In Memoriam

A fantastic journalist and author, Molly Ivins has passed away today. She will be greatly missed.

"What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority." ~Molly Ivins

Finished the workout...

...for the shredder, that is. It is in top form for the new year after all that exercise!

And I even started on the next dig site - The Thing. Right now, The Thing is cleared off nicely. Just don't look at the dining room table or the kitchen counter.... Because anything that wasn't tossed or shredded is now neatly piled on those two surfaces, waiting to be assigned to their new homes. :o

And Lori, I think everyone has some surface like my Thing. If they say they don't, either they lie or they are in need of some serious therapy for their compulsion to keep things tidy. We have more than one spot that gets all sorts papers and stuff dumped on it. Besides The Thing, we have our computer desk, the kitchen counter, and the dining room table. Ours gets filled up mostly with papers from school. School is the second biggest source of our incoming paper. (Junk mail is the largest source for us.) At least at the dining room table, we can push it all over to the fourth seat since there's only three in our family. ;)

I've now consumed a delicious malt beverage, and am feeling quite content. I will now go to sleep and see how far I get tomorrow with the piles of stuff from The Thing.

I sure hope I don't dream about it....

Overheated

Not me. It's below zero wind chills here, so I'm not the overheated one. I just spent some quality time with my shredder, and it decided now is a good time for a break.

It's that time of year! Time to dig out the old boot box full of statements and receipts so I can get ready to do our taxes.

Woo Hoo.

Actually, I *sort of* look forward to it. But it's only because we're the kind of people financial planners can't stand - we set ourselves up for a refund each year. (Some blah-blah-blah about keeping that $20 a month for yourself and invest it and get interest instead of loaning it to the government tax-free. I get it. It's just that if I had an extra $20 a month, chances are it would disappear faster than a snowball in July.) The part about finding out about what our refund will amount to is what I look forward to. And since I've been doing our household taxes for years and years and years, I'm not terribly intimidated by it. The very first year we had our house and got to itemize our taxes, I did them by myself, then we took our stuff in to an accountant and paid him $50 to do them. I wanted to compare. (Basically, it boiled down to finding out if I could follow the directions.) How did I compare to a professional accountant? We matched. I was so proud of myself. Just gimme my accounting degree now.

The past few years, I've done our taxes online. The one part about doing them online that really burns me is that I have to type in the full name and address of our employers. I think I should be able to type in our employers' tax ID numbers and the info should pop up for me.

Hmmm.... What other part do I not like about doing them online.... Nothing! Seriously. It's quite easy. And I do the freebie ones. (Call me frugal, not cheap!) Unfortunately, I have to type the info in twice for that - once for the IRS, and once for my state. The online programs that do the federal forms for free will charge you a fee to file your state forms. Screw that! I won't pay them $15 to do something I can do myself. Now if it were plumbing, that's another story. I can't always do that myself. So I will pay a plumber when I need to.

Going through the boot box is like excavating an archaeological site. It's layered chronologically with the newest stuff at the top and the older things at the bottom. I find things I forgot happened over the past year - for example, it was only in July that we got to dump the sorry ass old cell phone service (rhymes with Sing-you-ler) and sign up with one that has given us ZERO problems (the awesome one rhymes with You-ess-Sell-you-ler). Frodo just got his braces this past August. (Seems like longer.) And it was just 11 months ago that we had the new shingles put on our house.

After tackling this pile of shredding, my next project will be to clear off "The Thing". I've mentioned "The Thing" before. In fact, it was really cold the last time I mentioned it, which coincidentally was probably the last time I cleaned it off too.

I don't know what he wants me to do...

Frodo has a hard time falling asleep some nights. It makes me crazy. He'll lay in bed for all of nine minutes, then he'll come tromping out to the living room and announce that he can't fall asleep. So I march him back to the bedroom, telling him he hasn't tried long enough. He tries for about eleven more minutes and comes back to the living room. One time out to the living room is ok with me. A second trip? No way. Not unless you have a severed limb or your room is in flames.

"Go back to bed", I say.

"But I caaaaan't fall asleeeeep!", he whines. (My skin crawls when I hear whining.)

"Read. Do some deep breathing. Relax. But get yourself to sleep because 6:45am comes mighty early."

Stomp stomp stomp stomp stomp to the bedroom.

Ten minutes later, I can hear whimpering and the starting of crying from the bedroom. He's so lucky I have a vow of no physical violence.... ARGH! Just how does he think making me irritated is going to help him get some sleep?

