LateNightHacking Louis Journal

Auth

Today I continued working on paperwork. Michelle and I had some more budget discussions. I updated my tax spreadsheet with the Minnesota 2004 forms, so barring any suprises when I get my official W-2's and 1099's, I know how much I owe in taxes. For Minnesota, I did pretty good. I owe $59 exactly. Of course, for my federal taxes things aren't as pretty - I owe about $2,200. It went up another $400 from the last time I calculated in December, because of all the end-of-the year mutual fund capital gains ditributions. It makes me grumpy that with all the effort I put in to getting things right, it's still off by this much. And then, Michelle asked the very astute question, why were we so far off this year compared to last year. The answer is I don't really know, which is also exasperating.

We had a light lunch at Central Market, because we planned to go Ruggles for dinner and get dessert. At Ruggles, Michelle had a bup of sweet potato bisque and a chocolate volcano cake, and I had a small ceasar salad and a chocolate brownie. (The brownie was a little drier this time I think, which made it not quire as rich as last time.)

Well, I didn't get much work e-mail answered but the floor in my office is actually starting to look clean. Of course, my to-do list is still miles long but that's a pretty fundamental problem. Staying on Michelle's schedule this weekend worked pretty well - I'm not too sleepy, I can't say that I feel like I got more done.

In fact, I've got to admit that I had some pretty wild dreams this weekend. I can't remember this morning's, but yesterday's was wild. It started with shopping in some sort of new age shop at the top of a hill (cukoo clocks and windchimes, I think). Then I had to escape out the back door and do a first-person shooter scene down the side of the hill through huge boulders. To stop the dobule agent bad guy I finally had to shoot him point blank in the head, but it still didn't hurt him, just knocked him out. When unconscious, he reverted into this giant (3ft) squirrel. Then these other guys came and said they'd take care of him, tied the squirrel up and hauled him off. They told me I needed to go help this other kid who had turned into some funny kind of bear and needed my help learning how to turn back into a human. I told the kid he ought to go empty his bladder before we did the transformation process, because it would take a lot of concentration and needing to pee would only be distracting. (Now you know in case this ever happens to you!) See, to transform, what you have to do is first close your eyes and clear your mind so you are not really thinking about your body at all (like when you are day dreaming or reading, you are not really conscious of what angle your leg is at, for example). Then you begin concentrating more and more on the proprioception of your human body - you concentrate on what your (human) body should feel like - where your arms and legs are, how your clothes feel against your skin, where your center of balance is, etc. Pretty soon, what your body should feel like and what it actually feels like will converge and you will have transformed as desired. Ta-da! Of course, if you're new to this, it helps if you are holding hands with someone who is doing the transformation with you (you can blame Peirs Anthony for that bit). So, yeah, pretty wild.

I've been thinking a little bit about what makes some people's blogs more interesting than others. I mean, honestly, I can't say that my journal makes all that interesting reading, compared to, say, Ursual's. And I know other examples - Yukino's is more interesting to me than Gloria's, etc. I don't know what the answer is, I've just started podering it. Part of it is whether or not you know the person - a friend's blog automatically gets a few interest points no matter how boring it is otherwise. I guess after that it must have to do with what they have to talk about and how they say it. <shrug> What do you think?

This, of course, is why I typed out that whole dream thing above. While a bit embarassing to have as part of one's public persona, it's probably more interesting than what I ate or what I bought at Target. :) I hope, as part of my "keep in touch" goal, to come up with more interesting stuff for my journal. I'm thinking that commentary is good - more rants and fewer mundane facts. (Though the mundane facts will continue to appear when I can't think of anything better to say.) Second, more work samples. Ursula posts lots of things she painted. Well, I should be able to post code bit and discuss them. Maybe it's not what the general public would finds interesting, but it should appeal to the only audience (besides family members) I can hope to satisfy.

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I just had a though. (Yes, it's way late and I've completely blown my plan of going to bed early. I'm on a roll, don't bug me.) Maybe one of the reasons I'm frazzled is I haven't been walking at work during the winter. When I walk, I have a chunk of time when I can mull over any problem, and I can't get distracted by a task switch because there's nothing else I can do until I get back. I was just thinking that I solved one of my budgeting problems while walking this evening. The answer is pro-rate everything. Now this is not a surprising conclusion, it's what I usually do, but while walking I did get a chance to realize I'd been neglecting to apply this trick to certain problems and that this trick is fundamentally very applicable and should be used more zealously. So maybe I need to walk more in Minnesota. With the winter weather and the daylight savings time clock change, I haven't been, but maybe I should.