Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I spent a lot of the week preparing for, and then participating in, an audit of one of my clients by the Washington State Department of Revenue.  We don’t have either personal or corporate income taxes in Washington, so this audit covered 4 years of sales tax and something called the Business and Occupation Tax.

The preparation was complicated by the fact that, over the audit period, four different people have prepared the quarterly returns using source data from two different accounting packages, so almost no two quarterly tax returns were prepared in quite the same way.  This unnerved the auditor a bit, and I had to basically give her a guided tour of every return.  There was nothing really amiss with any of them, but since I hadn’t prepared the ones from the earlier years, a lot of questions arose.

The auditor would ask me how a certain number was derived, and I’d be all “Hmm…how’d they come up with that?”  As we progressed from year to year, “they” increasingly meant “me”.  But I still kept saying “they”.

There was an ironic twist to this experience.  Back in the 70s (1975 - 1979), I worked in the same capacity as a state revenue auditor.  Late in 1979, though, Reagan was elected on the federal level and a Reagan-esque Democrat named Dixie Lee Ray was elected governor in Washington, and I figured it was going to be a bad time to be a government employee.  So I quit and went to work for a CPA firm.

As it turned out, though, the state needed money pretty badly, and the audit function of the Department of Revenue was expanded quite a bit, including the creation of another supervisory level.  I’d have had an almost instant promotion, with a lot of headroom for advancement.

It’s all good, though, I’ve had a really kaleidoscopic career with exposure to stuff that I never would have seen if I’d stayed at the DOR.  However.  As I was chatting with the auditor and recounting how I’d worked for the Department back in the day, she mentioned a woman that I’d started with, who was her supervisor.  But…she had just retired.

Retired.  The word was like a spear between my ribs.  Her supervisor (and I if I had stayed) would have been grandfathered under PERS1, the gold-standard retirement plan that soon became unavailable to new hires as the state looked for ways to cut personnel expenses.  It shimmers like a desert mirage as I fretfully refresh my Quicken every day or so, and recalibrate how much longer I’ll be working.

My blog saw its shadow and would have whisked down its hole for another 6 weeks, but I grabbed it by its short serifs and sat it down for questioning.

I’ve been working a lot, a little bit overscheduled, plus today was something of a quadruple-witching day: clients had annual stuff like 940s, 1099s and W-2s due, as well as quarterly unemployment, workmen’s comp and sales tax returns due.  For some, I actually prepare the returns; for those who prepare them themselves, I often have to assist in generating reports and cajoling recalcitrant software.

Saturday was a really nice day here, relatively, and I launched into Puget Sound with a couple of paddling pals to practice capsize&rescue drills.  I had never actually immersed myself in salt water before - all my previous rescue practice had been in fresh water.  Puget Sound is about 46 degrees on average at this time of year, and even with my GoreTex drysuit and several poly layers underneath, the experience was bracing.

As I said, though, it was a pretty day, and we played and splashed until hauling out and viewing this sunset:

As you might can see, I selected a new Wordpress theme.  It’s variable-width, so most monitors will display a lot more text than my old theme.  It’s easier to work with and pretty clean-looking.  I didn’t want anything too gloppy and graphicky, as I put enough junk in here myself.  Still have to find a way to embed a photo in the header, but you were probably tired of the old one anyway.

I also upgraded to a newer version of Wordpress on Saturday.  It didn’t work quite right, and everything I did made it worse, right up to the point where the blog just disappeared.  The collective wailing from hip cafes across the country was heart-rending, so I spent a lot of the day Saturday learning how to use my web host’s Backup and Restore utility.  That’s one of the advantages of not having posted for a week - nothing was lost on the restore.

Happy New Year to everyone!  Just a quick post to let you know that we made it out of 2008 reasonably unscathed, setting charges behind us in the tunnel so that neither it nor its 7 predecessors could follow us.

When I last posted, we really didn’t have any invitations in-house, but a kind neighbor (not a Perils reader) subsequently invited us to an early nosh-and-sip, so your anguish for us was in vain.  Thanks, anyway, though!

Today we trekked over to University Village, a mall-kind of place on the other side of the University of Washington from us, to the Barnes & Noble there to unburden ourselves of most of a Christmas gift card.  While we were checking out, Mrs. Perils pointed the cruelty, probably intentional, of the juxtaposition of these two display tables:

Hope your holidays were joyous!

I know what you guys are up to.  I have *zero* invitations to New Year’s Eve parties, and I know you want me to start feeling depressed and bereft and friendless and just uncool.

And I would, if I didn’t know what you were up to.  But it’s gone on long enough.  It’s frickin’ December 30 at 9:00 Pacific.  Time to drop the ruse and get the goddamn invitations in here, so I can decide whom to honor with our presence, and whom to disappoint.

Now.  Scratch your ass later.

Our lines are open…

A delightful Christmas and extended holiday season to you all.  Snuggle up, stay warm and safe.

