Weekend Plans Post: One of Two Things You Can Be Sure Of
(I tried to find a nice classic commercial involving taxes but, to no one’s surprise but mine, they were all political.)
Well, we did our taxes. What a magnificent pain in the butt. I mean, if you use TurboTax and you only work a regular job and you only own the one house and you’re not in school and you don’t have any bitcoin or bored apes or anything wacky like that, well, you can get away with not hiring an accountant.
You just need a bunch of paperwork including the tax assessment on the house.
Now, Colorado is the state with the third-lowest property tax in the country and I’ve had a number of friends and acquaintances who have lived in New Jersey (the highest property tax state in the nation) and I knew better than to say stuff like “I had to pay $650 in property tax last year!” in front of them. But it was always funny when someone else said something like that.
This year we had all of our paperwork together, all of the W-2 and W-4 and W-12 and this and that and the other thing and the only thing we couldn’t find is the property tax paperwork. We know we pay it (it’s part of the payment to the mortgage). We know that we are *EXCEPTIONALLY* good at keeping the paperwork as it comes in. We know that it should be in the special paperwork basket kept aside for special paperwork. Where is it?!?
Well, we knew that, for the last 6 years, the estimated property tax and the actual property tax were somewhere within a hundred bucks of each other so we dug into our paperwork and found the estimated property tax paperwork exactly where we expected it to be and then on Sunday we did our taxes.
And then, of course, the property tax paperwork showed up in the mailbox on Monday.
DANG IT.
Ah, well. We ended up owing the Federal Gummint $X and Colorado owed us a little over $X so we figured “okay, we don’t need to touch anything” and will plow on to 2025 and get ready to do 2025’s taxes in 11 1/2 months or so. And we will try to remember that we’re really good at this and we keep the paperwork in the special paperwork basket and if we can’t find something it’s because it hasn’t been mailed to us yet.
So, this weekend will be spent thinking about how we’re not thinking about taxes. That’s a nice thought.
There’s a game night on Saturday and that will be nice.
But, mostly, it’ll be nice to not have that Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Tussle”. Photo taken by Maribou.)
The story behind these two shots is that Maribou took the first one and said “Can you get a better one with his face?” and I said “Sure!” and zoomed in took the second.
Nothing too exciting here. We’re going to go shopping for some chairs to replace the ones at the table I use for board games. The ones I have now have padded seats that are falling apart, and the legs were pretty badly chewed by our dogs. We just want simple chairs that are comfortable. They won’t have padded seats like the current ones, but we might buy some cushions that we can replace.
Hopefully the new chairs mean I will be less likely to have back pain after extended periods of gaming, but I might just be getting old.Report
Chairs are downright impossible to find. You can find solid ones that are uncomfortable or comfortable ones that have been priced to the point where they’re still available by the time you search for them.
Has a company recently gone out of business? You might be able to get 3-4 chairs for a decent price.
Or some cubicle walls.Report
We had to go full orc on a section of woods that we’d acquired a few years ago from a neighbor. For him it was the hind end of his property; for us it’s the gateway to our woods next to the house.
There were about a dozen misshapen walnuts along the fence line plus untold numbers of invasive species and brambles that needed clearing. Called in a forestry crew and five guys with about seven different machines showed up and made the shortest possible work of a lot of small, medium and big trees of varying degrees of nobility.
Upshot is we have a 12 x 12 x 4 pile of 18″ rounds for splitting (mostly walnut) four equally sized piles of beautiful wood chips and a nice maintainable 12′ wide path to the back part of the property. The star of the day was what they call the ‘forestry mulcher’; it’s a skid steer with a massive wheel of steel teeth that ‘eats’ invasive honeysuckle and tree of heaven and returns them to the earth faster than you’d like to think possible. Churns and improves the soil at the same time… leaving it lightly tilled for reseeding. Which is what I get to do this weekend.
And see Duecedy Dune with Lady Marchmaine. She hadn’t seen Uno Duno, so she watched it last night after having read the book 40ish (OMG) years ago. And, proving my point from the other thread, was mystified by lots of things that were in the movie but not explained well enough to trigger 40yo memories. Like, why were the Atreides going to Arrakis, and why did the Emperor move them, then stab them in the back? More words, less pew pew.Report
Maribou watched Duno Uno the other night and I asked her to pay special attention to the Duke Leto “exhale” scene and asked her whether she’d have understood it had she not read the books a million times.
She told me, afterwards, the movie was gorgeous but, yeah, they did showing when, maybe, telling would have benefitted everybody a hair more.
