The Neon Nurse's Charting

Tomorrow eBay is having another Dime Listing Day, and therefore I will be typing away trying to make my fortune. So you may not "see" me again until Wednesday.

Here is something nice that happened today. Mike's Christmas cactus plant he won at a party the Christmas before last bloomed!

A Certain Party who shall remain nameless recently asked my advice (Well, okay, called to vent, but that is always automatically a request for advice, yes?) about a tricky etiquette problem.

CP has legal custody of a box of cremains, or in non-technical terms, the ashes left over from a person who has been cremated. There are vague plans to someday display these in an appropriate and tasteful urn, but various circumstances have kept that from happening so far.

So, every now and then, a Different Party who has only a tangential connection to the cremains, but is in the running to be Exalted Queen of all the Drama Queens Ever of All Time, calls the CP up to rant and rave about getting her "fair share" of the box of grey gritty goodies.

My primary advice was "Just hang up." But as the venting continued, I had a better idea.

I suggested the CP should go out back to the trash-burning barrel, scoop a couple of trowel's worth out of it, sneak over to the DP's residence by gloom of night and dump the goods on the welcome mat.

THEN, boy howdy, we'd see some DRAMA!

Darn! I started spare ribs for dinner in the crock pot, and NOW I see we have no barbecue sauce! So I have made some from catsup. Time will tell if this was a Good idea or Not.
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If you use Firefox, there are some good options you can get to enhance it. One is called Session Saver, and it keeps you from losing your tabs if you have a power outage or something. The other one that has come in handy for me is IE tab options. In case you run into a site that won't load right on Firefox, you just click the little button and it turns your window/tab into a fake IE, which will often do the trick!
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Fake crime and suicide scenes with Legos. Sick but creative! (Now all we need are some CSI Lego people to solve the crimes!)
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My mom didn't know Road to El Dorado was a movie, and went to the Chocolate Deities site to see if she could buy me Miguel and Tulio. (I wish! Although if I was going to have a cartoon minion around, I'd prefer Kronk from Emperor's New Groove.)
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I volunteered to make a web page for our 35th high school reunion. This is it. Fight, Hornets, down the field.

http://www.neonnurse.net/PCHS71.htm

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If you are a word lover, like me, you would enjoy subscribing to the Word A Day list, which is a mere $12 a year, if memory serves. You get amusing descriptions, quotes, links to a pronunciation .wav and more!

Sample: "The word sextet has nothing to do with sex, unless of course, the six people in question engage in some questionable calisthenics. That's what the English language does -- often leading us on, only to make things limpid in the end. There we go again.

Take the word friable, for instance. All the evidence leads us to suggest
this word could be used to refer to raw potato chips. But in truth,
something friable is that which could be easily crumbled. Well, it could
be used to refer to potato chips, after all.

This week we visit these red-herring words, words with meanings that are
not the first things that come to mind. (limpid = clear)"

http://wordsmith.org/awad/subscriber.html

Thought so.

Got the important part of our taxes done yesterday. (The part that gets us money.) That was when my brain asploded, I am pretty sure. Part of it was irritation at getting back half of what we might have. I foolishly made about $500 too much for Caro to be able to claim me as a dependent...but oh, well, I have been TRYING to do better with selling stuff, so I can't really complain. On the plus side, as a non-dependent I can get a whopping EIC of $296 to put against the $575 I owe for Self Employment tax.

The bit that really annoys me is that they changed the law about children as dependents in regards to getting the additional tax breaks. Used to be ANY child that lived as a member of your family, for whom you provided more than half the living costs for, could be counted as a dependent child. Now, no. The child has to be related to you or placed by a foster or adoption agency. (Oh, and widow(er)s with a foster child get the same shaft!)

I mean, gee, Bush's billionaire buddies NEED their tax breaks, you know. Can't have people going around actually providing homes and care for kids out of the goodness of their hearts and expecting the same tax breaks for it as married heteros! (Just to say a for instance...no offense to my traditionally paired friends and family.)

THEN I started trying to do the eFile thing, which I have done in years past. Couldn't remember which company we used before, though. So I picked one at random....