Here are perhaps my favorite carols. The first is a combination of two Gustav Holst arrangements, This have I Done For My True Love and Lullay, My Liking:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/HolstCarols.mp3 | leftbg=0xFF0033 | rightbg=0×00CC33]

and a powerful rendition of Carol of the Bells by the Ohio State Marching Band:

[audio:http://phil2bin.com/sounds/CarolOfTheBells.mp3]

Once upon a time, we used to send Christmas cards that we designed ourselves.  Mrs. Perils is is a terrific cartoonist, and she would do colored pen drawings and we’d go off to a print shop to have them color-Xeroxed.

I’m not sure what year this is from, but it seems apropos for this year of economic disarray (click to enlarge):

“Losses of this magnitude can hardly be explained away by the increased cost of reindeer food, Mr. Claus”

I spent the weekend at my mom’s in Toledo stringing lights, putting up her Christmas tree, cutting evergreen boughs to arrange around family gravestones and doing minor plumbing.

I head for Milwaukee from Detroit tonight (Sunday) for a week of work there, and head home for the year on Friday night.

It’s kind of eerie to walk out to my mom’s garage to get a tool for some task.  She lives in the same house that our family built and moved into in 1961, so the tool shelves are in the same place they’ve been for nearly 50 years, populated by the same tools that were always there, and many brought over from the house I was born to, and many handed down to my dad from his grandparents.

These tools have a familiar look, and a familiar feel as I duck under the kitchen sink and confront plumbing handiwork that my dad jerry-rigged sometime in the last 4 decades.

But nothing is permanent.  I hear his cursewords as he bumped his head on the 2×4 just inches from my own head, or skinned his knuckles tightening the fitting that I’m about to loosen.

Happy American Thanksgiving, everyone, if a bit late. I lurched into the weekend from a hectic 3 days of triage (quality triage, for those readers who are also clients) following my South Carolina sojourn last weekend.

Mrs. Perils was preoccupied with dinner preparations yesterday and, after a perfunctory query (you have to practice this for 34 years to get it just right) asking if I could help, I set out on a pre-dinner walk down to Gasworks Park and Fremont, trying to earn Calorie Credits against what I knew would be a sumptious repast.

The day was overcast and, once I got to Lake Union, pretty blustery. Only one intrepid soul was flying a kite on Kite Hill at Gasworks, but it was a pretty cool kite (click on photos to enlarge):

I hustled on to Fremont, not for any particular reason other than to pad the mileage of the stroll. I had brought along my current read, Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri), however, on the slight chance that I would find a coffee shop open and - wish fulfillment! - the Starbucks in Fremont was not only open but pretty busy.

It’s gotten to the point where I actually feel somewhat naked if I walk into a coffee shop and take a table without a laptop. I’m not quite sure what to do with my hands, and I wonder how the internet can function without my input. I took a deep breath, opened my book, and slowly synchronized my breathing, my sips on my drink and, at last, my reading cadence.

I read until the manager announced that the shop was closing at 4, and that was the perfect time to depart for my 2-mile walk uphill to home, and our feast.

And a terrific feast it was. Mrs. Perils had prepared:

• an 11-lb turkey, a perfect size to feed 4 of us (me, her, my MIL, and our son)
• brussels sprouts sauteed in olive oil and something delightfully savory
• homemade dinner rolls
• gravy (against her better judgment)
• mashed potatoes
• (I must be forgetting something)

Our son chimed in by slicing a yam into strips and broiling them in olive oil.  We’ve had something similar in Squamish, BC, that they called “yammer-jammers”.

Mrs. P and I took a short post-prandial stroll down to Green Lake to try to show all this food who was boss, but the results were already in.

I’m off for a kayak adventure tomorrow south of Tacoma. Weather is less than accommodating, but I’ll try to get some photo evidence.

We exercised our franchise at midmorning, almost certainly for the last time walking over to the Good Shepherd Center (a former Catholic home for “wayward girls” now owned by the City) and down to the basement, where the voting booths have been for decades in the Wallingford Senior Center.  Although we live in a large city, this electoral experience resolves the compound equations of society into their elemental x’s and y’s, and there’s an unmistakable small-town feel to the activity. (click any photo to enlarge).

The polling place has generally also been manned by seniors, often the same folks keeping the book for the same precinct year after year.

We’re one of the last counties in the state to still have polling places to go to. Next year, unless there’s a glitch, we’ll most likely be voting 100% by mail. I’ll miss the Shirley Jackson-esque ritual of walking to the GSC with a cheat-sheet in hand and the serendipity of running into neighbors I haven’t seen in months, neighbors who, despite whatever they’ve got into their houses or their driveways, are brandishing that same single vote in their pockets that I am, a precious coin granted by parents and grandparents and legions of forbears who’ve made that same quotidian trek to the voting booth.  Looks like others feel the same way.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been receiving an absentee ballot anyway, because I’m so often out of town, but, when I can, I carry it over to the polling place on election day instead of mailing it, just for the feeling of physical participation.

Results are starting to roll across the country towards us in an inexorable wave, and I’ll try not to stay up past midnight waiting for just one more state to fall.

Halloween arrives on our porch:

And a neighbor punk(in)s the Republican ticket: