Weekend Assignment #256: Is It Tax Time Yet?

I spent a good part of Thursday gathering W-2 forms and other documents and starting my 2008 income tax return. Hence this week's topic:

Weekend Assignment #256: Tax time for individuals in this country starts in late January when the tax forms arrive, and runs through April 15th or so when the tax return is due. Do you file your taxes as soon as possible, at the last minute, or somewhere in between? Is there a particular reason for this?

Extra Credit: Who actually does your taxes, and with what software or other resources, if any?

Me first:

Left to my own devices, I would probably procrastinate on the taxes, and have sometimes done so. This is very likely because finding all the relevant documents tends to be a problem, and because I get nervous about whether this year we'll owe more taxes. It's been years and years since we got stuck with a huge tax bill through [name redacted]'s incompetent bookkeeping, but I suppose it left me a little gun shy.

John feels much of the same stress over taxes, but with the opposite result. He wants to know as soon as possible whether we're getting a refund or need to come up with more money somehow. If it's a refund, he wants the money right away, especially in these parlous times. If the news is bad, he wants to know about it and begin dealing with it.

My having been out of work the last 3 1/2 months of 2008 complicated our tax situation slightly, and increased my stress over the unknown effect of it. My unemployment pittance has no deductions, so in theory I owe taxes on it, presumable at some low rate because it's not a ton of income. But at the same time, John's still making good money, which is how we're scraping by. So how does that work out? I was genuinely worried that this would be the year that we owed the IRS, just when we could least afford it.

But it isn't, thank goodness. I'm only halfway through the TurboTax screens, with all the income in and some of the credits and deductions, and already the little box at the top shows a healthy federal refund. Maybe we'll end of owing the state a little, but if so it won't be bad. I don't know where we stand there, because I haven't even downloaded the state software yet.

TurboTax, by the way, is a wonderful thing. It isn't perfect; last year I failed to enter our property taxes, which may mean I wasn't prompted to do so. But even if something like that isn't operator error on my part, TurboTax is a huge help to me. I used Tax Cut for my only tax accounting course, and that's pretty good too; but TurboTax is clearer and easier.

You might think that as an accountant, I shouldn't need the tax advice and general hand-holding that tax software provides, but I do. Prior to 2005 or so, my total experience with filing taxes consisted of doing it once before I got married, if that (Mom paid me one year NOT to file a return on my part-time income from Friendly Ice Cream), and filling out a 1040EZ for Mom circa 2000. All those years in between, either John did our taxes, or they were done by a CPA firm in conjunction with taxes on John's small business. And that, by the way, was when we got the $10K tax bill. It wasn't until John's business was gone and I had my tax course at University of Phoenix that John quite sensibly stuck me with the family taxes, on the grounds that "You're an accountant." So you see, I'm actually far less experienced with income tax than many non-accountants my age. I need that friendly TurboTax questionnaire, even if it does let me down sometimes. I'm actually a little stuck at the moment in fact, waiting for an answer to my question about how to report the $70.83 I got on a 1099-MISC from First Magnus Liquidating Trust, recognizing the tiny fraction of my unpaid wages from First Magnus that finally came through last year.

And I'll tell you a secret: tax professionals use software, too. In that less-than-satisfactory job I held briefly a month ago, to do taxes for people inside a check cashing store, I was plunked down at a computer loaded with a pro version of an online tax software package. Nobody coming through the store had their W-2s yet, which was probably just as well. I spent the week, when I wasn't diverted from the store by their computer problems and the presence of cops, entering online sample returns into it. I have to tell you, that professional software was a lot like TurboTax. If I'd done a real return it would have been reviewed by the CPA firm for which I was temping, so I suppose that's where the value lies in using a service like that. But at my end, it was like using TurboTax, only for fictitious people, in a building with no public bathroom. Frankly, if the client is even a little competent and has a simple return, as most of the folks at a check cashing service do, he or she is better off using free tax software online at the local library and then mailing it in.

