Got the taxes done a little after midnight last night, in a mostly painless process. I didn't even start until after dinner, and I was just going to get the paperwork all in order, and do them today. I normally do our taxes in early February, but a certain employer who shall remain unnamed was being a total pain in the ass about sending me my W-2, to the point where, after two letters and a phone call, I finally had to involve the IRS. Go figure: it showed up a week later. (They had sent it to my prior address in Anchorage, despite my having sent a letter last October updating my address, and then claimed to already have re-sent it to my Atlanta address, which was pretty much a lie.)
The main time-consuming thing I needed to do was assign values to the many, many piles and bike loads and car loads of stuff we donated to the Starvation Army, Goodwill, Habitat for Humanity, and Big Brothers/Big Sisters when we were moving from Alaska.
Moving is good like that: sorta forces you to go through your stuff, identify what is crap and needs to be tossed, what can be freecycled, sold, ebayed, and what someone at a thrift store will pounce on, even when you haven't used it in months or years. We literally had about ten major dropoffs where it was worth it to itemize and get a receipt from the thrift store, and probably another couple dozen which were a few items at a time, and I would just drop them off on my ride to work and not bother with receipts (or deducting them later. Note to self in the future: bother with the receipts.)
So anyway, Turbotax has a built-in donation value tool called Itsdeductible, which can make the whole process much easier than guessing, or trying to use the limited guides various Goodwills and Salvation Army stores make available on the internetz. Problem is, you can't use it until you've proceeded to that point in your taxes, so I actually had to start our return, and get through the income, to the deductions part. And by the time I'd spent literally about 2.5 hours inputting all of the donations, item by item, and valuing them, there wasn't much left to do on the taxes, so I figured I might as well finish them.
The other problem is that some of the values Itsdeductible gives are absurd: household items like bowls and cups and plates, which most thrift stores sell for $0.99 unless they are a matching set, valued at $6? Hell, no. Now, I'm fine with taking a reasonable deduction, but I couldn't in good faith submit a return taking $4 for a bowl that I myself paid $1.50 for at a thrift store. So I had to spend a lot of time manually entering things like individual cups for $0.25, and individual bowls for $0.50. And books! Nonsense! They value donated hardcovers at something like $4, and paperbacks at $3! Preposterous! (I valued them at $0.50 hardcover, and $0.25 paperback.)
Overall, I was once again perfectly happy with Turbotax, and got a pretty good price on it. Note: anyone who doesn't search the web for Turbotax discounts is a sucker! Anyone can get 35% off, making the Deluxe version $32 and change, through Bank of America, customer or not. Just search it. There will be a little thing in the top of each screen that says "Presented by [BofA logo]" but it's not intrusive, and I barely noticed it. It's also nice that you can get all the way through your taxes before paying for Turbotax, so if you start them and then realize you actually need a more robust version (e.g., you have a small business and really needed to use the Premier version) you can do that.
What I did HATE about Turbotax, and I really think it was worse this year, was the number of sillyass add-ons they try to sell in the end of the process. I mean, you just told me my "audit risk" was about as low as can be, and now you want me to buy audit insurance for $40? I can have the convenience of paying for Turbotax through my refund, rather than with a pesky credit card, for an added fee of $30? Are y'all out of your damn minds?
I definitely don't miss my pennywise/pound foolish days when I would sit down and do all of our taxes on paper, triple checking all of the calculations, doing endless unnecessary worksheets only to confirm we don't get a particular credit, and mail them in.
Now to go ride my bike! Woo!
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Identity revealed!
I'm going through my digital images for a friend, and I've decided to come out from my pseudo-anonymous hiding on this blog. I hereby offer this clear, totally revealing picture of me:
NEW BIKE DAY! WOO WOO WOO!
I picked up my new bike yesterday, and am totally in love with it. I actually sat on the floor last night and admired it. Yes, I'm a big ol' bike geek. Here's my new Surly Long Haul Trucker:
Not a fantastic picture, but many, many more will follow. I took some pictures for insurance purposes, before I start to put all sorts of crap on it. Now today I need to put all sorts of crap on it. It's a 62cm frame, with 700c tires, a beautiful Tubus Cargo rear rack, and just all around nice.
