Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Wednesday, March 29, 2006 Vacuuming Doesn't Suck Any More You know those little kids who are fearless, the kind that don't shrink from dogs thrice their size? The kind whose reaction to strangers is a hearty, "Hi!" The kind who clamber around on the adults in the room like Cirque du Soleil performers on a cargo net, because they're agile, and the grown-ups always catch them, and even if they don't the pavement's only five or six feet down? The kind who aren't afraid of anything but the vacuum cleaner? That's my kid. Except he's not afraid of the vacuum cleaner. As long as he's been able to move around, he's loved vacuuming time. The first time he crawled, it was to try to chase the noisy machine whirring around the living room rug. The first time he walked wasn't to intercept it, but the second time was. And the first time he got all tangled up in the cord and face-planted on the floor, I picked him up, apologized deeply for my carelessness, and had to make a grab for him when it turned out to be a cynical ruse to steal my appliance right out from under me. All babies have their own names for the important things in their life. Trash and I are "Mama" and "Dada," respectively, the cats are "Keedee" (although they've recently been promoted to "KeedeeKAH" in general, and Turtle in particular to "Turl" with proper coaching), and a new battery-powered bubble machine not only turned the whole neighborhood into the beginning of The Lawrence Welk Show, but also had him addressing each bubble individually as "bah-bah." But the vacuum cleaner has had its name the longest. It is called, simply, "AAAAAAAA!" He knows exactly what's going on every time I drag that Singer out of the study into the living room and start unspooling the cord. I go to plug it in in the bathroom, and he stays out there admiring and worshipping and supplicating to his upright idol instead of following me in there to try to steal the toilet brush like usual. Sometimes the vacuum switch is still on from last time, and it gives a little yelp before I pull the plug out. In which case M. Small yelps right back. But they really get into a conversational rhythm when the vacuuming begins in earnest. Vacuum: WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA M. Small: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Vacuum: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA M. Small: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa And so on. They could debate this for hours. I used to hate vacuuming. It seemed like such a waste of time to wrestle that thing out every couple of months and go over the carpet in the same boring old patterns. I don't have that problem any more. Now it comes out every couple of days, and the pattern changes every time. That's because M. Small leads it in what a game of cat and mouse would look like if the mouse thought it was the cat and the cat had a handle on it that led up to my hand. He runs after it and it dodges around him, cleaning the spot where he was just standing. It feints in one direction and goes in the other. It ducks behind him and around, making abrupt turns and curlicues that leave M. Small befuddled. And sometimes he catches up, puts his hands on the humming hood, puts his face up against the little light, and goes, "AAAAAAAAA!" It takes longer to vacuum than it used to, and I don't exactly have those hotel-lobby-carpet stripes when I'm done, but it's a lot more fun than it used to be. I don't even really want a Roomba any more. I'm already dreading the day when the joy of this simple task is gone for him, because when it is it'll be gone again for me, too. I'm trying to stretch it out as long as I can, of course. I've shown him games like spinning around, and rhythmically plugging his ears against the noise, and chasing mom instead of child, and it seems to be working. One of his favorite toys at home is a little popper thingy that he wheels around on the floor, and I've recently learned that his favorite toy at day care is a toy vacuum cleaner. Apparently he takes it around with him everywhere. This morning I let him hold the broom for a while, and he laughed and sang to it as though he was in the end of one of those movies where the animals walk all the way across the country to get home, but with a broom instead of a special pet. A Target broom, no less. I had a brief scare last week that his love for the vacuum cleaner may have waned, that he'd lose interest in the thing before reaching an age where I can hand it off to him permanently. I was clearing the toys and books and pillows off the living room rug. This usually excites him because he knows what's coming. But this time all he did was leave the room. I finished clearing, calling out to him, saying "It's time for AAAAAA" and such things, but he didn't come back. So I gave up and went into the study to find the vacuum, hoping the noise would bring him back. He was already in there, trying to haul the vacuum cleaner out for me. That's my boy.  Today's best search phrase: "Math smart heavy ugly angry." Which is so weird, because it also happens to be the only thing anyone ever wrote in my high school yearbook. posted by M. Giant 6:51 PM 9 comments 9 Comments:Oh my God! You're SO funny!
By My 2 little cousins LOVE the vacuum. REALLY love it. They have their own toy ones, and now I think they have real ones too. It makes their mom really happy.
