Tax Time

This is a friendly reminder from your neighborhood accountant that it's tax time! Your W2's should have arrived already and if you do your taxes now, you'll have your refund in your pocket in a couple of weeks. With all of the free services that allow you to file your taxes online, there's no reason to wait. Seriously, it's not going to be any easier to do your taxes on Tax Day Eve than to do them right now!

As you may have guessed, I'm in charge of taxes in our family. We haven't formally divided up tasks in our marriage, but so far the following divisions of labor have arisen naturally:

1. I do the dishes (Ed hates doing dishes)
2. Ed cooks (He's just more into making dinner than I am)
3. I do the laundry (I have too many needy clothes to ask someone else to take care of them)
4. Ed takes out the trash and kills bugs (definitely man jobs)
5. I do the taxes (because I have a phd in accounting)
6. Ed does the investing (because I can't stand watching our money bounce around with the ebb and flow of the stock market)
7. We both clean our own bathrooms. We'll see how that one plays out when Ed moves in with me.

Quote of the week: "Honey, you know that hot stock pick you gave me on Monday? It's gone up 7% since then. I didn't buy it."

Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite

WARNING: THE PICTURES IN THE LINKS BELOW ARE KIND OF DISGUSTING, SO BEWARE IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH ABOUT BUGS.

Bedbugs are making a big comeback in the United States. Once you get them in your house, they are really hard to eradicate because they are tiny and they can live for months without feeding. Often people don't know they have an infestation because at first they think the bites are from mosquitoes or something else.

They can spread from place to place by getting on clothing and then jumping onto someone you rub against or by travelling in luggage. Experts suggest that people avoid bringing used mattresses/bedding into the house and keep their luggage off the floor in hotels. Unfortunately, there's not much else you can do and clean houses are just as susceptible to these bugs as dirty ones. Here's more info:

Really disturbing time-lapse video of a bed bug feeding on a human (seriously, don't look if you are faint hearted): Bed Bug Video

More information about bed bug infestations: Bed Bug Info

Planning Ahead

Check out our new blog: thejohnsonkids.blogspot.com.

Vegas Baby...

Well, I'm in the office waiting for a guy to call me from India. I thought this might be an opportune time to do a post--particularly since I am not convinced that he will figure out how to call...He asked me for the country code this morning (the country code of Sunnyvale no less) and I looked it up online. But as I have never called internationally from India (and I thought he was calling from Hong Kong at the time I looked it up) I am not sure there is altogether too much certainty on the subject.

Anyhow, during the first week of January I had a very interesting experience--I went to CES in Vegas. CES is the Consumer Electronics Show and it is a huge convention in Vegas every year. One really interesting part of the experience was the fact that I took a flight out of San Jose. Yes the heart of Silicone valley. A Vegas local was next to me on the flight. Apparently she flies the route regularly and couldn't understand why the usually roomy midday Wednesday flight was full--over-booked even.

Well. I will try and include more about the show later. Suffice it to say, we came out of there fairly unscathed. I only had one friend gamble (at least while I was there). He put in 1$ and got out 1.75$ (of course as it was a coupon and not coin, and he never redeemend it--the casino still won).
Well, more later, I think that I am going to go home now. (I've waited 15 min. I think that is enough.)

Dare not Austria might?

I made it back to California today after a pleasant month in Maryland with Ed. My house wasn't invaded by ants or taken over by spider webs while I was gone and it only took 20 minutes to go through the pile of mail.

I bought a book about World War I in the airport and made some good progress on it on the way home. It's really interesting, but the author has a strange, convoluted writing style that involves really long sentences and way too many commas. Like this:

"The only truly transnational religious movement remained, as it had since the collapse of the Roman empire, the Catholic Church, with bishoprics throughout the world centered on that of Rome; it's incumbent in midsummer 1914, Pope Pius X, was, however, a willing prison in the Vatican, a root-and-branch opponent of all modernising tendencies in theology and as suspicious of his own liberals as he was of Protestants."