How about you? Are you a tax go-getter or a tax procrastinator? Do you fly solo, use computerized help or palm the tax preparation off on someone else? Tell us about it in your blog, with a link back to this entry, and leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week to post the results. Meanwhile...

For Weekend Assignment #255: Two Centuries Later, I asked you to consider the impact of Abraham Lincoln and/or Charles Darwin on your life. A few brave souls responded:

Julie said in comments...

I'll have to give thought to this one as well...

Florinda said...

I would rank Lincoln up near the top of my list of great Presidents, if I had one, especially in the context of the times over which he presided. However, I can't say he's had much impact on me personally - my own forbears didn't even reach this country until about forty years after the Civil War was over..

Mike said...

This is pretty easy for me. See, growing up in Illinois you have no choice but be reminded about good old Abe Lincoln and how much he meant to our country. Usually this involves a filed trip to Central Illinois to see some log cabins he may have lived in at one time. Also, there is no way one can get through school without doing some kind of report on Abraham Lincoln. I don't remember when I did one, but I know I did. Heck, our slogan is "Land of Lincoln."

That's it for now. Whether or not you're ready to do your taxes (or have already done them), please participate in this Weekend Assignment this week. And yes, I'm still in desperate need of your suggestions for future Weekend Assignment topics. Email me your ideas at mavarin@aol.com anytime. If I use your topic you'll get full credit and my undying thanks. Next week we'll probably be digging through the suggestion box, so why not add to my options?

Karen

Auditing Myself

Nor surprisingly, considering that I just completed a whole string of lessons about internal control for my online Auditing seminar, I have internal controls and related concepts on the brain tonight. After eight hours of answering questions about segregation of duties, control of assets, matching numbered documents to test completeness, etc., I start to see the whole world in auditing terms, from the monitoring of gold received by my character in Dragon Wars to my own performance in completing the assignment a couple hours late.

Neither an online fantasy game nor the nature, timing and extent of my studying procedures are directly related to what I was studying, and even now the imagined concurrence between them is slipping away. But when you get really immersed in a particular way of looking at things, that perspective tends to map itself on your perception of the rest of the world, however briefly. I remember reading eight or more Doonesbury books in a row once, quite a few years ago now. For an hour or two afterward, my thoughts about the world around me assumed a standard four-panel structure: set-up, punchline, secondary punchline or tag. Similarly, I once stood in the Catalina Theatre parking lot after seeing Field of Dreams for the first time, feeling, however briefly, that the world was shimmering with human altruism and mystical possibility.

From that experience comes a passage in Heirs of Mâvarin that I've quoted from in my sig files for quite a few years now. Crel, who recently learned that she is really Princess Cathma but isn't supposed to tell anyone, obliquely compares that revelation to a more limited alteration of perception:

“I know what you mean,” Li said. “I get that way about books, too. Do you ever get the feeling, right after you read something, that the whole world around you is a little different because of what you read?”

Crel thought about it and nodded. “Like everything that happens right after that means a little more, as if it were part of the story. Yes, I’ve felt that.”

“Then the feeling wears off,” Li said earnestly, “and everything’s just the same.”

Crel looked at him again. She knew just what Li meant. She’d felt it herself, but she had never been able to talk to anyone about it. Not to Del, and certainly not to Jamek.

“Somebody told me a story a few days ago,” Crel said slowly. “It changed the world around me, and I don’t think the effect is ever going to wear off.”

One thing the human brain does is compare new experience to existing data, to identify everything and fit it into one's understanding of the world. This thing Pepper is barking at is a St. Bernard, because it matches my stored image of what that breed of dog looks like. Another dog matches my brain's description of a Great Dane in shape but not in color, which based on my readings about dogs in fifth grade, my brain labels "brindle." And so on. This process is absolutely necessary to our ability to learn and understand and function. A particular example may be entirely appropriate and benign, such a recognition of something as a "table" or "test of controls," or it can be skewed and detrimental, such as a false identification of a person as "lazy" or a "terrorist" based on faulty data or stereotyping.