“Alas”, we messaged back and forth to each other a couple of times.Report
STILL trying to heal up from this bone bruise 🙁
I feel good when I first get up, or when I sit for a while. I walk or stand on the floors here (teaching) which are vinyl tile over concrete and I hurt again. Still afraid I’ll have to have my meniscus operated on sooner or later, there’s a definite
“pinch” sometimes when I take a step
I also have a dental checkup this afternoon, an idea I greatly loathe. I was just saying Tuesday “thank goodness I am done with medical stuff for a while and I get my two free afternoons back” but nope, I got the reminder right after that.
I do need to get my tax stuff out to my “guy,” I printed out all the 1099s I need. Maybe if I’m out of the dentist early enough and not too traumatized I do it then….Report
Good luck. I know that Maribou and I got through it, barely, without conflict. I hope you can do the same.Report
I am not an inherently organized person, so my tax prep life got rather easier when our town started letting us go to their website to request an email including all our property tax transactions for a selected calendar year.Report
We will look into that in 2026 or 2027.Report
Amazingly enough, in Cook County, the carbon paper capital of the world, property tax stuff is all online. Just type the address and you can look it up.Report
When we moved 3+ years ago, my wife’s dementia was already at a point where keeping her on task was difficult. As a result, an embarrassing amount of stuff from her office and the basement just got thrown in boxes and moved. It all went into the basement of the new townhouse, which despite the upstairs being considerably smaller than the old house, has a larger basement. Since the kids and I put her in memory care 11 months ago, and it’s clear this is permanent — or until the money runs out — I have been (very) slowly working my way through the basement, recycling and discarding.
One of the things the builder left was a 12×24′ piece of the carpet. I don’t know that it’s that size, but that’s what the note on it says. It’s folded, not rolled, so takes up more floor space than it needs to. I’ve got enough space now to, with some care, unfold and refold and otherwise manipulate it and get it rolled up. That’s this weekend’s project.
My daughter wasn’t happy when I told her. “Dad, you’re 70. Should you really be doing things like that?” I pointed out the dumbbells by the couch and told her that if the TV got turned on after dinner, I spent 20-25 minutes using the dumbbells and my body weight for strength training. Her daughters are lunatics. I’ve caught all of them doing something insane on hikes or at the playground. Caught in the sense of grabbing the waistband of their jeans as they overbalanced and were going to fall into the river.Report
My dear friend’s daughters are entering the age where they’ve moved from smiling and nodding when I’ve explained stuff like “Uncle Jay is cutting the cheese in the kitchen! You should stay away from someone who is cutting the cheese!” (their mom explained to me “we’ve never used that in front of them” and I told her “that’s some of my best material!”) and into the age where they say stuff like “I don’t care!” when I say similar.
All that to say: Dude. I can’t even imagine.
Lunacy now means the amount of time I spend trying to explain Yahtzee to someone too old to laugh at jokes about passing gas.Report
Back in 1990, when I thought I’d be moving to California instead of Colorado, we did a lot of flying back and forth. On one of those trips, Robbie lent me a copy of Peter Murphy’s “Deep” when I was flying from New York to California.
Our hub was Chicago. On the trip that Robbie lent me “Deep”, our layover was something around 2-3 hours.
So I went back and forth on the underground moving walkway for about an hour listening to Peter Murphy.
Thanks, Robbie.
Report
Volunteered to help the HOA remove tree stakes on Saturday. This is a largely sane HOA. At one of the last lots the woman living there gave permission for us to go inside the front fence and remove two stakes. She assured us that her large dog — some sort of mastiff cross that clearly violates the HOA’s rules on dog size — was under control. Just as we were finishing she opened her front door and the mastiff got through the gap. There was much barking and growling and the rest of the group got through the front gate. I was the last one in line and just before I was out the dog snapped at me. Put a hole in my jeans and left me with a shallow tear in the skin on the back of my thigh a couple of inches long.
The HOA notified the property management company with a formal request that the dog be removed. The resident will be notified on Monday, and if the dog is still there in 30 days animal control will take it. Because there is a biting incident, if the dog is taken it will almost certainly be put down. I feel badly for the dog. My injury is slight; every few years I do worse to myself be falling off a bicycle. It’s a 110-pound part mastiff; someone(s) obviously failed at the training and socialization a dog that’s going to get that big needs. I’ve been back over my recollection of the important seconds multiple times; did I do something wrong that triggered the aggressive dog?Report