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Before you went and had a kid, I NEVER wanted kids. But the more I see and hear about M. Small...
By Me and my two-and-a-half-year old can relate, except his love is the swiffer. Ohhhhh, The Swiffer, his love, his muse. He grabs it up like a drum major, marches to a nice large swath of floor, and sings. I LOVE this child.
By DO you know what you need? One of those battery-charged broom things. It puts all of M. Small's favorites together: it makes noise, it doesn't have a cord, it's light weight, AND it will actually do some work. Everybody wins!
By You are made of awesomeness.
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ovaries...twitching...must...resist...biological clock...
By You never fail to make me laugh, but this time, the toddler-vacuum debate, I laughed even more than usual! I'm finally up to season 5 of Six Feet Under on dvd, and I'm looking forward to your recaps as much as the episodes themselves.
By Those popper thingies are kiddie crack. I had one when I was small, and I was fiercely, rabidly protective of it. Much to my younger brother's grief.
By Sunday, March 26, 2006 Fever Dreams Supposedly the great thing about being sick is that if all goes well, you get to sleep through the worst of it. I felt the ague insinuating its creaky fingers through my ribcage on Wednesday afternoon. Since I had not one but two ginormous (and I'm adding that to my spell-check already) projects due the next day, it wasn't like I could take the rest of Wednesday off. I'd just have to cowboy through the rest of the day and Thursday, and crash on Friday. Wednesday night I got home and told Trash I thought I was coming down with something, because I know from experience that she hates it when I leave her to figure that out for herself. Especially considering the way she would have found out in this case. At about 1:30 Thursday morning, she woke up in what had apparently become an old-school Magic Fingers bed, with yours truly as the vibrating unit, engorged with a jingling bellyful of quarters. Apparently I had the kind of fever that got people dumped in tubs of ice on Little House on the Prairie. She got extra blankets without my having to ask, which was good because my teeth were chattering so violently that I wouldn't have been able to verbalize the request anyway. The next morning, all that was left was a soreness in my throat that made it painful to swallow. Well, that wasn't so bad, I thought. I figured that thanks to the flu shot I'd had in the fall, my system had managed to make short work of whatever pathogen had decided to visit me. I went to work, got both huge projects done minutes before seven p.m. without breaking for lunch (which was fine, because lunch would have been painful anyway), and headed home to recuperate for the next day; because another huge project had just come in that was due the following Tuesday. So Friday and Monday would be crunch time all over again. But Trash wasn't having that. Despite my assurances that I would be fine going to work Friday, and screwed if I didn't, she bargained me to a compromise where I would take a half day. "Fine," I scoffed, "But I'm going to feel just fine by one o'clock, and there won't even be any point in my coming home." I did feel better by the time I actually left work Friday, but that was only because I'm not sure I've ever felt worse at work than I did from 10:00-10:30 and 11:30-12:00. Because on the morning I insisted I would be "fine," I suffered through not one but two bone-wracking bouts of fever, alternately shivering and sweating at my desk, breathing hard, my face feeling like a tingly mask and my hands seeming somehow really far away from my body. I don't know how high it actually got, since I never took my temperature, but when I stood up, there were singe marks on my chair. I finished slightly less than the bare minimum I could get away with before bailing for the day at 1:30. It would have been 1:15 if I hadn't spent so much time waiting for the shakes to subside so I could properly wield a pen. I went home and crashed hard, until Trash brought M. Small home from day care at the end of the day. We all spent the hours before his bedtime together. After he went down, I rooted through the medicine cabinet, downed some LiquiTabs of uncertain provenance, and went to bed early. 