And it can be wonky in the way that the new data alters the rest of the database, forcing accommodations to make it fit. If we apply critical thinking, we may see that the new information requires us to revise our understanding of something. For example, when I finally took my first formal accounting course after years of learning on the job, there was a definite "everything you know is wrong" aspect to a lot of it. To learn accounting properly, I had to revise my understanding of a number of terms and concepts, and did so. But this isn't necessarily the way everyone deals with new information. Rather than alter one's understanding of, say, a Congressional bill we don't like, based on factual information and expert opinion, we may choose to deny or ignore the data that doesn't fit our established world view, substituting false and illogical claims that allow us to maintain a static understanding, however flawed it may be. Or, as we have seen, the new data can encourage a greater change in perception than is actually justified. The world really isn't a Doonesbury book, a mystical cornfield or a study of internal controls of an organization in the planning phase of an external audit. Most of the time we recognize this, and are only influenced a tiny bit by such data outside the scope to which it applies. But there are times when it has an unwarranted impact. For example, one bad experience during early childhood can result in a lifelong fear of dogs, or a single rejection for a job due to not being bilingual can result in a lasting resentment of the Hispanic labor force.

Well, anyway.

My office at Worldwide Travel at its worst, March 2005.

Separation of duties, for the non-accountants among you, is a subset of internal control, which is basically the system of policies and procedures designed to minimize fraud, error, illegality and inefficiency in an organization. The idea behind separation of duties is that if the same person is in charge of an entire accounting process, such as the authorization, preparation, signing, distribution and recording of a check issued by the company, that person has plenty of opportunity to do something nefarious, or make errors that will go undetected.

In reading all this stuff about separation of duties, I inevitably compare what I'm reading with my personal work experience. The first time I read about this in one of my accounting courses, I compared the standards for separation of duties and other internal control procedures with what happened at Worldwide Travel. Being the entire accounting department, I both prepared and recorded the checks in the general ledger, which is less than ideal. (I didn't sign or mail them, though, so it wasn't horrible internal control.) I also collected the cash and checks from the safe, prepared and recorded the deposits and the components thereof, and often took them to the bank. That's worse than the disbursements thing by far. But this was a small company, and when there are only six people in the office on a given day and five of them are mostly there to sell travel, it isn't practical to conform to the same standards that are appropriate to an organization with hundreds or thousands of employees.

My office at Worldwide Travel after a major catchup and
cleanup effort prior to leaving the company, May 2005.

So this time around with the same material, I find myself thinking about Worldwide Travel again, and also about First Magnus and Beaudry RV, where I worked after getting my accounting degree. First Magnus was big enough to sustain good separation of duties, and yet I suspect I was in charge of too much of the payroll and fixed assets accounting cycles. At Beaudry RV, there was so much segregation of duties that I was in a little ghetto of specific tasks, with little idea what the big picture was, except that it was hard to miss the departure of longtime management and other indications the company was in trouble.

So maybe as I second-guess myself about my competence and breadth of knowledge an an experienced staff accountant, it's not too surprising that I haven't performed every task in every job description that comes along. Worldwide Travel notwithstanding, a single accountant isn't supposed to be in charge of everything from soup to nuts. I only hope that the stuff I have done, combined with a good theoretical knowledge of other accounting tasks, will be enough to match the criteria of some good job somewhere in Tucson, with a large or small company. And when I get it, no doubt I'll compare the new info of my job experience with my knowledge base about internal control and all that jazz.

Karen

Photographing a Birding Hot Spot, 1986

Last night in my initial response to the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, I lamented my lack of really good bird photos taken with a digital camera. Tonight I'll show you why I say this. Back in 1986, we took a number of decent bird photos with regular SLR cameras, which I've so far failed to top with a digital. Here are some of those decades-old photos, scanned and edited.