And in honor of New Bike Day, you should go check out this Dinosaur Comic. It's just a damn shame that "Sexual Intercourse: The Bike" is already taken.
And now, I need to fund the military industrial complex. Oops, I meant to say, do our taxes.
Not a fantastic picture, but many, many more will follow. I took some pictures for insurance purposes, before I start to put all sorts of crap on it. Now today I need to put all sorts of crap on it. It's a 62cm frame, with 700c tires, a beautiful Tubus Cargo rear rack, and just all around nice.And in honor of New Bike Day, you should go check out this Dinosaur Comic. It's just a damn shame that "Sexual Intercourse: The Bike" is already taken.
And now, I need to fund the military industrial complex. Oops, I meant to say, do our taxes.
Monday, March 29, 2010
BIKE BIKE BIKE BIKE BIKE!
Banana panorama!
Okay, I'm arguably conflating bananas and panoramas, rather than posting a panoama of bananas. But hey, they rhyme, and I have images of both. Good times!
This is what I like my bananas to look like. Ripe and brown and ready. Yum!
And this is, as panoramas from my balcony go, a perfectly good one:
Horizontal (not rotating the camera)
Vertical (camera rotated 90 degrees.)
Generating panoramas definitely works better when I used a tripod, and using the vertical shooting format (at least when I want to highlight the sky.) We'll see if I remember that in the future.
This is what I like my bananas to look like. Ripe and brown and ready. Yum!And this is, as panoramas from my balcony go, a perfectly good one:
Horizontal (not rotating the camera)
Vertical (camera rotated 90 degrees.)Generating panoramas definitely works better when I used a tripod, and using the vertical shooting format (at least when I want to highlight the sky.) We'll see if I remember that in the future.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Onions, Part 73
In my continuing demonstration of my love of onions, here is a play by play:
Organic yellow onions, waiting for the chop.
The chop.
The dice (for the guacamole.)
The thick slice: waiting for another dish.
The gratuitous bowl full o' onions shot.
Slicing up a fresh jalapeno, with the time-saving method K taught me, for the peanut sauce onion jalapeno pasta.
More onions!
Fresh jalapenos. Yum!
Dinner: whole wheat pasta with J's spicy Thai peanut sauce, fried onions, and fried fresh jalapenos. It was delicious!
Organic yellow onions, waiting for the chop.
The chop.
The dice (for the guacamole.)
The thick slice: waiting for another dish.
The gratuitous bowl full o' onions shot.
Slicing up a fresh jalapeno, with the time-saving method K taught me, for the peanut sauce onion jalapeno pasta.
More onions!
Fresh jalapenos. Yum!
Dinner: whole wheat pasta with J's spicy Thai peanut sauce, fried onions, and fried fresh jalapenos. It was delicious!
GARDENING PORN!
Okay, okay: I have heard the cries of the assembled masses, readying to storm the Food Porn Palace gates. Happily, it's springtime in ATL, and time to mix it up a little bit with the old standby that has bored so many of you in the past: GARDENING PORN!
Last year's gardening continued producing tomatoes all the way through February, though the herb gardening didn't last so long. Check out this post for a reminder of how the tomato plant was doing in January.) But it was all looking pretty haggard after we finally pulled out the bulk of the old plants:
Note the volunteer weed in the right-hand side of the brown herb garden pot. Kind of impressive, how effective weeds can be, since this pot has lived indoors since at least last October.
So I went to my local nursery, Pike, yesterday and, while they aren't amazing, and are a small chain, they certainly beat the hell out of buying plants and seeds at the gardening industrial complex of Home Despot or Lowe's. I bought a milk crate's worth of organic plants.
I got four kinds of TOMATOES!
Red Strawberry (heirloom): indeterminate, 80 days, 48-72"
Cherokee Purple (heirloom): indeterminate, 80 days, 48-72"
Celebrity: determinate, 70 days, 24-36"
Juliet: indeterminate, 60 days, 48-72"
Two tomato varieties got planted on opposite sides of five gallon buckets, and I'll thin or transplant as necessary as one or the other does better.