EIGHT tries later I finally managed to complete the filing correctly, though it still took some doing--and TurboTax (which was our winner) flips you an ad of some kind about every three screens! I KNOW we have a complicated filing, with the K-1 and the self-employment tax and all that. But some of those sites didn't even HAVE an option for the trickier stuff, and some of them had glitches so that if you made a mistake, you couldn't go back to fix it!

So just a hint: if YOU are planning to eFile, do your return YOURSELF beforehand and know what you should be getting. Don't count on generalized software to do it for you, because it probably won't get it right!

All I have to do now is fill out the fairly simple forms for our official business reporting that the IRS requires, and MAIL them in. And of course cough up my $279 by April 15th. But by this evening I should have all the mean ugly bad nasty tax forms back in their file and hidden away in the filing cabinet so I don't have to look at them until 2007.

Yay. I go like a girl.

Well, sorta.

This is a thingie for here in Colorado:

Congratulations on your appointment by President of the Senate Fitz-Gerald to the Judicial Performance Commission for the 15th Judicial District.

Since you are filling a vacancy, your term will expire on November 30, 2007. You will be eligible to be appointed to a full four-year term on December 1, 2007.

***

This is a review board for judges coming up for re-election. We read surveys from jurors and reports and interview them, and then our recommendations are put in the "Blue Book" which is non-partisan and goes out to the registered voters to give them info on both sides of proposed amendments and stuff.

In what happily turned out to be non-news, I finally took Salazar the moped out of the car. Managed to ride him, oh, at least 20 feet! Graded myself thusly:

Fit of helmet: A- (straps a little tight still, leaving unattractive creases in face)
Balance: B-
Getting on without help: C
Not falling: A+!
Knees, bendiness of: D-
Lungs: F

So, lots of room for improvement, but not TOO bad!

Cold: Close to gone, yay!

Mike's birthday: Fun. We ate the pizza buffet at Pizza Hut, plus cake and ice cream and stuff later. Have discovered new downside to giving him the DVD player (and yes, it was a little indulgent, but it was one of the few things he really wanted that was even remotely practical)--now he is nagging me to finish setting up the DVD RECORDER so he can have DVDs of all the TV shows he follows. He thought SpongeBob Lost in Time was debuted on his birthday SPECIALLY for him! What a fanboy! :)

Taxes: Still under construction

Fun: Looking for a HEAVENLY gift? This company makes chocolate in the shape of the GODS!

http://www.chocolatedeities.com/index.php

(I want a Miguel and Tulio from Road to El Dorado!)

Let's have a humor break, OK?

I was at that in-between loose ends stage of being sick yesterday; too tired still for anything physical, but with all passive entertainment venues used up, leaving me bored and restless. So I decided to be brave and poke into the stack of taxes stuff. So now I'm bored, angsty and a little depressed.

I need to fill out 1040 longs and Schedule SEs (Self Employment) for me and Caro. Then for the business, I need to slog through Form 1065 and K-1, PLUS two new ones, the 1099-MISC and the 1096. I may be forgetting one, because of the whole brain asplode and send me into a coma thing.

It is also 1 degree outside. But still I must make it to the PO today (first time since Tuesday I've been outside the house) because of the mail holiday Monday.

Why it needs to be a mail holiday for Mike's birthday, I don't know.

Still kind of generally yuck, but I feel like I have a little energy available for typing. Brain is probably not up to working on taxes yet, so e-chat it is!

As you can probably guess, I haven't been doing too much but coughing. I have watched some shows on DVD I've been meaning to get to. Like the 3rd season of CSI that loaned me. I saw the one where...some people died...and, uh...the CSI team finds out who killed 'em? While looking very good, of course.

Darn gluey brain.

The other one I watched was a couple of episodes of the first season of Hill Street Blues. I had forgotten how early they introduced some ongoing characters and plot threads. Good old Sgt. Esterhaus is there, suggesting folks be careful, Belker is being a poor man's Wolverine, and Capt. Furillo is...still quite the attractive individual.

I had forgotten, though, or had not realized before how very sexist the show was, at least at the start. A few of the incidents even made my bleary brain go, "Say WHAT are you serving us, writer person?"

So maybe things have changed for the better a LITTLE in twenty-five years. Or I don't watch enough modern television to be able to judge....