9:30, to be exact. Looking back, it seems that as soon as I closed my eyes, the dreams started in. My slumber was haunted by the demon spawn of every giant project in my pipeline, past and present, racing towards its deadline riddled with yawning gaps, internal contradictions, blank grids where tables full of numbers should be, and unanswered questions that would have stymied the greatest minds in my field or any other. Holes would be filled in, only to reappear elsewhere, while the minutes ticked away. I don't often have nightmares where the situation becomes so intolerable that I simply wake up, but this was one of them. Still groggy, I took in the blackness of the bedroom and the clamminess of my t-shirt, and only hoped that I would have the chance to get some actual, restful sleep in what I estimated was the thirty minutes or so before the sun came up and M. Small awoke for the day. And then I turned my head to look at the bedside clock. 11:08 p.m. Normally such a sight would have filled me with elation, but the potential of another seven to eight hours of this filled me with dread. Asleep or no, how would I get any rest with my work-guilty subconscious tormenting me? But all I could do was hope for the best and go back to sleep. As it happened, the best was over, because that first stretch of unbroken sleep was to be the longest of the night. Trash tells me that I woke up about every fifteen minutes thereafter, although I would have guessed it was every forty-five. And every time I looked at the clock, knowing I should be counting the hours of sweet sleep remaining to me, but all that seemed to be coming was this nasty, bitter variety. Because that nightmare project haunted me through the night, assimilating elements of everything in my subconscious--from an upcoming trip to Mexico to that night's episode of Doctor Who--into its misshapen, Lovecraftian bulk. When M. Small finally announced at 6:30 a.m. that the night was over, I told Trash, "That was the least restful nine hours of sleep I've ever had." "Tell me about it," she slurred into her pillow. Why she didn't kick me out of there is a mystery to me. The next night, I skipped the LiquiTabs of uncertain provenance, but again went to bed early. Let me tell you about now my relationship to the show Prison Break. I've never once seen an episode, even though it's now on right before 24. I have read some of Sobell's excellent recaps on Television Without Pity. And on Saturday, I read an article about the show in Entertainment Weekly over the lovely and very soft brunch that Trash had made me. That's it. And yet, somehow, when I fell asleep on Saturday night, I found myself solely responsible for every plotline, every character, every dark conspiracy, every logistical detail of this by all accounts labyrinthine show that I've never actually seen. I woke up at 11:00, exhausted all over again. I turned to Trash, who was reading next to me with the light on, and explained what had happened. "You've never even watched, Prison Break, she pointed out in disbelief. "I’m saying," I agreed. "Is this why you don't like to sleep as much as I do? Because you have all these complicated dreams that are so much damn work?" "Sometimes." Trash and I understood each other a lot better after that. I didn't wake up as many times over the rest of that night, and I felt quite a bit more rested this morning, despite having shepherded my evolving band of escapee pilgrims through an odyssey too digressive and boring to even spare the number of words I'm using to describe it now. And when I took today's afternoon nap, I woke up before M. Small did, which never happens. So I must be caught up on my rest, right? It still hurts to swallow, but that's only good because, like I said, going to Mexico soon. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. Maybe I'm hoping that if I get it all down and out of my head, I'll sleep well and normally tonight. As for you, after reading all this, you probably already are. Consider it my gift. posted by M. Giant 7:56 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:
this comment has to do with your recap of the episode the Silence:Six Feet Under. I'm watching in France so a little behind the USA schedule.
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Sounds like those pesky animal crackers got their revenge. You must have really cheesed off that zebra.
By Holy cow, my boyfriend had the exact same flu.... except that we hadn't heard of anyone with the same symptoms (sweating, restless sleep that felt like hours, ribcage aches), so of course we went online to self-diagnose and came up with the fact that he obviously had cancer.
By Your household seems to get sick ALOT. Eat a vegetable or two. I hear that helps
By You might want to keep an eye on your throat, so to speak. I had similar symptoms around Thanksgiving, and it turned out I had strep - an illness I hadn't had since I was nine.
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Sounds like typhus, or maybe Dengue Fever. Have you been to the Equatorial Congo lately?
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"Your household seems to get sick ALOT. Eat a vegetable or two. I hear that helps."