I was tempted to go with some good looking Early Girl and Better Boy plantings, since I've had good luck with them in the past, but (A) that was in Utah with constant sunlight and crazy amounts of water, and (B) consistency is the hobgoblin of small-minded gardening porn. And while I've had so-so luck with heirloom varieties in the past, I like a little bit of a challenge in my gardening. Which must be why I do it in five gallons buckets and pots in a high-rise condo.
Oh, but for the good ol' days when my tomato gardening looked like this:
This was June 15, 2006, in the back yard in Salt Lake City. With raised beds, tons of sunlight, hundreds of dollars of water going through buried soaker irrigation, and endless hours of delight spent in the back yard maintaining plants.
At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, as any of you who are also gardeners know, a lot of good gardening is love. And I loved those plants. I derived so much pleasure out of going out there in the morning before work, picking a tomato from the vine, and eating it sliced on toast within minutes. I loved being able to give away huge bags of tomatoes and squash to my co-workers, and later, when they'd had enough, on freecycle. I love the ways my hands smell after I've been working with tomatoes. I love picking up $7/pound organic tomatoes at Whole Paycheck, smelling them, and smugly knowing mine smell better.
Back to the current reality, though...
Here are the buckets after planting them. I'll move them out to the balcony soon, as we're supposed to start getting daytime highs near 80 on April Fool's Day, but we're still getting overnight lows in the low 40s and high 30s.
Juliet in front, Celebrity in the rear.
Herb plantings closeup. Clockwise from left: rosemary, garlic chives, spearmint.
Cherokee Purple up front, Red Strawberry in the rear.
More herbs to come as the seasons continues, and Pike gets more choices in. I might do another entire herb planting, since J and I really love to have fresh basil and sage available for cooking.
I was smart enough to cage the tomatoes immediately. Last year when we moved to ATL, I actually didn't necessarily expect them to do so well as to require caging, and J and I had a hell of a time putting cages on the boisterous plants on mid-season.
I did make a good decision, to only plant stuff I really want to eat/cook with. Too often in the past I have been enticed by random shit at the nursery that looked fun or smelled good, like lemon balm, but then which I have almost no use for when it does grow. So this year, it's all stuff we want to cook with. And I did continue my practice of only planting stuff I can't buy for far less, organic, at Whole Paycheck (or even the local Publix.) Except as experiments in Alaska, I can't understand taking up gardening space that I can buy for less at the supermarket.
Who's excited for a long season of blog gardening porn? ME!
Last year's gardening continued producing tomatoes all the way through February, though the herb gardening didn't last so long. Check out this post for a reminder of how the tomato plant was doing in January.) But it was all looking pretty haggard after we finally pulled out the bulk of the old plants:
Note the volunteer weed in the right-hand side of the brown herb garden pot. Kind of impressive, how effective weeds can be, since this pot has lived indoors since at least last October.
So I went to my local nursery, Pike, yesterday and, while they aren't amazing, and are a small chain, they certainly beat the hell out of buying plants and seeds at the gardening industrial complex of Home Despot or Lowe's. I bought a milk crate's worth of organic plants.
I got four kinds of TOMATOES!Cherokee Purple (heirloom): indeterminate, 80 days, 48-72"
Celebrity: determinate, 70 days, 24-36"
Juliet: indeterminate, 60 days, 48-72"
Two tomato varieties got planted on opposite sides of five gallon buckets, and I'll thin or transplant as necessary as one or the other does better.I was tempted to go with some good looking Early Girl and Better Boy plantings, since I've had good luck with them in the past, but (A) that was in Utah with constant sunlight and crazy amounts of water, and (B) consistency is the hobgoblin of small-minded gardening porn. And while I've had so-so luck with heirloom varieties in the past, I like a little bit of a challenge in my gardening. Which must be why I do it in five gallons buckets and pots in a high-rise condo.