Southeastern Arizona is a major birdwatching destination, a top birding "hot spot" because of the many species that live here or come through seasonally. This is partly because of its proximity to Mexico, partly because the "sky islands" of mountains provide a variety of habitats in addition to the desert floor and the occasional riparian (riverside) habitat down below.

Curve-billed Thrasher, probably Grannen Rd but could be Mt. Lemmon.

From my Picasa album Arizona Critters, c. 1986

I'm not sure whether this first shot was taken at the back of our property at our old house on Grannen Rd. here in Tucson, or somewhere on Mount Lemmon. Curve-billed Thrashers are relatives of the mockingbird, with almost as much variation in their song. I've always been fond of them.

Dark-eyed Junco, Molino Basin.

There are two kinds of junco on Mount Lemmon, the dark-eyed and yellow-yed ones. The yellow-eyed are at the top of the mountains, while the dark-eyed appear lower down as well as higher up. Molino Basin is a picnic area a relatively short distance up Mt. Lemmon Highway. By the way, when I say Mount Lemmon, I'm using the local shorthand for "Santa Catalina Mountains." From a distance, people around here talk about "the Catalinas," but if they actually drive up there, they talk about going "up Mount Lemmon."

Acorn Woodpecker, probably Molino Basin.

The most common woodpeckers in the city and other low elevations are Gila Woodpeckers and Northern Flickers. But at Molino Basin, you get quite a few of these clown-faced, raucously "peep"-ing Acorn Woodpeckers.

Scrub Jay, somewhere on Mt. Lemmon.

As with the juncos, Mt. Lemmon boasts different kinds of jays, depending on the elevation. The common ones lower down are the Pinyon Jay and the Scrub Jay, and at the very top, if you're lucky, you can see a Stellar's Jay. The Stellar's Jay looks the most like the Blue Jay you see back East. There are no Blue Jays here, only jays that are blue.

Gambel's Quail (2 male and 1 female), Grannen Rd.

Returning back down the mountains and into our long-lost bird sanctuary of a back yard, we have a few shots involving Gambel's Quail. The female is the one without the dark face. It is fun to see whole families or flocks of quail scoot by on the ground.

Clockwise from top left: male Gambel's Quail, female Gambel's Quail,
Gila Woodpecker, House Finch, Mourning Dove.

We had bird feeders behind the house on Grannen, and sometimes scattered seed on the wall as well. So it was not unusual to get a variety of birds hanging out together, waiting for their chance at a meal.

Great Horned Owl, Catalina State Park.

This last shot was almost certainly taken at Catalina State Park northwest of the city. I previously posted a few shots of this guy years ago on my old AOL Journal, and since I'm trying not to post reruns I thought I'd have to skip the owl. But it turned out that I haven't posted this one before. Once I lightened the shsadow a bit, it became my favorite of the lot.

All of these plus the old scans from 2004 or so are posted on a new Picasa album, most of them in a larger size than you see here. Click on any photo to get there and see the rest.

Karen

EMPS: Ducks and Dogs!

It's virtually impossible to take a good photo of ducks in motion at sunset with an inexpensive digital camera, while holding back two dogs who are straining at their leashes. Just in case you ever wondered!

From my Picasa album Dogs and Ducks

But that's what I tried to do for Carly's Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #25: Birds. It was 5:40 PM when I took the dogs to one of the duck ponds in Reid Park, somewhere between the lion in the zoo (I heard it roaring) and the dog park. The dogs found it all very exciting, especially Cayenne. The photographic results are technically not very good, however, what with the low light, the camera shake and the moving ducks, plus I think my lens was dirty. But when I lightened these up, some of them were rather interesting anyway.

It was easier to take the photos before the dogs noticed the ducks. This batch was off to the left, possibly downwind. I liked the cropped edit enough that I've put it through the watercolor and frame effects here.

Carly asked to see a white bird for extra credit, preferably a heron or an egret. No such luck on those, but here's a white domestic duck. I even went through six volumes of physical photos from the 1980s, in a period when we did a lot of traveling, and photographed a lot of birds until the Canon AE1 was stolen. But I didn't find the shots I wanted, and I've previously scanned and posted the best ones of what I did find.