By Thursday, March 23, 2006 Lesson in a Bag One of the things we've been working on with M. Small is animal noises. He's known for months that a cow says "moo," and sheep saying "baa" and ducks saying "kack" weren't far behind. But the other night, Trash decided we should spend a little time focusing on the vital life skill of knowing wht other animals say. So at snack time, she broke out the bag of Animal Crackers. I didn't realize at the time that she was screwing me over. She got to feed him the cookies, and I had to stand by making animal noises for his edification. Whatever she happened to pull out of the bag, I had to imitate. Trash: [Pulling out a cracker] "What does an elephant say?" Me: [Makes trumpeting sound, raising one arm in front of face like a trunk] M. Small: [Smiles, eats cracker] You can already see where this is likely to become embarrassing. Trash: [Pulling out a cracker] "What does a monkey say?" Me: "Oo oo ee ee ee ah ah!" M. Small: [Smiles, eats cracker.] Trash: [Pulling out a cracker] "What does a camel say? Me: [Makes horrible spitting noises like the llamas on The Amazing Race that time, thinking those were camels and not llamas] Trash: [Laughs hysterically] M. Small: [Laughs, eats cracker.] Trash: [Pulling out a cracker] What does a giraffe say? Me: "..." Trash: "..." M. Small: "..." [eats cracker] Trash: [Pulling out a cracker] "What does a zebra say?" Me: "..." Trash: "Come on." Me: "ZEEEeeee..." Trash: "...?" Me: "...bra." Trash: "I don't think so." M. Small: [Eating cracker]: "Zeeee!" Trash: [Pulling out a cracker]: "What does a seal say?" Me: [Singing] "And we're never gonna surviiiiive, unless..." Trash: "Don't confuse him." Me: "Oh, Heidi Klum, I'm so glad we're married." Trash: "Stop it." M. Small [Having eaten seal cracker and now reaching for the next one] Me: "Ark, ark ark." Trash: "What does a camel say?" Me: [Horrible spitting noises] So, yeah, it was embarrassing, but now when you ask M. Small what a monkey says, he'll actually say "Eee eee ooh ooh." Which is more embarrassing for him, but he's still cute enough to get away with it. No fair. posted by M. Giant 8:12 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:I thought a zebra would say "who's behind the dooooorrr...."
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For your future reference, a zebra is a member of the donkey family. It is not so close to the horse as many people think, so it's more a donkey with stripes than a horse with stripes. It's sound resembles the whining noise of a donkey, but it's stretched longer. Something like 'whahah, hah... whahah, hah' while you pinch your nose closed. Put National Geographic on at any time, you'll see what I mean.
By Okay, the seal/Seal thing had me cracking up at my desk for several minutes. So funny.
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"Oh, Heidi Klum, I'm so glad we're married"
By Love your M Small stories! My son is 1, and we're playing many of the same games. He'll neigh for a horse and woof for a dog, but none of these fancy animals yet. :)
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People with little people: unite and take over!
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Honestly. The "and we're never gonna surviiiiive..." was totally playing in my head the MOMENT I read from one line to the next.
By Sunday, March 19, 2006 Bald My Boss! My editor at Television Without Pity is going to shave her head, with your help. Sars is running a contest/fundraiser over at her site, Tomato Nation. It's for Donors Choose, a great charitable organization that helps schools get funds they need for specific goals and projects -- and you choose which ones to support. Hence the name. Sars is shooting for $25,000 in total donations as her goal, and you'd better hurry, because she's more than halfway there as of this writing. Not that overshooting would be a bad thing, because if her readers raise $30,000, her hair comes off. All of it. I know you can do it. I know you want to do it. Think about all those kids getting access to the things they need that they're not otherwise going to be able to afford. And then think about Sars walking around New York with a top that's shinier than the Chrysler Building. It's win-win, people. Every little bit helps. And every donation, no matter the size, gets entered into a random drawing for a whole raft of kick-ass prizes. One of those prizes is an hour of live career counseling with my brilliant wife Trash, whom you may remember from jobhunting week on the Vine's Ask the Expert series. And maybe a story or two here. Once again: here's the official contest page on TN, and the Donors Choose list of projects being targeted. Go nuts. UPDATE: Done and done. The video's accessible from here. See how humorless those sourpusses G.I. Jane, Ellen Ripley and Evey Hammond really are by comparison. posted by M. Giant 10:18 AM 4 comments 4 Comments:
Donors Choose is an awesome org.
By There MUST be photographic evidence of Sars' pate shining in the sun. Prefereably whilst surrounded by some of the kiddies that benefitted from the D.C. efforts. Good project!
By Thanks for the heads-up, M. Giant. I gave my $20 bucks. It's not enough by itself, but with everyone giving, we are sure to see that bald shine!
By
Ha! "Heads up." Awesome.
