o! canada!

This past weekend Beanie left Cleveland and flew to Seattle and hooked up with long-time Seattlite Tommy and came up here. Together we all went to Vancouver BC and Bowen Island. We'd have gotten there sooner but we were the first car turned away from the 9:30 Pete Townsend ferry to Keystone. The 12:15 was canceled due to extreme low tide. Dammit! We had to drive south to Kingston and take the boat to Edmonds and start our trip a lot further south than we wanted to. Oh well.

This part of the world is beautiful. Amazingly so, and I thought I lived in heaven itself. The views from pretty much everywhere were breathtaking.

Now I know that my blog friend ellipsis despises Canadians and to each his own I guess, but dammit to hell this particular bunch of Canuckistanis were great hosts, great cooks, great sports and great fun. I learned the appropriate technique for initiating a fight while playing hockey. I learned the appropriate technique for adjusting, uh, well junk that I don't have in my pants but you get the idea. I learned that no matter how much chocolate there is, Beanie will still be drawn to the stuff from Ecuador like a moth to the flame. I learned that waitresses aren't the least interested in knowing how much earlier in the day you switched from drinking beer to drinking wine. And I learned that everything that is said about BC bud is deliciously true.

Mostly I learned that it is indeed possible to laugh continuously for three days and not damage much of anything. Certainly not reputations. What happens on Bowen Island stays on Bowen Island.

I'm going to go back soon and often.

Here are some pictures. Enjoy!

for no good reason at all

Huh. It's been a week since I've had any motivation to type.

How about that.

dammit

So hobbitt owns a piece of an S-Corp, from back when he hired on with a start-up company. The shares he received were an enticement, considering he was taking a monumental pay cut at the time.

It's been a pain in the ass ever since. He was working in Atlanta, living in Illinois, and owning a piece of a company that was incorporated in Massachusetts. That meant we had to file three state income tax returns in addition to the federal.

He's received distributions from time to time, and they've been very small. Small enough that we'd like to think we can skate by not jumping through the hoops we'd have to in order to file in Massachusetts again. Another lovely thing is that these checks all arrive at the end of April, after we've finished our taxes.

So we got a check today, dated 4/15, a distribution from 2006. And it's big. It's big enough that we're going to have to file an amended federal return and file in Massachusetts. And we're probably going to owe money to both. Not much, probably three times the amount we got in a refund today ($140), but still.

Don't get me wrong. Income is good. Income is wise. And this will likely pay for most of the cushy ticket he booked for his trip to Peru in July.

But I'm the one who does the taxes. And I say, "Dammit!"

another installment in the "watching paint dry" chronicles

What do these phrases mean?

The guard may be high enough that the outturn might be available through the port.
Jennifer Jones is trying to make the yellow yellow.
The top yellow is dead buried.

No clue? You're not Canadian enough. These are all things we heard the sports commentators saying while we were watching women's curling last night.


For the record, we're not Canadian enough either, but we sorta kinda understood what they were saying, if not precisely what the lingo meant.

I will say this: we both enjoyed watching. hobbitt had the laptop open and was wiki-ing all about curling while the match was on, so we learned something, too. Not much, but enough to enhance our enjoyment of this finicky, precise sport. That gal in the photo is Kelly Scott. Her team lost to Jones last night. Evidently it's an old rivalry. Who knew? That's Jones below.



Curling. Yes. You heard it here first. Another exciting adventure from druid labs.

annual easter sunday window cleaning jag

I don't like it when hobbitt's up on a ladder. I don't like it at all. He's careful, always, but it still puts the fear in me.


Then I started to notice now amazing the glass looked. As in: clear. These windows hadn't been cleaned in 2 years, and I think you can figure out why. The lower window was done first. The difference is striking. When the outside was finished, neither of us could believe how crappy the view had been before.


We used these micro sham cloths. There was absolutely NO streaking. All we needed was water. That's right. No ammonia, no vinegar, no soap or detergent of any kind. Just water.

It almost made the job fun. For the record, I cleaned all the safe-height inside windows. hobbitt did the lion's share of the work. He's a prince.

When we were done, he popped open a bottle of champagne to toast the new view.

safe!

One of my big worries lately has been finishing our taxes.

I don't know how this came to be my job, but I've done our taxes pretty much every year except for that brief period where we had to file in Illinois, Massachusetts and Georgia. (We were living in Illinois, hobbitt was working in Georgia, and he owned a small piece of the S-Corp of his employer, and that was the Massachusetts part.) I didn't have the smarts for that nonsense so we hired someone to do those.

Anyway, we no longer live in a state that has an income tax, so it behooves us to track our sales tax. I had a paper bag bursting with receipts that had been glaring at me for months. It actually made my heart sink to look at it.

So yesterday I took the plunge and plowed through the receipts, matching them to their transactions in Quicken. It took me almost three hours, and that concentration also led to Zach having an accident on the carpet. Good times!

Well, it was worth it. According to the tax tables, we'd have about $700 less for the sales tax deduction. It was enough to get us past owing anything and into a small refund situation. While this whole downsizing thing has been wonderful for our cash flow, it truly blows come tax time. I filed the return electronically and my nightmare is over for another year.

It totally earned me that big honking martini.

balls? no thanks. I've got a stick!

Zach is rearranging the beach, one piece of driftwood at a time. He doesn't seem to be pining for any missing parts.

ouch!

No I did not cut myself again.

Zach is home from the vet where he had his, uh, procedure this morning.

He's hopped up on goofballs, whiney and clingy. Right now he's at my feet curled up on the cushy fleece side of the cat's former pillow (which I actually bought for Inti but it was too small) with an afghan that Aunt Grace made for me wrapped around him to keep him warm.

When the morphine wears off, he should be a bit calmer. And he's also on rimadyl, which should help with any swelling or inflammation as well as discomfort. At this very moment he's asleep and chasing rabbits. It's adorable. I want to squeeze him!

I haven't seen the incision yet, and I don't want to call attention to it, either. He doesn't seem to be zeroing in on where it hurts.

For the most part I don't mind at all just having to sit here and hold his paw. But for the record I would like to mention that today is cloudless - I mean 100% cloudless - with mild temperatures and only the gentlest of breezes. I would kill to be outside.

what just happened?

So here's Day One of us being all alone again.

Hmmm. I think it's Sunday.

For the past three weeks we've been hosting a wonderful assortment of dear friends (seven folks over 21 days) here at the labs. It's been a blast - in spite of last Sunday, when I woke with chills, aches, fever and much vomiting. But that only lasted 24 hours, and I slept through most of it.

I felt some regret at not having a larger house, but I think everyone was pretty comfortable - even that night we had 5 extra folks sleeping here. Perhaps that's just my over-active hostess sensitivities, because I'm pretty much over the "bigger house" thing and on to the "view house" thing. *sigh* This too shall pass.

We cooked an amazing amount of food. We put an amazing amount of miles on the car. We played an amazing amount of board, card and tile games. Don't even ask about the amazing amount of liquor that flowed.

For the moment, I don't want to do anything, unless it's go away to a cushy vacation house for some solitude, and that's not happening. Life goes on: Zach's getting neutered on Tuesday, the garden is in dire need of my attention, and in a few short weeks another couple of folks are arriving to travel with us to Vancouver and Bowen Island BC.

druid labs: The fun might stop from time to time, but not for long. Oh, and the kitchen is always open. Come visit! Just not all at once, okay?