# posted by Susan : 2:44 PM

Wouldn't you know it? I get home from my exciting adventures in the city, which should have had the traditional restful and relaxing effect, only to slowly realize that I am probably succumbing to the same bug-going-around that the poor clone was suffering from all weekend. This annoys me.

Cowboy the blue heeler thinks it is already full spring and has been doing the traditional spring eating of the grass lately, except for some reason it has a delayed effect, so he is like a ticking time bomb of dog disgustingness. This time, possibly because of missing me SO much, detonation occurred in my bed. This also annoyed me.

At least, though, a quick laundry job fixed THAT problem. Tomorrow I have the bigger one of needing to pack and mail the usual weekend accumulation of orders plus a couple days extra, with the special bonus of probably not feeling like it in the slightest. Again, annoyingness happens.

It could be worse. At least I haven't been shot by any Vice Presidents.

And while we are on the topic of Dread Politics, this made me LOL.



Here is the beauteous Damaris acting as Spokemodel for Wang's Gourmet.



And here is Damaris a little earlier in her career. I drew this picture in 1973 from a photo. My mom had it for a long time--she's the one who varnished it to protect it--but Damaris talked her into passing it on to her. I'd been meaning to take a picture of it for a long time, but I never remembered to do it when I had a camera handy, until this weekend!



Dang it, now I'm sneezing. Serially. This bodes ill.

Just a quick update to let you all know I AM still alive, and having fun on my little trip.

Last night we watched a couple of movies I hadn't gotten to see before, The Terminal with Tom Hanks and Intolerable Cruelty with George Clooney, both also with Catherine Zeta-Jones. They were good. I liked them.

This morning Damaris and I headed off to pick up my new darling baby Salazar the moped, armed with Mapquest directions (when will I LEARN?). It was a lovely day, but almost TOO sunny, as we had some trouble with glare when trying to read street signs.

After a certain amount of random driving, we decided to grab some lunch to fortify us for our continued quest. Naturally, we had no luck spotting a franchise of any of our preferred fine dining establishments. Eventually we were feeling a bit loopy from hunger setting in, so when I spotted a place called Wang's Gourmet in a strip mall called Sunset Strip, we just HAD to give in to our inner twelve-year-olds and try it.

It turned out to be a very attractively decorated little place, but not exactly thronged for Sunday lunch. When we went in, in fact, we were the only customers. (If you are ever looking for a place to eat in Littleton, Colorado, it's at 12 E Arapahoe Rd, right off S. Broadway.) They had something new on the menu I'd never seen, Peach Chicken, and you know what? It's GREAT! Kind of like lemon chicken, but with peaches and a little ginger.

So there we were, making jokes about Wangs and eating peaches, and we got off (HEE-HEE!) on the idea of making a website called Riceinfunnyplaces.com just to see if we got any hits to the site. Somewhere in the middle of this, a kind of strange couple came in, a woman with a pinched, sour face, trailed by a schmucky looking guy who might have been her son or her husband -- I honestly couldn't tell.

She gave her order to her dinner partner in a piercing voice, laying out exactly what she did NOT want in her chicken chow mein (which was 7/8ths of
the typical ingredients, as best as I could tell). Then she got up to find the restroom, but halfway across the floor seemed to think better of entrusting such a delicate and important task as ordering her food to the moron she came in with, so she repeated the whole thing loudly and abrasively to the server.

Eventually a third pair, two women about my age, came in to eat and were seated next to us. In the way you do, we lowered the sound levels another notch, but we were still laughing and having a pretty good time, as I always do when I'm with Damaris.

We were about halfway through the very good meal when I heard someone say, "They must be DRUNK!" I thought it was the women at the table next to us, and stopped what I was saying to listen. But they went chattering on, oblivious, and I figured the strange line was part of the story one was telling the other. I mean, how egotistical is it to think that strangers in a restaurant might be talking loudly about unremarkable YOU?

But then I saw that WeirdoWoman was storming across the floor. I remember thinking that was strange because they couldn't possibly have had enough time to finish eating. At the cash register, WW started waving her arms and loudly saying, "They're so RUDE! Cackling and HOWLING!" among other complaints. I looked around for these rude cackle-howlers and suddenly realized...it was US!