By Friday, March 17, 2006 Talk to the Hand I've been after Trash for a while now to start teaching M. Small sign language. I've heard that many babies can pick that up before they can speak English, and I'm eager to hear his review of the past seventeen months. But she says it's pretty much futile this early on unless both parents know sign. And I don't. And yet, the other night, M. Small was climbing up on the love seat again, and Trash sang him a little song, signing it as she went. He watched her raptly, and then, smiling happily, flailed his hands and arms back at her in what was inarguably an attempt at mimicry. "Teach that boy sign language right now!" I ordered. She agreed to give him a short lesson, but he quickly lost interest. So maybe she's right. And by the time I learn sign, he'll know more spoken words than I do anyway. Trash took ASL as her language requirement when she went back to college in the mid-nineties to prepare for librarian school. She had a gift for it, and she practiced all the time. She'd hang out with her friends who were also learning sign, and they'd converse in it. She'd start signing along with her words when she'd got upset, and then stop talking and keep signing, so it was sometimes like living with a deaf Ricky Ricardo. She'd sign the lyrics while singing along to the radio in the car, until I told her that unless she was going to keep her hands on the wheel, I was going to keep putting the car in neutral. But I never picked up much more than the finger-spelling alphabet and a few of my favorites, like "turtle" and "soda" and "butterfly." But the thing I remember more than anything else wasn't a sign at all, but a certain aspect of deaf culture. I first learned of it at the airport, when I noticed that Trash was watching a couple of people who were waiting with us at the gate. They were signing, and I asked Trash what they were talking about. This was when she was still learning, and I think it was one of the first times she'd seen sign language being used in the real world. But as soon as I noticed, she looked away from the signers. "It's rude to eavesdrop. Really rude. You just don't do it." And then she wouldn't even tell me what they had been talking about. Even so, I had no idea just how powerful that conditioning is until last night, the second time this week that ASL came into our lives. She was in the study, working on the computer while a rerun of CSI was playing on my recapping TV. It was the last few minutes of the episode, and Gil, who was going deaf at that point in the series, was having a conversation with another person in sign. As I walked by the TV, I offhandedly said, "It's rude to eavesdrop." And the awesome thing is that she looked away from the screen and turned back towards the computer monitor as if she'd been slapped. I watched her in amazement, and it was a good five seconds before she realized I was fucking with her. "Hey!" she said, turning back to the TV. But the episode was over. "That wasn't funny!" she lied. "Come on," I said. "Even you thought that was funny." But then she got her revenge by refusing to tell me what Gil and the other character had been talking about. Today's best search phrase: "Poisoning ice for flu in his trash." I believe in this context, it would be spelled "flue." posted by M. Giant 9:05 PM 9 comments 9 Comments:
I've heard that if you start too early, kids just think the sign for a word is like a synonym of the spoken word, and it can stunt their langauage development. Not that you're going to have that problem with M. Small, just a related anecdote.
By There are also 'baby signs', which is a set of simple little quasi-sign-language signs, that are sufficient to babies' needs. It overlaps with actual sign language but isn't exactly the same. We tried it with our first son and it really helped. And there was no confusion with switching to spoken words. If you do a search on 'baby signs' I'm sure you'll find more than you need to know.
By I also know ASL and Trash is correct -- it's rude, like standing close to someone to listen to their conversation. However, I am certain that it's allowed when it's ON TV and thus, M. Giant, that was a mean move.
By Wow! Suddenly I feel both famous and evil. Um, not that I had any notion that a search about poisoning flu ice might bring up the food poisoning entry or anything. Ahem. Because I have certainly never been plagued by an inexplicable desire to be "Today's best search phrase." Of... of course I haven't. (All the same... yay!)
By i nannied for a language-delayed (possibly autistic) infant/toddler (from when he was 7 mos to just over 2 years) & his parents were in total denial that there could be anything "wrong" with their kid, but i taught him signs for juice, milk, snack, sleepy, nap, & a few others & they were IMMENSELY helpful -- it drastically reduced his frustration at not being able to communicate what he wanted, & it reduced MY frustration with HIM at not being able to decipher his various whiny noises (no babbling, no pointing).
By We used a small set of signs with my daughter starting at about 8 months (eat, drink, apple, banana, sleep) and she picked up on them very quickly. I would challenge anyone who thinks it delays language to spend a silent moment with her now - at 4 years old, her only language problem is talking too much :)
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Am I a huge pain in the arse if I remind you that you should capitalize the "D" in "Deaf culture," at the end of your fifth paragraph?