If you can't say a sentence in one breath, it's too long. Here's some strange phrasing:

"It remained to see whether the German Emperor and his government, without whose backing the Austrians dare not act, would support them. Dare not Austria might;"

"Dare not Austria might"? What in the heck does that even mean? Doesn't anyone proofread this stuff?

Getting Out of the House

Yesterday, Heather C. and I went to see an exhibition of rare color photographs from 1939-1943 that were on display in the Library of Congress. Although color photography had been around for awhile by that point (here is a color picture that was taken in Russia sometime between 1905 and 1915), it was still rarely used. The photographs were taken by “approximately one dozen photographers [who] were employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and its successor agency, the Office of War Information (OWI), from 1935 through 1944.”

Most of the photographs are of everyday people living, working and socializing. I loved the vibrant colors. When I imagine that era, the picture in my mind is set in drab, washed-out colors. I was really surprised by the bright colors - in clothing, in the landscape and in little details like red fingernail polish. This is one of my favorites: Woman building a dive bomber.

All of the pictures in the exhibition can be viewed online here, but the colors are somehow less vibrant on the computer screen than they were in person. If you are in the D.C. area, it is definitely worth the trip to go see the exhibit. It is on view until January 21. You can read more about it here. From that link you can also get to the Library of Congress’s collection of over 160,000 photos (mostly black and white) from that era.

Geography Quiz

Yesterday Ed was making fun of me because I had just discovered that Michigan has an upper peninsula. It's not my fault. When I was little we had a wooden United States jigsaw puzzle where each state was a puzzle piece. But since the two pieces of Michigan aren't attached, it only had the mitten-shaped piece as a puzzle piece and the upper peninsula was painted on the edge of the board between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. So how was I supposed to know that the chunk between the two lakes was actually part of Michigan?

Today I redeemed myself. I discovered an online U.S. map puzzle where you use the Great Lakes as a reference and drag all of the states to their proper position. Ed and I entertained ourselves for 15 minutes racing to see who could do it first. Final score: Me 3, Ed 1. He claims he was having technical difficulties.

Triple-Country Day

We had our first two international readers today - in Canada and England. (You can see where our readers are reading from if you scroll all the way down and click on the Site Meter icon. On the left of the Site Meter page, under "Recent Visitors", click on 'By Location' and you can see a list of what cities they are in.)

How I am Tormented Yet Again by Microsoft

A new computer virus mushroomed over the weekend. According to this story:

"what makes this threat particularly vicious...is that unwitting victims can infect their computers simply by viewing a web page, e-mail, or instant message that includes a contaminated image. That differs from most virus attacks, which require a user to actually download an infected file."

Microsoft promises to have a patch out by next week.

In the meantime, Microsoft recommends reading your email in plain text mode (instead of html mode). That way, no images load. How do you do that in Microsoft Outlook 2002? The instructions on the Microsoft website start out like this:

WARNING: If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

If I do it wrong, I might have to reinstall my operating system? Nice. It's a little easier with Outlook 2003. Here are the complete instructions for both Outlook versions.

Happy New Year!

Yesterday we enjoyed Boston's First Night. Amazing.

Boston does this big thing every year which allows people to buy a $15 button/pin and gain entrance to many many many activities. This was our day:
- Otis House Museum (a grand post-Revolutionary War house that has been set up for a New Year's Dinner, circa 1796)
- Boston Museum of Science (the math section had such sophisticated stuff that Susheem and I decided we'll have to study up before we take our kids there)
- Ice sculptures on the Boston Common (they are *huge* and lit up with colorfull lights. It started to softly snow when we were walking through and made it very romantic.)
- Grand Procession (the parade)
- organ, timpani and brass instrument concert in the Old South Church. (900 people singing Auld Lang Syne together as a finale - amazing.)
- Anime show - they had different different shows every 30 minutes.
- Gospel octet
- modern dance troupe
- Duncan Sheik concert
- fireworks out on the pier

And we had many many more options. There are tons of family-friendly activities and choices, a lot of interesting musical performances, several dance events (we were tempted to go to a swing dance thing, but were pretty tired by that time), movie and short-film showings, and more happening all over the city.

Boston does New Years Eve well. Even though it's 20 degrees out. I am impressed.