What I Watched: ALL the help stuff for doing my taxes with TurboTax.
Each year I swear that I will get a professional, but nooooo. My employer prior to the company sale had gifted me 0.0759604% of the S-Corp stock. That equates to as little value as you can imagine. It also means I have to do K1s, mail a hard copy in my home state, and generally lose my mind in the arcane and ever-changing tax law requirement hell. This is the last year for it, hooray.
Please chime in!
- How is the tax season in your country? (Looking at you, Canadian, UK, and Dutch folks).
- US denizens – do you have a tax guy? Do them yourselves?
What I Read: A Wretched Folly: A Regency Cozy (Beatrice Hyde-Clare Mysteries Book 14) by Lynn Messina. I adore these cozy mystery romances (always ensure that there are enough almond-laced rout cakes). Here is the Amazon blurb:
Traveling to the ancestral Matlock estate with her husband, Beatrice, Duchess of Kesgrave, is finally able to confront her greatest foe: the pinery. Forced to endure an endless parade of pineapple-inflected dishes early in her marriage, she has devised a scheme to sabotage the despised fruit, which she can now carry out at long last. Good gracious, no. Bea does not really mean the plants any harm, and approaching the building on a summer morning, she is struck by how lovely it is, with its elegant portico and high arching windows. It is a shame, then, that she stumbles across a slain corpse almost immediately upon entering.
Devil it! A dead body is the last thing she wants to contend with! She’s in the country — nearly a hundred miles from London and her recent harrowing experience. Having proven to the beau monde that she is not guilty of multiple homicides, she is eager to put some distance between her and her reputation as the murder duchess. All she wants to do is enjoy some fresh air and ingratiate herself with her new staff, an effort that would not be aided by accusing the servants of lying — although they obviously are, which the constable will figure out quickly enough if he is not a dunderhead.
Oh, but maybe he is a dunderhead and maybe the drawing in the victim’s pocket actually is a treasure map to a lost Viking horde and maybe the murder duchess is a little too set in her ways to allow a killer to go free — or strike again.
What I Listened To: Genesis Owusu – Stampede, The Slow Country – Firing Line, and Tom Vek – Hold On to Your Love:
Thank you for playing Brain Drain! How are you, Darling DeadSplinterites? What’s going on, dearest ones? Please do share with us!
I binged Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. It has an impressive lineup of female directors!
“The 2026 Netflix horror series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is directed by an all-female team led by Emmy nominee Weronika Tofilska (Baby Reindeer), who directed four episodes, alongside Axelle Carolyn (The Haunting of Bly Manor) and Lisa Brühlmann (Killing Eve). Created by Haley Z. Boston, this series focuses on a bride and groom during their wedding week.”
…taxes…hmm…for the folks I know UK taxes run from pretty much no effort (single salary paycheck with tax deducted at source so take home paychecks are after-tax & no investment or other income) through too-complicated (paychecks in more than one currency with overseas work & income from secondary sources like portfolios or rent paid to them or something) to not pay someone to figure it out…to pointlessly infuriating (have to manually make a return online but via a process that doesn’t just give you the form to fill in so it’s hard to be sure you’re consistent year to year…for what is a small enough income to not make it into the tax-paying bracket…so the US isn’t alone in seeming to make it all more difficult than seems to make sense…but…quite a lot of people in the UK don’t really think about it that much
…pretty sure in the next tax year they’re changing it up to quarterly filing as part of some “go digital” initiative the purpose of which is unclear to me…but if that means the people who just let the PAYE (pay as you earn) system do whatever & maybe if you’re lucky wind up giving you a rebate because you paid more than they should have taken…have to start filing 4 times a year…that might be less than popular with more people than not…so…their old slogan of “tax isn’t meant to be taxing” might need a remix?
…seem to be behind on the watching of stuff…there’s daredevil & at least two other things I’m sure I meant to get around to by now
…but I started a book series called the lost fleet…sci fi thing…first installment called “dauntless”…&…people sometimes pick a lane in the hard/soft spectrum with sci fi…in which sense…give or take the odd inertial dampener or cryo-pod or “hypernet”…they try pretty hard to do space navy engagements the hard way?
…rough & ready your protagonist is a guy who won an against-the-odds battle at the outset of a war that has been waged for a century or more but spent pretty much all of that in the suspended animation sort of hibernation until being found like a frozen fossil by the titular fleet…& then has to try to get that shit together because standards are not what they were in his day
…shame elon or hegseth or whoever didn’t read those instead of missing the point of better known stuff…they spell out a bunch of stuff about the overarching purpose of things like LOAC or not butchering prisoners or whatever in ways it might have been harder to grab by the wrong end of a stick that wasn’t shitty before you did that?
…also…the DMZ comics…turns out there’s a tv show based on them…which I started…& making rosario dawson the main character makes sense in some ways…the protagonist in the comics is kind of a vehicle for musing about the role of the 4th estate & they don’t seem inclined to have any of that stuff in the show that I’ve seen so far…so they’re pretty different beasts…but both have some redeeming features?
Just did my taxes this morning. Owed $280, so we’re calling this one a win.
Watched Annika on Masterpiece. It’s the usual BBC cop show but in Scotland and lord, the accents were a treat. The show itself was kind of meh. Also watched Mudtown, which is the usual BBC cop show but it’s about a magistrate who has an out-of-control daughter. It was one notch above meh. Tried to watch The Thursday Murder Club and it was godawful, despite a stellar cast.
…oh, good…I thought it might just be me that was underwhelmed by the thursday murder club
…don’t know much about richard osman other than he used to be the one who doled out a bunch of trivia in a game show he invented as a format…called pointless…& had something to do with a david walliams comedy thing…so I might be biased because I always found walliams pretty insufferable…either way he sort of has a rep for being clever but the books…weren’t especially?
…it improved to the tune of the casting but it was a bit like walliams’ thing about the criming granny…or…the no.1 ladies detective agency but transposed onto a genteel nursing home kinda context…& pretty much tailored to “could go out on a saturday night on the BBC” style stuff…but the one with the bloke from minder & some others dealing with cold cases had more to it?
…new tricks that’d be…short on the scottish accents but you might like it better if you haven’t already been down that road?
i have always done my own taxes. i owe 4600+$ fml
i can’t stay up past 7 so i wake up at midnight and stay up watching the news all night…so i figured i’d get into other stuffs instead.
i am not a super hero person so deadpool was recommended to me because “you don’t need to know anything prior to watching.” i watched all 3…laughed a few times.
i’m halfway through the hitch hikers guide tv show from 1981. pretty funny so far…some really good lines.
i got a library card in my new spot so have signed out the handmaids tale.
We have a tax guy that replaced our long time tax gal. Right before she retired, one of her employee’s stole a bunch of their clients tax returns, not ours because we usually owe. Our taxes are too much of a mess for us to do w/ a few LLC’s, our trust, & the clinic’s tied in for us to attempt.
I watched Bad Thoughts which is a very disturbing but darkly funny show…
Listening to new Courtney Barnett…
Took yesterday off from the floor to go to Seattle for tamales, empenadas, & beer so pay the price today.
I pay someone qualified to do my taxes. I’m good at many things, taxes are not among them.
I went to see Project Hail Mary and it was so good!!!
They did a wonderful job adapting the novel, seriously a fucking amazing movie.