It's now two hours since he first went to bed. He came out yet again a few minutes ago. I told him to put himself on the couch to sleep. Sometimes that works for me. If he's just feeling lonely, he's in for a big surprise when I go to bed shortly....

Maybe the clackety-clack noise of the typing will have lulled him to sleep.... I can only hope.

Getting scarier every day

Using another one of his infamous "signing statements", President Bush last month gave authority to the government to open US citizens private mail. Supposedly, it's for foreign intelligence collection. I think it's just putting us yet one step closer to a fascist political system.

Before any of you start jumping up and down and saying to me, "I have no problem with it. I have nothing to hide", I want you to stop and think for a bit. First off, do you think it is just fine for your neighbor to take a letter from your mailbox and open it? No, you would think that is NOT a good idea. And you might even think it was illegal to tamper with someone else's mail, right? And you'd probably never open your neighbor's mail because you would think it's wrong. What makes our government any different than that? Oh yeah. I forgot. They're "protecting" us from the boogeyman.

What would stop the government from opening your mail, then taking something you wrote out of context? (The fancy word for this is "contextomy".) Think of it like this - You write a letter to your mom. In the letter you state, "The dogs are driving me nuts. Spot is always eating my shoes and Fido is always climbing on the furniture. Sometimes I want to strangle them. Of course, I'd never do that. Maybe tomorrow will be better."

Now, take some of the phrases out of context, and you could get this: "Driving me nuts... strangle them... maybe tomorrow..." Out of context, it could sound like you are going to strangle someone tomorrow. I know, that's a bit of a lame example, but I'm still waiting for the caffeine to kick in this morning. But you get my point.

So for me, it's not that I have something to hide, except for I'd prefer most people not find the *special box* in the bedroom. I just prefer our government go the route currently established by law and get the warrant before opening my mail. Checks and balances. The basis of constitutional system. It's there for a reason. And it's a good thing to have.

Did an *opposite* thing today.

Most people are working towards their new year's resolutions by signing up at the gym.

Today, I stopped by the gym and CANCELLED my membership. It wasn't worth the $80 per month expenditure for our family to pretty much never use it. If we decide we want to go swimming at their pool one day, then we'll bust out a few bucks and pay for a day pass. It's waaaaay cheaper for us to do it that way.

The manager at the desk says to me, "We'll miss you!". I'm wondering how they can miss someone that hasn't set foot in the building in the past 4 months....

Oh yeah - they'll miss my nearly $1000 per year.

Today is a good day.

A VERY good day.

Nothing particular happened here at the Cuckoo Nest home. It all happened in Washington DC.

For starters, our nation has it's first female Speaker of the House. I've always said it, and I'll continue to say it: The more women we have in leadership positions, the better off our country will be. (And the UN backs me up on this.) Madame Speaker gave a great speech today. One of my favorite lines: "Hope: That is what America is about. And it is in that spirit that I serve in the Congress of the United States."

I sure hope that the other senators and representatives serve in that same spirit.

And hallelujah! The republicans are finally out of power in Congress! I couldn't be happier. Now to make sure the Democrats follow through on their "first 100 hours" promises. Many Americans will be watching.

And hoping.

Only three days into the new year...

...and I haven't broken any resolutions!

But that's only because I don't make any. I don't feel the need to set myself up for failure. I am successful enough at failure, so I figure, why add more?

BUT, for a household with no resolutions, you should see what we've done in these first three days:

1) Consolidated every bit of our debt into one loan. In 36 payments, we will be debt free (except for the mortgage - there's no way we could pay the house off in 3 years unless we won some sweepstakes or lottery.)

2) Shredded every credit card. We are NOT going to get into that crappy credit card cycle again! We are going to learn to budget and work with an allowance.

3) Researching a treadmill for use at home. Hubby was actually the first one to suggest it. Bye bye gym membership! Hello to walking/running while watching whatever movie/tv show I want to see!

I'm quite proud of us for doing this. I can't wait to see the fruits of our labor!

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From school today came a slip of paper in Frodo's folder. Bright yellow in color, it's a permission slip for Frodo to join chess club. At first I was surprised. Hubby and I used to fret and worry that two brainy geeks equalled a dumb jock, and that poor Frodo was destined to a life of sports and becoming an insurance salesman. But as time marches on, we're finding he's less of a jock and more like us. Thank goodness for dominant genes!

I'm not the chess player in the house. I prefer Scrabble and other word games. Hubby is the one that likes the strategy games. Frodo is liking them too.

So I signed the permission slip.

As I'm tucking it back into his folder, I ask him what about chess club interested him.

"The trophy I could win at the tournament later this year!"

Maybe he's a little bit "dumb jock" after all....