There was an Asian couple feeding the ducks when we arrived, and many of the ducks and coots were on the sidewalk until they saw the dogs. Here is the tail end of the birds' retreat into the water.

The color of the water here is the result of my letting my software's autoenhance function choose the shade of the image. I kind of like the grainy wonkiness of it. It reminds me of some old Life magazine photo that I can't quite remember.

And here we get into my favorite shots of the set, even though they're kind of terrible. I had trouble getting the surging dogs into the shots, especially both at once. But here's Pepper, sort-of scaring the ducks and coots...

...and here's Cayenne, just dying to chase waterfowl, most likely for the first time in her young life.

And here they both are, making the ducks panic again. Again, it's more than a little blurry, but I like the way the ducks and the water look.

There are a few more shots in the Picasa album I set up for this entry; click in any photo to get there, and to see each one full size. And be sure to check out Ellipsis each week for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot topic, with links to the previous week's participants. And check back here tomorrow night for better bird pictures - I hope!

Karen

Update and clarification: the two duck ponds are not in the same part of Reid Park as Miko's Corner Playground dog park, but hundreds of feet away. Here, I've marked up a Google Map to show you:


View Larger Map

The other duck pond and other parts of Reid Park can be seen in my entries Round Robin: Light Moves Over Reid Park and A Reid Park Ramble, continued.

Actual Progress, Actually Being Made

I went to bed just now, only to realize about a minute later that I hadn't blogged yet. Oh noes!

That probably shows you the level of my distraction at the moment. Aside from some unnecessary but enjoyable messing around on Facebook, I've taken on yet another volunteer task at church - have I mentioned this? - and I'm back to studying for the CPA exam, AND I'm actively editing Heirs of Mâvarin. Let's discuss these one at a time:

There's a game on Facebook called Dragon Wars. It's not a full-fledged online role-playing game, but a sort of simplified one that focuses more on end results than individual actions. Key attributes such as health, energy, stamina and real estate income offset by maintenance expense (no, really!) are slowly replenished on a timed basis, so by and large it's a game of planning strategies and waiting to do the next thing. That leaves lots of time to do something else, such as an AUD lesson, while waiting to do the next quest or deposit the next payment of rental income.

As I edited the screen shot above just now, I realized belatedly that someone had slammed my character in a massive and/or multiple attack, and my health points were suddenly dangerously low. The main interplayer activities or the game are forming alliances and attacking other characters' alliances. I've reached the point in the game at which many players with similar experience levels have formed alliances of dozens or even hundreds of players. There's little I can do with my alliance of seven characters to prevent someone with an alliance of 103 from doing my character a lot of damage in a hurry. Fortunately, in this game, health can be regained, and death is not the end. Still, I could really use for allies. Wanna play?

Meanwhile at church, I'm still webmastering. In the next day or so I need to delete a mass from the schedule due to an elderly priest's infirmity, post the weekly announcements from three sources, edit and post a photo from coffee hour, and maybe set up a MySpace page. I'm also doing some light bookkeeping now at church on a volunteer basis, essentially a data entry and reconciliation task. I had my first session on Friday. There was a vague offer to pay me a small fee, but that would complicate the unemployment issue and benefit no one.

On the employability front, tonight I finished my second AUD assignment, with strong understanding of the material and perfect test scores. I was right: the Auditing section of the CPA review course is much easier for me than the FAR section, especially with the video lectures the company threw in for that section as part of the December special. I'll still need to conquer the long slog of FAR material, but I'm nevertheless feeling much less discouraged now.

As for the novel, I'm editing Chapter 8, on page 300 in my doublespaced manuscript files. I had been stalled for a while, but now I'm going on at a good clip, tightening prose and fixing problems in flow and logic. Just tonight I had to rearrange two paragraphs when a minor character suddenly changed the order of his thoughts, and was right to do so. Also, a strictly offstage character announced that he made the deadly necklace in Chapter 12, and I had to go back to Chapter Six to get his name. And finally, when I finished editing Chapter 7, I realized that Chapters 6 and 7 needed to swap titles to fit the content of the scenes. Fun stuff, and more to the point, it all represents an incremental improvement in the book.