Oh, but for the good ol' days when my tomato gardening looked like this:
This was June 15, 2006, in the back yard in Salt Lake City. With raised beds, tons of sunlight, hundreds of dollars of water going through buried soaker irrigation, and endless hours of delight spent in the back yard maintaining plants.At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, as any of you who are also gardeners know, a lot of good gardening is love. And I loved those plants. I derived so much pleasure out of going out there in the morning before work, picking a tomato from the vine, and eating it sliced on toast within minutes. I loved being able to give away huge bags of tomatoes and squash to my co-workers, and later, when they'd had enough, on freecycle. I love the ways my hands smell after I've been working with tomatoes. I love picking up $7/pound organic tomatoes at Whole Paycheck, smelling them, and smugly knowing mine smell better.
Back to the current reality, though...
Here are the buckets after planting them. I'll move them out to the balcony soon, as we're supposed to start getting daytime highs near 80 on April Fool's Day, but we're still getting overnight lows in the low 40s and high 30s.
Juliet in front, Celebrity in the rear.
Herb plantings closeup. Clockwise from left: rosemary, garlic chives, spearmint.
Cherokee Purple up front, Red Strawberry in the rear.More herbs to come as the seasons continues, and Pike gets more choices in. I might do another entire herb planting, since J and I really love to have fresh basil and sage available for cooking.
I was smart enough to cage the tomatoes immediately. Last year when we moved to ATL, I actually didn't necessarily expect them to do so well as to require caging, and J and I had a hell of a time putting cages on the boisterous plants on mid-season.
I did make a good decision, to only plant stuff I really want to eat/cook with. Too often in the past I have been enticed by random shit at the nursery that looked fun or smelled good, like lemon balm, but then which I have almost no use for when it does grow. So this year, it's all stuff we want to cook with. And I did continue my practice of only planting stuff I can't buy for far less, organic, at Whole Paycheck (or even the local Publix.) Except as experiments in Alaska, I can't understand taking up gardening space that I can buy for less at the supermarket.
Who's excited for a long season of blog gardening porn? ME!
A brief respite
From all the arduous food porn I've been engaging in. While I was typing that last post, this seriously hilarious spoof of a favorite Schoolhouse Rock song was on On the Media, one of my favorite public radio shows.
How a Bill Becomes a Law... These Days. Even if you didn't love Schoolhouse Rock, while this might indicate there is something really far more wrong with you than a food porn obsession, you should go listen to this immediately. Like: now.
How a Bill Becomes a Law... These Days. Even if you didn't love Schoolhouse Rock, while this might indicate there is something really far more wrong with you than a food porn obsession, you should go listen to this immediately. Like: now.
You've been a bad, bad boy/girl! (Or, more food porn)
You just can't get enough of the food porn, can you? Has it occurred to you this might be unhealthy? Or unnatural? You know, we could talk about this.
But it would be much more fun to just feed the addiction, wouldn't it? We can always quit tomorrow, right? Whatever: that's between you and your therapist. Personally, I can quit any time I want. It just takes the edge off, okay?
I just like the way it makes me feel. Especially after a long day.
NO, I DO NOT NEED TO BE PROFILED ON INTERVENTION.
BACK OFF.
Uhhhh, please pay no attention to all that. I've shoved my inner demons back under the stairs, and put a more stout lock on. Anyway, the other night a friend and I were going to go out to dinner. But I was coming down with a slight cold, and so didn't much feel like riding to Little Five Points, where we'd planned to go to Java Vino, a coffeehouse/cafe/wine bar I love. So we played the "what do I have in the fridge" game, and came up with a favorite fallback dinner of J and mine, fried veggies with tofu over pasta, and my friend N decided to test-run the shredded fried brussels sprout recipe he was planning on making the next night for a dinner party.
Prepping one of each: a yellow pepper, a carrot, a zucchini, a red onion, and a bunch of green onions.
Knocking out some flash fried tofu.
N's brussels sprouts. He started out trying to grate them, but on my recommendation switched to thin slicing instead.