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My little brother (I nanny for him, I'm 21 and he's 17 months) has been 'teaching' signs (just incorporating them into everyday life) since 11 months or so. He picked up at about 12 months on 'more' (usually for food) and 'milk', and 'sister' (yay!). He's very much a 'his way' kid, though, so he caught on and made up his own signs for a bunch of stuff-'mom'(peekaboo, which only she plays with him) and 'snack' (pretending to pick up cheerios), and other stuff.
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I took a signing course with my now-11-month-old son, Sam, and one of the first things we were told is that the whole "delayed verbal skills" thing is a myth. Just in case you were actually concerned.
By Friday, March 10, 2006 Head of the Class Trash has been teaching a research class at an area college for the past five Tuesday nights. Naturally, her twelve students all think she's awesome and wonderful and want her to teach all the rest of their classes, even though she doesn't know anything about the other areas they're studying. She's inspired them to step out of their comfort zones, and become more creative in their schoolwork, which is great. And, believe it or not, they're all having a great time. They are, you might say, amped. For instance, last night was her final class. Most of the evening was devoted to final presentations by small groups. And they'd clearly put a lot of planning into these presentations. One group took the floor, and its spokesperson made an announcement. "Part of our presentation is going to be trivia questions. The first person to get the right answer has a choice. You can either take a piece of candy from this bag..." Here, one of her teammates held up a bag of candy. "...Or, you can give John a shock." Here, her other teammate, John, held up the electronic dog collar around his wrist. I don't know what it says about John that not only did people's hands shoot up throughout the presentation, but at least half of them chose a shock for John. Luckily for John, the collar was working erratically and only delivered a shock part of the time. Also luckily for John, the collar wasn't working erratically enough to kill his ass dead. Trash kept thinking to herself, I should probably stop this, but they were all adults, after all, and John had volunteered, and everyone was having so much fun. It was like a wacky game show, combined with a nutty referendum on John's popularity, with the madcap kookiness of the Milgram Experiment thrown in for extra laughs. Plus there was the random element of the collar's erratic functionality, which helped maintain an unpredictable rhythm. "Didn't hurt. Didn't hurt. Didn't hurt. Ow! Didn't hurt..." If Trash is asked back to teach another class, however, she's thinking about making a rule in advance about no electric shocks being administered to the students. I told her that if she plans to continue encouraging such creativity, she should probably also prohibit the use of insects, leeches, corrosive chemicals, and firearms. But then she said that that will only make them more creative. Today's best search phrase: "Puerto Rican parade hos." Naturally, I fully support taking advantage of any opportunity to learn about other cultures. And, of course, their hos. posted by M. Giant 6:16 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:Woo boy am I glad you found a way out of your foggy elevator and posted a new entry. Have a great weekend!
By M. Giant is exaggerating about how strongly my students enjoyed my teaching, but he is telling the truth about the dog collar. I'm not sure that it was a desire to *shock* the student in question so much as it was the novelty of the shock option, but it did indeed feel a little "Lord of the Flies" or something.
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No, M.Giant is not exaggerating about your teaching ability. I have sat through countless of your presentations - the same ones - and can testify as to your amazing speaking style...not to mention how you can make the most boring subject material (boring to others perhaps) interesting!
By This is awesome! I teach LIS students, and keep telling them to be creative in presenting. I would definitely be impressed by something like this! :)
By What's great is that all your Google ads are for shock collars now!
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Wow. The most exciting thing we did my my Research class was a regression analysis.
