April 7, 1995
Dear Everyone:
Daylight
Savings Time has struck again. It
always takes me at least a week to get used to getting up an hour
earlier. Seems like I put in a
mere 10-hour day and I just wimp out, too tired to watch TV.
So I tape anything that comes on
after 9:00 and plan to watch it on the weekend.
This is one of the problems with having a
VCR.
It lets you have your cake and
eat it, too; but you need twice as much time to do it.
No wonder my weekends are so
full. Luckily, I spend absolutely
no (zero) time worrying about the
OJ
Simpson trial.
Got my
taxes done last weekend and I will be seeing a little bit in the way
of a refund. Now, I've got to do
some serious thinking about this in the future.
I'm set up so that my withholding
goes just a few hundred dollars over what I'm going to be paying, so I
get a refund. But there seems to
be a catch.
I get paid ’X’ and the government takes ‘Y’ out of it, claiming it’s
income. So far, so good.
The state also takes a chunk out
of that income. Come April,
I do my taxes and it turns out both the feds and the state have to give
some back. So far, still good.
But, when I get my refund from
the state, the feds say that's
"income", even though I've already paid taxes on it.
Then the feds take some more
because of the refund from the state. Does that seem kosher to you?
Seems like I'm paying twice for
the same piece of change. But, if
I change my withholding to less, I'll end up having to pay in April
instead of getting a refund; and I'm not sure I like that aspect either.
So I'll go on thinking about it,
and smoke will continue to come out my ears.
This has been one of those weeks where I'm busy all day long; and, at
the end of the day, I haven't gotten anything done.
Phone calls; emergencies;
"I-forgot-my-password-(again)"; "Can you show me how to (fill in the
blank)?"; etc., etc., etc. I'm
definitely earning my ‘X’-worth of salary.
The mama bird is still on her nest, over the fire extinguisher.
They’re still tearing up the lobby of my San Francisco building.
This week, the guards, in what
remains of the lobby, had to wear those protective earmuffs, because the
workmen were using jackhammers. I
wouldn't mind, except that they were using them on the
walls.
As in, the steel-reinforced
concrete walls that generally hold the building up.
There's also construction of some kind going on in “Livermore”.
This has something to do with
replacing be rather miserable air-conditioning/heating system with an
entirely new system. It seems to
involve guys who spend most of their time on ladders, half inside the
ceiling, only visible from the waist down.
Of course, the letters get in the way. And
the work on the ceiling means a shower of little bits of everything
coming down on your work area, so they plan their work to coincide as
much as possible with when people will be gone.
Since most of “Livermore” is on
the "9/80" alternate work schedule (80 hours worked in nine days), that
means that someone is always gone on Fridays and Mondays.
Since I'm not on "9/80" (more
like 5/80), that doesn't work for me. But,
since I split my time between “Livermore” and San Francisco, they can
work when I'm not there.
They've even learned to read my door. I
keep a 3-month calendar on my door, where I can pencil in where I'll be
over the next few weeks (subject to change without notice, of course).
When someone wants to know when
I'm going to be in “Livermore”, or the City, they just go over and read
the door.
Whatever works.
Love, as always,
Pete
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