Category: Jake

If you’re wondering why I’ve sort of disappeared off the face of the Earth the last week or so (posting links sporadically at best), I’ve been dealing with my favorite time of the year: Tax Time. And since I’m apparently the only one that knows anything about this sort of thing in my extended family (or at least I pretend to), I do the taxes for my in-laws as well. While I do it all in TurboTax, it’s still a time-consuming, mind-numbing process.

It’s always easy to do my brother-in-law’s taxes as he has one job, doesn’t make a ton of money, and is eligible for the free filing programs with the IRS so I don’t have to pay filing fees for him. My mom and dad-in-law’s taxes got a lot more complicated this year with their youngest daughter going off to college this year. They had loan paper work, she had scholarship paperwork, I didn’t get her 1098-T form until after filing, and needed to amend (as there was a $300 difference in the refund as the numbers on her statement didn’t match up with her 1098-T). All told, it took a bunch of time to make sure I was getting the numbers right so that we maximized their refund (it certainly helps that she’s going to a really expensive school and he finally got his W4 adjusted last year so he wasn’t claiming four kids living at home). But we had to try to get theirs done as soon as we could so that they could get their FAFSA sent off.

Then this weekend I finally got around to starting mine. This year I was making more money doing side-jobs for people, and got three more 1099-MISCs than last year, and also had a bunch of work that had to be claimed but didn’t get a 1099 form. Being the good boy I was, I claimed every last frickin’ dime of it (even making sure that TurboTax handled my Oregon “kicker” properly), but you better dang well believe I also itemized and deducted as much as humanely possible so that the Feds couldn’t bend me over the table. All told, after hours of work, I’m getting a small refund from the Feds and owe the State a bit of money — so basically I broke even. I wish I could write off my time I spent doing this crap, not just the fees I paid for the software.

I’m just happy as heck to have it overwith at least another 11 months or so. And then we get to do it all again. Yipee…

Now I’m going to go catch up on some Dead Like Me episodes that I’ve gotten from Netflix but just haven’t had a chance to watch.

Today is my Monday at the office, and you knew it was going to be a long day when I walked in there was about two dozen heaters, dehumidifiers and fans blowing in the office and the carpet was spongy. Apparently a pipe froze in the empty tenant space next to our office, broke and flooded that office with about four inches of water. It went out the back door of the place, and a snow burm that was outside the door basically routed the water like a river right into our office back door, flooding the first floor of our office. Luckily, it appears that the various computer we had on the floor weren’t damaged. I’ve been spending most of my day trying to get things back up and running, but not having a whole lot of luck because the heaters and fans and such keep breaking the circuits that the computers are plugged into. I’m basically moving computers around until I find a circuit that isn’t overloaded so I can get this office back up and running.

So don’t expect to hear from me much today if you sent me an email or need to get a of me, as this is the first time I’ve gotten online all day (and will probably be the last until this evening).

Just an FYI to anybody who cares: For some reason, the RSS/Atom feed for Bend Blogs is totally hosed. The feed has always had 200 items (which is about three days worth of blogging around Central Oregon). The problem is that for some reason it’s only getting 200 entries, sorted alphabetically — which means it’s only getting up to about the letter “K” or so. Long story short, it’s messed up, and I’ll work on it when I get some more free time. But it certainly explains why my site never got listed on the RSS feed.

Update: OK, I’ve sort of narrowed down what it’s doing. It’s taking the first 100 blogs (alphabetically) over there, and push the latest two entries from each of those blogs, regardless of how old they are. I have an open thread on the Gregarius forums, so hopefully that will get some responses.

Update on 1/27 at 10:40PM: Finally found the problem. It ended up being a misconfiguration in Gregarius. The feed works, but I’m working on tweaking it, and will be also be hooking it up through FeedBurner so that it’s a permanent URL, should I ever change back-end systems on bendblogs.com. I’ll post the new feed URL tomorrow, and will see if I can get all of the bendblogs.com feed URLs through FeedBurner. More tomorrow after I get some sleep as my daughter was ill last night and I’m tired.

In case you haven’t heard from every other local blogger, it’s frickin’ cold outside, dipping down below 0°F last night and will easily do it again tonight.

Here’s the problem with the cold in the Ortman household: We use our woodstove for heat during the winter, because it just provides much better heat for our house. Our electric furnace only pumps lukewarm air into one room of the house (there are no vents in any other rooms), so it’s fairly pointless to even bother to turn it on. So we use our wood stove to heat the house.

The problem is that with wood heat that you have to have wood, and you have to chop said wood. This isn’t usually an issue when the temperature’s in the 35-50° range as I can easily keep the house warm with not a ton of wood. I can usually chop a bunch of wood and have it last a few days. However, when it doesn’t get above 10° for a couple days, I can’t keep up with the amount of wood needed as we have to constantly have the fire burning hot, and I have to get up in the middle of the night to put wood on it. Chopping wood in 5° weather isn’t any fun, either.

I’m thinking it’s time to start saving for a new furnace and duct work, as I quit chopping wood a couple hours ago and I’m just now able to feel my hands again (and yes, I was wearing gloves and about 15 layers of clothing).

In case anybody’s interested, I have a nice Xerox color laser printer that needs some work for sale up on Craigslist as well as a big load of ink and a couple maintenance kits for the printer over on eBay. I’m sure they’re a good deal to somebody.