Crouton du Jour No. 40: The Loser Has To Fall
Archive for January, 2009
A Fistula Called Maceo
I got staples taken out of my arm today. Apparently, Mickey Rourke has staples removed from his back in The Wrestler. It feels about how I imagined it would feel. My surgeon thinks everything looks great. He told me to take care of my fistula. In kidding around with him and his assistant, somehow I wound up naming my fistula Maceo.
Some people really like looking at gross medical things. If you do, here’s an annotated picture of my arm that documents my fistula history. I was going to put a thumbnail of the photo here, but I know I don’t want to look at someone else’s surgical wounds and scars. It took me ten days just to look at my own.
I kidded that my surgeon should publish a coffee table book of his surgeries.
Bush’s Note to Obama
I was inspired by this post on Pam’s House Blend to imagine what the contents of that note that George W. Bush left for Barack Obama in the Oval Office might have been:
List of 343 NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Teams
38 versus 7500
That’s my federal refund for 2008 after an initial run-through with TaxACT, which I’m new to after many years of TaxCut and Turbo Tax. TaxAct is either free or very cheap if you want the Deluxe version, and, for my purposes, seems to have all the functionality of the mainstays.
$38. I suppose I should pat myself on the back for doing well in 2008 at the game called “Mess With Your Payroll Deductions”. To come out basically even means I got to keep the money that I’d otherwise get back in a hefty refund. With that money I got to do things like go to one-and-a-half Journey concerts and purchase orthotics.
I did pretend, briefly, that I did actually qualify for the very generous first-time homebuyer tax credit that Congress passed last fall in response to the housing crisis. It gives new homeowners up to a very nice $7,500 as a credit. Unfortunately, you had to have purchased your home after April 7, 2008 (and you have all of 2009 to take advantage of it, I believe). I bought my house in September 2007.
So many credits and deductions in the tax code have graduated phase-outs. This credit has an income phase-out but no phase-out with regard to the date of your home purchase. If you had closed on a home on April 8, 2008, you may get $7,500 back from Uncle Sam. If you closed on April 7, 2008, you will get $0.
(I didn’t mean to get too technical, but if anyone is really interested in this credit, note that it is technically a 15-year zero-percent interest loan. You are supposed to pay the government back through your federal withholding over the next 15 years–$500/year if you’re getting the whole $7500).
On the bright-side for me, getting $38 back from the government is a heckuva lot better than owing money.
JP Morgan Chase Hates Pets
Dear Valued PetSmart PetPerks Visa Cardholder,
As you may know, certain assets held by Washington Mutual, our partner for the PetSmart® PetPerks® Visa®, were purchased by JP Morgan Chase. This transaction included all of the credit card accounts that were part of the PetSmart PetPerks Visa program. Chase has decided not to support the PetSmart PetPerks credit card.
That means no more credit card with a a picture of Aremid. Well, it might be the one expired credit card I keep around as a souvenir.
Aremid The Healer #6
Previously
Online Trivia Resource FAIL
I am rummaging through my six-year-old desktop and found this web development effort:
I have no recollection of what I was thinking. Google existed six years ago. Maybe I was playing some online trivia game and was hoping to create a way to cheat. It’s like I was trying to make a World Almanac cheat sheet. Finding answers to basic trivia isn’t always as easy as a Google search…although it usually is.
Oh, well. There’s some insight into my desire to create stuff. If I continue to spend time rummaging through old computer files, I’ll surely find other examples of how I waste my brainpower.
Toastie Plays The Blog Tag Game III
Except this time, the tagging was done on Facebook. I was asked to list 25 random things about me. I had already done the same exercise twice in this blog in the past year. So I just copied ten items from March 24, 2008 and six from November 30, 2008. That left me with nine more original items to come up with…
17. My first car was a 1986 Carolina-blue Chrysler LeBaron (sedan, not the pretty convertible); I bought it in December 1992 and probably ordered New Jersey personalized plates – “DUKE 97″
18. I took my prom date to Tavern on the Green in New York City’s Central Park. She was not impressed. “I hope we’re not going for a carriage ride, because I don’t like them,” she said. We didn’t, but I had been planning on it.
19. When I was around seven, my family ridiculed me on a car trip to the Poconos because I said that the mountains “looked like scenery”. Until that point, I had thought scenery only meant fake art resembling landscapes, used on TV and in plays.
20. I have kept some sort of journal since February 1989. For the first few years, I wrote as if the whole world would be reading it years later.
21. I hate having a last name that most people pronounce incorrectly. I hate that I myself know I don’t enunciate it well when I have to give it out to others.
22. Since my father was adopted by his step-father but he considers his paternal family to be his birth-father’s family, my surname doesn’t mean a whole lot to me.
23. I didn’t vote in any election until 2000. (I was 24 years old).
24. I have a recurring dream or element of a dream in which I am still in high school or college and know I am about to fail a final exam or similarly embarrassed because I have been missing class all semester.
25. I desperately want a girlfriend, a serious long-term relationship with a woman that leads to a partner for life. I want this more than anything. This may be quite obvious…but maybe it’s not. And so I’m just stating it for the record. I realize items 1-24 offer ample explanation as to why I may be coming up short in achieving my goal.
