Strange Day
Feb. 21st, 2011 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howeirdWoke up at 6, got on the computer around 7:30, played till 10-ish, breakfast was a cinnamon raisin bagel with light cream cheese and a hardboiled egg. Got my butt out to the movie theater half an hour early for The King's Speech. which I'll review some other time. Enjoyed it a lot, the three leading characters were what acting is all about.
From there to Starbucks nearby, enjoyed the eye candy, which is plentiful near the theater.
The weather was a festival of clouds of many varieties, moving in different directions at different speeds. That usually means a cold front and rain Real Soon Now, so I went straight home and nibbled on grapes and cashews and channel surfed a bit. CNN is once again trying to make the news instead of just report it, this time it's Libya. They play the same shabby cellphone video over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over in a window as they interview people who have nothing substantial to say. At one point they put their "Internet technical expert" on to say sweet nothings about how hackers will always find a way to get news out of a country no matter how shut down the Internet is there. This is a 20-ish woman who is wearing black thick-framed glasses with tape on the camera side, wearing a very expensive looking silk blouse. I'll bet real cash pennies she's an actress, not a techie. The almost total lack of non-government news from Libya made her statements a lie. The anchorclown said something inane along the lines of it is hard to get news when the government is not releasing any.
There are 195 countries in the world, many more than the three being reported on by CNN are in the midst of various degrees of war, revolution or just plain bad governing. But CNN's format is to pound one issue into the ground 24/7 because it is easy.
After an hour or so of flipping channels I decided eff it and went upstairs and took a nap.
Dinner was more home made chicken soup, this time I boiled up some more barley because I had not put nearly enough in the original recipe (it tends to drop to the bottom of the pot and burn). Dessert was a banana-orange-chocolate smoothie. Yummy.
Looked at the calendar and realized it is after Feb 15, my brokerage info would be available to download into TurboTax, so I did my taxes. After importing the data, the refund indicator went from getting fed and state refunds to owing the IRS $8500 and California $1400. Stupid TurboTax did not import the cost basis for two tax-free mutual funds I'd sold. After those bits were entered by hand, the refunds came back.
Funny story, that. When my inheritance came through, I invested most of it in a pair of tax-free funds which my father had held. But I forgot that he lived in WA State, which has no income tax, and those funds were taxable in California. So a week later, when this revelation came to me, I sold those two funds and invested the same amount in two California tax-free funds. In the week which had passed, the price for the funds had gone up, which made them a short term capital gain. I think.
Anyway, taxes are filed, and we'll see what the IRS and Franchise Tax Board say about Turbo Tax's math.
Plans for tomorrow:
Scan the job listings
If she calls/emails, tell the trainee recruiter in LA not to bother with the Cisco job, it's too late now.
The rest depends on the weather.
From there to Starbucks nearby, enjoyed the eye candy, which is plentiful near the theater.
The weather was a festival of clouds of many varieties, moving in different directions at different speeds. That usually means a cold front and rain Real Soon Now, so I went straight home and nibbled on grapes and cashews and channel surfed a bit. CNN is once again trying to make the news instead of just report it, this time it's Libya. They play the same shabby cellphone video over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over in a window as they interview people who have nothing substantial to say. At one point they put their "Internet technical expert" on to say sweet nothings about how hackers will always find a way to get news out of a country no matter how shut down the Internet is there. This is a 20-ish woman who is wearing black thick-framed glasses with tape on the camera side, wearing a very expensive looking silk blouse. I'll bet real cash pennies she's an actress, not a techie. The almost total lack of non-government news from Libya made her statements a lie. The anchorclown said something inane along the lines of it is hard to get news when the government is not releasing any.
There are 195 countries in the world, many more than the three being reported on by CNN are in the midst of various degrees of war, revolution or just plain bad governing. But CNN's format is to pound one issue into the ground 24/7 because it is easy.
After an hour or so of flipping channels I decided eff it and went upstairs and took a nap.
Dinner was more home made chicken soup, this time I boiled up some more barley because I had not put nearly enough in the original recipe (it tends to drop to the bottom of the pot and burn). Dessert was a banana-orange-chocolate smoothie. Yummy.
Looked at the calendar and realized it is after Feb 15, my brokerage info would be available to download into TurboTax, so I did my taxes. After importing the data, the refund indicator went from getting fed and state refunds to owing the IRS $8500 and California $1400. Stupid TurboTax did not import the cost basis for two tax-free mutual funds I'd sold. After those bits were entered by hand, the refunds came back.
Funny story, that. When my inheritance came through, I invested most of it in a pair of tax-free funds which my father had held. But I forgot that he lived in WA State, which has no income tax, and those funds were taxable in California. So a week later, when this revelation came to me, I sold those two funds and invested the same amount in two California tax-free funds. In the week which had passed, the price for the funds had gone up, which made them a short term capital gain. I think.
Anyway, taxes are filed, and we'll see what the IRS and Franchise Tax Board say about Turbo Tax's math.
Plans for tomorrow:
Scan the job listings
If she calls/emails, tell the trainee recruiter in LA not to bother with the Cisco job, it's too late now.
The rest depends on the weather.
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