Except of course in the way it was totally not. I mean, yeah, we WERE laughing, but not nearly enough to be causing chips of paint to flake from the walls and glass to shatter. Plus, we were cracking some pretty silly and immature jokes, and we are both active parents, so we automatically tone down anything we don't want to have to explain to the Young and Innocent.

What I think is that this lady was a sister under the skin/fur to our old dog Sheila, who used to get very upset and bark hysterically whenever the other dogs tried to romp and play. We called her the Fun Police.

Damaris noted that the unflapped staff made them pay their bill anyway.

As you can imagine, we spent much of the rest of the day calling each other RUDE and objecting to cackling and howling of any kind.

We DID finally find the moped maker's house. He's a really nice guy, and demonstrated it for me and helped us load it and everything. I'm very excited about getting it home to try it out.

Unfortunately, about then Damaris started feeling kind of yucky, in the same way her husband Nigel had on Friday. So our trip was cut a little short and the journey back to her house was punctuated by several bathroom breaks. We were late enough getting back that I decided to stay up here in Brush tonight and go home in the morning. It meant Mike would have to miss school, but he bravely bit the bullet and agreed to make that sacrifice for the general good.

So if you have emailed me...I am away from my mail! I cannot reply yet! I will do it soon!

Anything else would be RUDE!

It's a beautiful day for a drive and family visit, slightly windy, but that's normal for here, so we're used to it. Mike and I are getting ready to head up to Brush, home of the Fabulous Stieb Family. We make a brief stop at the library to empty out Dreamcloud's hatch of books for the next Friends of the Library sale, and then we hit the highway.

We need the back cleared out, you see, because tomorrow Damaris and I will zip over to the Denver area and pick up MY NEW MOPED!!!

After giving it some thought, I've decided to name it Salazar. This is mainly because I am overly amused by names with more than one meaning.

(Mike got cut out of the naming process because, while he hit a winner with Dreamcloud, he also comes up with more...unusual names. Case in point, he recently bought a little stuffed terrier at a yard sale. It now rejoices in the name of "Wouldn't It Be Nice." Same as the Beach Boys song.)

First of all, the moped is green and silver, so naming it after the founder of Slytherin House is appropriate. Second, our Dem senator from Colorado, as some of you may know, is also named Salazar. He is a big proponent of green and alternative energy, so he would probably take it as a compliment, having a moped named after him. There is also a connotation of riding him relentlessly to get him to go where I want him to go, but I'm good with that.

There is a potential downside to choosing him as my moped's namesake, of course. I am taking a risk of getting in an accident--you never know for sure whether Salazar is going to stay in the middle of the road, or go veering off to the right or left!

All went reasonably well at the doctor's office, as I expected. I have to start taking lovastatin, as my cholesterol is inching up, but my fasting blood sugar was fine. Otherwise I am generally good to go for a while longer, looks like.

I got one LITTLE outdoor chore done, repotting some plants, and then the wind came up to 30mph from a standing start, so back indoors for me.

So far the most cheering thing, though, was that I got the moped!! The GREEN one!! Which might seem like an extravagance, but NOT. Because I figured it up (gas at av. $2.50 a gallon, savings per trip to town, 2.25, av trips to town per week 3.5) and it will pay for itself in 10.5 months! Well, okay, that doesn't count a helmet and a few little things like that...but also, exercise! Exercise is very important as a fringe benefit!

So anyway, good day so far!

I am having another one of those weeks where everything is way more complicated than it ought to be. I want it to KNOCK IT OFF.

Tonight Mike was telling me a story set in his Train World, as he is wont to do. This time Our Hero, Train Engineer Mike, had a problem because Joe, the perpetual goof-up engineer, rear-ended his train and caused a wreck that derailed Mike's goods and made them fall on the people's cars who were waiting behind the crossing arms. No one got hurt, but there was a problem with groups of people chasing after them throwing food.

Mike informs me a group of people that chase someone this way is called 'the angry moms'.

You know you better watch out for THEM. Me, I'd take my chances with an angry MOB any day, but whew, those MOMS! (And, yes, I did TRY to correct him...he knows what he knows!)