ONIONS! WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO! (You KNOW who you are. And you KNOW you are a closeted onion lover. Look, there's nothing to be ashamed of. I'll help. I have decades of experience.)
Much less attractive than the onions, here is some organic whole wheat penne boiling.
The fried zucchini getting it on with the tofu and peppers.
Gently frying the green onions and carrots.
Tragically, no images of the plated product were taken: we were too damn hungry, and dove in, washing it down with Rhum Barbancourt, which J brought back from Haiti. Yeah: she loves me.
But it would be much more fun to just feed the addiction, wouldn't it? We can always quit tomorrow, right? Whatever: that's between you and your therapist. Personally, I can quit any time I want. It just takes the edge off, okay?
I just like the way it makes me feel. Especially after a long day.
NO, I DO NOT NEED TO BE PROFILED ON INTERVENTION.
BACK OFF.
Uhhhh, please pay no attention to all that. I've shoved my inner demons back under the stairs, and put a more stout lock on. Anyway, the other night a friend and I were going to go out to dinner. But I was coming down with a slight cold, and so didn't much feel like riding to Little Five Points, where we'd planned to go to Java Vino, a coffeehouse/cafe/wine bar I love. So we played the "what do I have in the fridge" game, and came up with a favorite fallback dinner of J and mine, fried veggies with tofu over pasta, and my friend N decided to test-run the shredded fried brussels sprout recipe he was planning on making the next night for a dinner party.
Prepping one of each: a yellow pepper, a carrot, a zucchini, a red onion, and a bunch of green onions.
Knocking out some flash fried tofu.
N's brussels sprouts. He started out trying to grate them, but on my recommendation switched to thin slicing instead.
ONIONS! WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO! (You KNOW who you are. And you KNOW you are a closeted onion lover. Look, there's nothing to be ashamed of. I'll help. I have decades of experience.)
Much less attractive than the onions, here is some organic whole wheat penne boiling.
The fried zucchini getting it on with the tofu and peppers.
Gently frying the green onions and carrots.Tragically, no images of the plated product were taken: we were too damn hungry, and dove in, washing it down with Rhum Barbancourt, which J brought back from Haiti. Yeah: she loves me.
FOOD PORN! from 1,000 Vegan Recipes
You just can't get enough, can you? C'mon, admit it: you LIKE it when I do three posts in one day with food porn. (And if you ask nicely, you just might get that third post.)
This is another recipe I cooked from 1,000 Vegan Recipes, which I mentioned in a post earlier this month, when I made seitan with chipotle sauce.
This time around, I had some broccoli I need to use, so I considered the broccoli heavy options, and went with Chinese noodles with spicy black bean sauce, on page 239. I largely follow the recipe, though I used angel hair pasta instead of Chinese noodles (I didn't want to pay $4 a box for the noodles at Whole Paycheck, and I had a ton of angel hair sitting around.) I also added tofu, which was a very good call.
Stock shot of stock tofu, just beginning to fry.
Frying the broccoli stem first, since it needs a little more time than the florets.
Did somebody say broccoli florets?
The broccoli canoodling with the tofu. Hey, give them a little privacy, would ya?
Frying up some ONIONS! Who doesn't love onions? Not any reasonable person I can think of!
The onions get a bunch of fresh grated ginger.
Then you add a mix of soy sauce, spicy black bean sauce, chili paste, and cornstarch dissolved in water.
And you reduce it down a bit.
With the broccoli and noodles added.
Overall, it was very good, though I would ratchet up the heat next time.
This is another recipe I cooked from 1,000 Vegan Recipes, which I mentioned in a post earlier this month, when I made seitan with chipotle sauce.
This time around, I had some broccoli I need to use, so I considered the broccoli heavy options, and went with Chinese noodles with spicy black bean sauce, on page 239. I largely follow the recipe, though I used angel hair pasta instead of Chinese noodles (I didn't want to pay $4 a box for the noodles at Whole Paycheck, and I had a ton of angel hair sitting around.) I also added tofu, which was a very good call.
Stock shot of stock tofu, just beginning to fry.
Frying the broccoli stem first, since it needs a little more time than the florets.
