus. Life has always been a tunnel, but now it seems a more narrowly defined tunnel. It seems hard to make any headway toward anything that seems like real progress.

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Listening to some music, I thought it quite powerful, that it presented some important truth of the world. Then I thought that some others might not find it as such, but may find some other music powerful that I do not. “Everybody finds their own truths,” I thought, as I had many times before. Truths in everything: music, lyrics, statements, tweets, books, posts, articles, shows, scenes, thoughts, choices, situations: anything.

Toby Now

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My roommate has been out of town this week for work. It’s been me and the dogs. I got to work from home a couple days so I could feed them. Normally when I work from “home”, I actually work from the library, because my roommate doesn’t like me working from home. The dogs have been mostly good, though as usual they can be a bit demanding for attention.

Bought myself a few things earlier this week. Got my first ever electric razor (Phillips-Norelco PQ208). I’ve only used it once, but it seems like it’s going to speed up my shaving experience and make it more likely for me to do. Also, since I usually let my blades get rather dull before buying new ones, it will be less painful. It’s just a travel one, so it cost around as much as a 5 pack of blades for my former razor, the Mach 3.

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House fire down the street

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To continue with my fire theme (see Van fire), I was awoken around 0500 to the sound of some yelling and then some fire trucks. I couldn’t see any fire or smoke from my bedroom window, but could see the trucks and firefighters and neighbors outside. I could hear some talking and at one point chopping and breaking glass. There were so many fire trucks with flashing lights that a red glow came through the curtain, reminding me of a certain Seinfeld episode. They took up like half the block parked along the street. One firetruck parked right in front of our house. They were there for a couple hours probably and kept me awake for at least that long (I often have trouble falling asleep). The event got a brief blurb and video on the channel 5 website.

Van fire

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On my way home from my brothers, I saw a van on fire. Really on fire. The whole thing was enveloped, the van itself looking like a dark skeleton trapped within. The flames would sometimes jump to at least twice the height of the vehicle or flow across the lane width beside it. Firefighters were around it spraying away. The flames would fluctuate out and in, though always completely covering the van. This was on 480 West.

I witnessed another fire related incident recently as well. I saw a large plume of smoke on my way home from work. I was on 77 North and it looked to be a ways away. I had seen smaller plumes before and had wondered what they were, but never investigated. That day though, I had nowhere to be and was in my car, so I decided to find it. I just drove in its general direction until I got close enough to it. It was on the east side of Cleveland. The traffic around it was terrible and it was really slow going in its vicinity. I didn’t get the best view of it, but I did drive down the roads adjacent to it and saw the huge, rolling, multicolored plume of smoke billowing from pretty close and got brief glimpses of the flames and possibly the building. I saw streams spraying into the smoke and flame. The traffic was bad enough that I got my fill looking at it trying to get out of the traffic jam.

And we’re back

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I haven’t posted anything on this site since 2011. My “professional” site and related blog took my attention as I focused on my career. In 2011, this site was hosted from my home on an iBook. That server probably was taken down within a couple years of that post when I moved and didn’t bother trying to get it back up and running. By that point, I had my “professional” site on a shared host (Dreamhost) and liked what it had to offer. I no longer had to worry about keeping my IP updated with DynDNS or the downtime from internet outages (common with my Windstream DSL), server problems, router problems, etc.

This site was down for a period, but at some point I migrated it over to my Dreamhost server. I started it at personal.tobymackenzie.com. After a while, I decided it needed its own domain and would be a good candidate for a .name domain, so I bought tobymackenzie.name. The site was still not fully functional though. Some pages and sections were completely broken, and for a while I couldn’t log into the WordPress install this blog is run with.

Recently, I went through and got most things working and threw a more recent, responsive theme (Twenty Fifteen) onto the blog. A few sections still don’t work. I may have lost the data for the almost never used forums. The gallery is run by software that shared photos from my iPhoto library, no longer possible on shared hosting. I may replace these at some point, though I would probably only put the forum back in a read-only mode for posterity.

Anyway, this site is old and outdated. Some of the information is inaccurate. At some point soon, I intend to replace it with something new, probably something built on Symfony. I hope to merge the code-base and some of the content of my “professional” and personal sites, though in appearance and most content they will remain separate to serve their own purposes most effectively. I will leave this site as is on a sub-domain for posterity. As with most of my personal projects, who knows when I will actually get to it, but I have been itching to play with some things that I don’t get to at work.

As to this blog, I hope to get back into the habit of writing for it. I’ve put a lot of focus on my career lately, but miss thinking and writing about some of my other interests. It can be somewhat therapeutic to write down my ideas or about things happening in my life. Lately, my interest in homes and architecture has been coming back. Hopefully, this blog will be seeing me as regularly as it once did and my thoughts will be archived for my future self and others.