By Sunday, March 05, 2006 One for You, Nineteen for Me I'm not one to complain about having to pay taxes. In return, I get some pretty good stuff that I'd never be able to afford on my own. I'm not entirely thrilled about all of the individuals whose government salaries I'm paying, but then, who is? I can't even really complain about the time it takes to pay our taxes. Trash keeps track of all of the relevant paperwork all year, and then, until a couple of years ago, she plugged in the relevant numbers and came up with the amount that we owed or expected back. For a few years in a row, she did such a good job that the IRS sent her back even more than she'd asked for. I think that was some kind of reward. She managed to do this for us for over ten years, despite what amounted to a negative amount of assistance from me. One year she entrusted to me some kind of card that was important in some way that I didn't even understand at the time. "Make a copy of this," she said, "And be sure not to lose it." I followed her instructions to the letter. Except that the problem was that I could have sworn she'd said, "Mail this to the IRS tomorrow." Oddly enough, they never sent it back to me. I guess they don't like me as much as they like her. We stopped doing our own taxes in 2004, for two reasons. The first is that we adopted a child, which comes with a variety of tax credits; and the second was that I earned a significant fraction of my income for the year from freelance writing. Did you know that taxes don't get withheld from that? Fortunately, I kept track of all of my freelance income in a spreadsheet, which I printed out to add to Trash's huge stack of other, more relevant documents. And then last year we stuffed the whole thing into a manila envelope and brought it over to the home of Trash's stepbrother, who is an accountant. We'd been using TurboTax the previous few years. Stepbrother-In-Law's tax software is more like HyperTax. The process is almost completely painless for us now. We go over there some evening, Trash sorts through our paperwork and gives Sb-I-L the relevant information, and I sit next to them and ask stupid questions. Last year we got a very nice rebate, thanks mostly to the tax credits that we got for adopting M. Small. Some of that credit even got carried over to this year, so we were expecting a smaller rebate. And that's what we got. In fact, the difference between the amount we're getting back from the Feds and the amount we owe the state is slightly more than the value of the small gift we got Sb-I-L in return for helping us out. The good news, of course, is that it couldn't possibly be my fault. And we were completely done when we noticed something on the W-2 from my regular job: apparently I have four exemptions, or deductions, or whatever they're called that you're not supposed to have four of. Trash asked why I had so many. "I'm pretty sure that's what you told me to do," I said. Believe it or not, this isn't the first time this happened. The first job I had after we started living together, when tax time rolled around she was surprised at the number of diversions (or whatever they're called) that I had there, too. "I was just trying to pay less taxes," I explained. It took her a while for her to get me to understand that the number of depositions or whatever doesn't affect the amount you pay, but only when you pay it. Doesn't seem fair, does it? Needless to say, I'm going to be filling out a new W-4 form on Monday morning when I get to work. I think after I fill it out, I'll fax it to Trash to make sure I have it filled out correctly. Then, and only then, will I mail it off to the IRS. Today's best search phrase: "Recent pictures of Robot Redford." The Jetsons use Google? posted by M. Giant 9:17 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:You should probably have 4. The general rule is one for every person living in the house that you can claim plus one if you own a house. It's about finding the biggest number that still enables you to not have to owe money at the end of the year. It's better for you to pay as little as possible each pay period - since the IRS doesn't pay interest on your overpayments during the year.
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It's so cute that you think of it as a "rebate". Like Uncle Sam is having a sale.
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"Did you know that "the IRS" put together = THEIRS ??"
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Don't even ask me the chain of googling that somehow accidentally lead me to this blog, however, I liked your writing style so I read it.
By But he is freelance!! There is no Payroll Detp! That would be Trash.
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Taxes made me laugh (and cry) this year. Because my husband sold his business, and makes a lot more money than I do, and because of the awesome alternative minimum tax, our taxes this year were more money than I MAKE in a year. Like, almost twice as much as my salary.