Did somebody say broccoli florets?
The broccoli canoodling with the tofu. Hey, give them a little privacy, would ya?
Frying up some ONIONS! Who doesn't love onions? Not any reasonable person I can think of!
The onions get a bunch of fresh grated ginger.
Then you add a mix of soy sauce, spicy black bean sauce, chili paste, and cornstarch dissolved in water.
And you reduce it down a bit.
With the broccoli and noodles added.Overall, it was very good, though I would ratchet up the heat next time.
Bicycle, two ways
Day four of bicycle withdrawal. The shakes have mostly gone away, but I still have transient feverish chills. I'm getting by, though. Here's the bike mere minutes before I sold it, after stripping all the crap off of it.
As you can see, it's a pale shadow of its former cargo-hauling glory:
As you can see, it's a pale shadow of its former cargo-hauling glory:
Tofu Marsala
I had a 40% off coupon at Borders, so I did the natural thing: bought another cookbook. (J and I were just talking, and agreed that we might need to go on a cookbook diet, and get rid of some that we never/rarely use.)
I'm pretty excited about the new book: 500 Vegan Recipes. Here is a nice review of the book.
I made the Tofu Marsala on page 259, and was pretty happy with it. I tried hard to follow the recipe exactly, to give my first dish from the book a fair shot.
When I make it again, I'd definitely add a little more salt and pepper to the flour mix that you batter the tofu steaks in before frying them, and maybe some paprika or cayenne.
One of the few substitutions I did make was using a portabello mushroom instead of button mushrooms. I both like them better and thought the texture would hold up better, and they were quite a bit cheaper at Whole Paycheck.
Dredged in the flour batter mixture, they go into the olive oil. Kind of unattractive, no? Don't worry: it'll get better.
While the tofu steaks fried, I decided to get shitfaced through mixing cheap fortified wines. Actually, the recipe calls for 1/2c. of marsala and 1/4 cup of sherry.
Okay, starting to look quite a bit better.
Added the mushrooms, which actually drop the appearance a couple notches, if you ask me.
With the addition of the cheap foritifed wines. Woo!
Lidded and cooking for another ten minutes,
it results in something real tasty looking.
After flipping over the tofu steaks to ensure they are well cooked on both sides.
Unnecessary mid-process shot of taking the tofu out of the pan:
to dry some of the oil, while I finish up some kaffir lime rice:
to mix it with. Pretty damn tasty! I did add some sri racha sauce, but it would've been fine without as well. I toyed with adding a couple jalapeno slices, but was hungry enough that I just wanted to eat already.
I'm pretty excited about the new book: 500 Vegan Recipes. Here is a nice review of the book.
I made the Tofu Marsala on page 259, and was pretty happy with it. I tried hard to follow the recipe exactly, to give my first dish from the book a fair shot.
When I make it again, I'd definitely add a little more salt and pepper to the flour mix that you batter the tofu steaks in before frying them, and maybe some paprika or cayenne.
One of the few substitutions I did make was using a portabello mushroom instead of button mushrooms. I both like them better and thought the texture would hold up better, and they were quite a bit cheaper at Whole Paycheck.
Dredged in the flour batter mixture, they go into the olive oil. Kind of unattractive, no? Don't worry: it'll get better.
While the tofu steaks fried, I decided to get shitfaced through mixing cheap fortified wines. Actually, the recipe calls for 1/2c. of marsala and 1/4 cup of sherry.
Okay, starting to look quite a bit better.
Added the mushrooms, which actually drop the appearance a couple notches, if you ask me.
With the addition of the cheap foritifed wines. Woo!
Lidded and cooking for another ten minutes,
it results in something real tasty looking.
After flipping over the tofu steaks to ensure they are well cooked on both sides.
Unnecessary mid-process shot of taking the tofu out of the pan:
to dry some of the oil, while I finish up some kaffir lime rice:
to mix it with. Pretty damn tasty! I did add some sri racha sauce, but it would've been fine without as well. I toyed with adding a couple jalapeno slices, but was hungry enough that I just wanted to eat already.
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