We had another appointed with our nice "feelings doctor" today. I always feel guilty at our appointments, because my charting of our assignments...well, it sucks, where it isn't non-existent. We do DO the stuff, though, and I feel it is helping. Like last night, Mike got mad because I wouldn't let him stay up to see some ToonDisney thing, just because it aired at 10:30 on a school night. So we had the usual yelling and stomping and crying and complaining (him, not me). BUT he went away to call down, and then came back, apologized and offered me an old video tape he didn't want anymore so I could record the show for him. Without any prompting from me or Caro! So I thought that was a really good sign of progress.

But as I said at the start, little things are bugging me. I don't think I like the latest Firefox update--something is making my computer act weird and I think that's it. I had to disassemble a melodica (kind of a keyboard harmonica) to clean it this week, and it was weird and a pain. I also need to clean some Bugs Bunny slippers and take pictures of assorted items that include wooden shoes from Holland--all of which would have been better done last weekend. But you know the glam life is not lived on the clock.

Also, people keep bidding on MY bike. Ha-ha, fools! Fear my mad eBay sniping skillz!

Here is what it's like to live in a small town like Lamar. We were heading in to the Post Office, Mike and I, and I spotted a Fedex truck driving along in a slow and dubious sort of way. As I was actually expecting a package sent via them, I just pulled up and stuck out my arm in a signal to stop. He must be familiar with rural ways, because he did. "You lookin' for 6109?" I asked him. He was, and he thanked me as he handed over by first season Barney Miller DVDs.

Today I got my first season Hill Street Blues, so I am totally set for stuff to watch for pretty much the whole month!

Mike has watched one ep of Barney Miller, just to be sociable, but of course it doesn't measure up to train pr0n. He saves up his chore allowance to buy videos and DVDs of...long recordings of trains being driven from here to there. His favorites are the cab rides, shot from the engineer POV.

Sometimes I watch them with him, to be sociable back, but his most recent one kind of brings me down. It's an hour of train and trolley scenes in and around New Orleans, and instead of just enjoying the trains rolling along, I found myself thinking, "And THAT'S probably not there any more, and I saw THAT on TV and it doesn't look so nice now, and THAT'S probably still half under water...."

Oh, well, at least we have the video to look at.

We are just having another puttery weekend, doing stuff like catch up email, tighten the loose toilet seat, saw legs off a shelf so it will fit under the desk here in my work area (Under ReConstruction!) and start negotiations with Mr. Mike about his upcoming birthday present. Which so far consists of explaining why we will NOT be buying him a motor scooter even though I am really hoping to buy a green moped on eBay.

There are multiple reasons I am looking at the moped with lust in my heart. One is that I feel the need to not be spending so much money on gas. Yes, I do own a Ford Explorer, which is technically an SUV. I need that type of vehicle for hauling my loot home from auctions and book sales, and it was the cheapest one I could buy after my dear departed Brownie the pickup got smashed up. I DID cut my driving to the Post Office back to every other day. But still, I figure it takes me a gallon of gas to go to town and back. The moped would do it on a tenth of that at most, PLUS I can do SOME of the pedaling and get a little non-weight bearing exercise out of the deal!

While I was researching my options, I found I could buy a kit that looks pretty good and convert my existing bike into a moped. The downside of this is that I would probably have to either be sensible (yeah, like THAT'S gonna happen) and ask Rick the Car Doctor and/or his guys to do it for money, or do it myself and...you know, let's not even go there.

The guy selling the two I like seems to sell kits, but also now and then installs one and sells the whole thing. He lives near Denver and says if I win I could just come pick up the bike, which saves me the shipping charge! So all in all it seems like a plan.

Well, back to work. Time to go mine the basement!

Wednesday got away from me. It's still out there somewhere...beware! It was in a mad frenzy when last I saw it cavorting and bucking over the hill! That's why this is a Take 2, because the post I started yesterday got lost in the melee.

So. January sort of dwindled away with a phfftbz. It's okay, January tends to be that kind of month, don't you think?

My health is decent, knees continuing to veerrrry slowly improve, shingles essentially gone except for rough textured, funny colored skin in the area. Damn, there goes the Playboy photo shoot AGAIN. I am hoping that by the time spring really sets in around here, I will be mobile enough for some minor gardening. The poor Garden of Art, Science and Technology got completely ignored last year, and needs floofing up something awful!

For the next few days, though, I will be sitting here trying to do tax stuff without smoking up ALL my good crack.