By Thursday, March 02, 2006 Talking Points, Part TWO! Since the last time I wrote about M. Small's vocabulary, it's grown quite a bit. In fact, he now has more words in his arsenal than months on this earth. Not that I'm going to list them all here or anything. Just my favorites. Baby: This isn't a new word, but the meaning of it has expanded to include not only himself, but every other baby and every representation thereof. Including this one. We don't really encourage him to use it in reference to himself; we figure that once you're old enough to say "baby," you technically aren't one any more. Puppy: All dogs, or representations thereof. Still a little patchy on this one, though. He was with me last night when we went to get cat food at the vet's. There was a dog in the waiting room, and I acted like an idiot, pointing it out and going, "Look, M., what's that? What's that there? Can you say 'puppy'?" And then the dog was gone taken in back to have its nads removed or whatever, its presence uncommented on by M. Small because he was too surprised by the new surroundings. But in the time it took to get to the register with Strat's special diabetic kitty food, he found his tongue and pointed to the tiny ceramic dog on the counter and said, "Puppy." I can only hope the real dog's feelings weren't hurt. E-I-E-I-O. M. Small's part of the frequent musical duets he sings with his mom. His favorite verse is the one about the cow. Since that was the first animal he ever identified (not counting the "keedies,") we've gotten him several new books about cows. Which, right when they come out of the envelope, he points to and goes "Cow! Moo!" One day he's going to meet an actual cow and it's going to be like those old Beatles newsreels. P.U.: There are some words we've been trying to teach him forever, and that he never seems to get the hang of. And yet he picked this up in one morning from his mom. Guess what she was doing at the time. Hot: Anything he's not allowed to touch, which, in most cases, are indeed hot. Hey, as long as the "don't touch" message gets through somehow, we don't care about the phrasing. We assume that by the time he figures out that the catbox isn't literally hot, he'll understand the other reasons for leaving it alone. Hoddie: We have no idea what this means. For a while, I tried to convince Trash that he was saying, "happy," as in "I am a happy baby, and you two are great parents." She wasn't buying it, though. And then he stopped saying it. So that must not have been what he meant after all. Two: It's not that he understands the concept of numbers or counting yet. All he knows is that every once in a while, Mom or Dad will chant "One...two...THREE!" and sweep him off his feet for hugs and tickles. We think that the way he hollers "TWO!" is his way of triggering the process on his own. And really, who are we to deny him? Pretty: Variously pronounced "pwee" or "prwee" or simply "peee," he first said this word while admiring the snow globes we had out on display at Christmastime. He loved them so much that we left the decorations out until last month. It had nothing to do with our laziness. Nothing at all. Fortunately, flowers, decorations, and Trash are still proclaimed "pwee" on a semi-regular basis. Because "pee" has become... Please: We hadn't even started teaching him this yet, but he appears to have picked it up at day care. We certainly aren't complaining; in fact we're taking this ball and running with it. Any word that allows him to ask for things that isn't "cookie" or "uh-oh" is fine by us. Bus: Although he's able to use the different words for "car" and "truck" and has been for a while, the big yellow buses that show up at the school across the street are just too exciting for him to address as anything but "OOOOH!" Hockey: Now this one had us stumped. Neither Trash nor I is a hockey fan, and as far as we can tell, neither is he. I pitched the "happy" theory again, but had to give it up when he actually started saying "happy." And then it hit me: he's saying aqui, the Spanish word for "here!" But Trash shot that one down too; as far as we know, there are no Dora the Explorer videos at day care. Finally I asked the day care lady if they watch old North Stars highlight reels or something. But apparently one of the older kids is a hockey fan, and M. Small may have picked the word up from him. Which is kind of a relief; I'm not ready to be a hockey dad yet. And while he's not yet speaking in complete sentences, he is able to put a couple of words together. Like "Go! Car!" and in case we don't get it, he usually brings us his coat as he's saying it. So it's only a matter of time before I can hand the site over to him. I'm thinking two, three months, tops. Don't worry, I'll still help him post pictures. Today's best search phrase: "How to make washcloth lollipops." What, you can't buy washcloth-flavored lollipops where you live? Sheesh. posted by M. Giant 8:25 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:
One of our son's first words sounded like *fair* which we didn't understand at all. Fair, as in the county fair? Or life isn't fair? Or like a bus fare? And why?
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HOckey was my brother's first word, actually, but we are good Canadians so that's just par for the course.
By I think he's saying "hottie." It's what the kids these days call an attractive member of the opposite sex. "Fox" and "stud muffin" are, apparently, considered outdated now.
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I like to think of kids' first words as an indication of the concepts that are so important to them that they must verbalized. So you've got a polite, hockey-loving kid who-um-likes cows. (Perhaps the theory needs fine-tuning.)
By You should consider yourself lucky. My brother's first word was "light!" - complete with figuring out how to use the switches.
By when my cousin was about m small's age he would say frog, but it would come out sounding like f*ck. that was fun :-)
By My brother is 17 months, and has like a fifteen-word English vocabulary, which is fine. Our issue is, since we were so desperate to be able to communicate with him, he also has a small sign language vocabulary and twenty recognizable non-words that he made up that are only recognizeable for the immediate family: "gee" for "light" and "hotcha" for "look at me," and so on. Meanwhile, his gramma is teaching him Chinese. Vocabulary train-wreck, is what he is. I love this stage, though. You really figure out what's important to them by what they need to name: Grapes, Videos, and Dad are big hits with my brother, for example.
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