But other than that, and the dishes, and the dog park, and getting ready to do the taxes, and online job hunting, I'm not doing nuttin'!

Karen

The Monkeys of Nimbus

Valentine's Day actually went pretty well. John liked the Cayenne valentine and wildflower seeds I gave him, and at 3 PM we headed out to the south side of town to eat a late lunch at Nimbus Brewing Company.

Half an hour later, we admitted that we weren't going to find the place based on our vague memories, and drove home. John was last there close to a decade ago, and I had only seen it at a distance from the road. What road exactly, I wasn't certain.

From my Picasa album Nimbus Brewing Co.

It turned out to be very close to where John thought it was, on 44th near Alvernon. It just needed to be reached by a roundabout route through an industrial area. We had nearly gotten there, but turned left instead of right at 44th. Google Map in hand, we found it easily.


View Larger Map

Nimbus is Tucson's primary microbrew company, the local ale that is bottled and sold around town. With the economy in such bad shape, John wants us to support local businesses when we can, to help them keep going until things pick up. I don't drink, but red ale wasn't the point of the outing for me. I was there to do something fun with my husband, a much-needed rutbreaker and a chance to take some pictures.

And Nimbus certainly provided interesting sights to photograph! For some reason I've so far failed to suss out, the iconography of Nimbus has a lot more to do with semi-evolved simians than with clouds or halos. I had no idea when I wrote about Darwin on Thursday night that on Saturday that I would visit a place full of playful images satirizing his theory.

And oh, yeah, they make fun of religion, too.

Inside it was kind of dark (I've lightened the photo above substantially), especially for John, who was wearing his sunglasses. Nearly every table on the main floor was full, so good on them in these parlous times.

My steak sandwich was good, and I assume John's burger with chipotle was good also. The service was - well, it's not a place you go if you want to be waited on. You go up to the bar and ask for a menu, and that's also where you place your order and start a tab on your credit card. But the staff was courteous, and the wait for the food was fairly short. John had brought a large empty bottle from his last visit years ago, and bought a refill. He's pretty sure they got the order wrong, and gave him pale ale instead of the red. But it's okay; he likes that, too.

The ale is said to be the best in Arizona. I have no way of judging that, and don't really care one way or the other. For me it was all about the look of the place. Behind the brew pub area, just a few feet from our table, was the brewery itself, in plain sight behind purple iron bars.

Brewing was not in progress, and customers aren't allowed back there, obviously. But it was still cool to see.

Also inside was more of the monkey stuff, including this "Nimbus Legion" plaque...

...and a monkey-Eve taking an apple from a ceramic snake.

Nimbus has a final message for customers on their way out, in the form of a poem on the back of their water tower.

And of course, coming and going, they raise a glass to us.

Karen

Valentine Dogs

Valentine's Day is a little tricky for me, and I had no idea what I would write about until I remembered that I already edited and set aside a few pictures for today. Here they are:

From the Picasa album Trouble Dogs

(Actually I just did the third one.)

The thing about Valentine's Day is, I never know what to do with it. I'm allergic to flowers (and don't like them much anyway), I shouldn't be eating candy, and I'm not at all interested in diamonds or naughty underwear. John feels much the same way. In addition to that, neither of us feels it's a great idea to buy useless token gifts in our already overstuffed house, especially when money is tight. So how are we to meaningfully celebrate Valentine's Day? Write love poems to each other? It's been tried. I have no particular objection to the holiday as a commercial enterprise or a sappy tradition, or anything like that. I'm sure some people enjoy it very much. It may even help to advance lasting relationships and remind couples of their love for each other. This is all to the good. But John and I personally don't have a satisfactory way to celebrate it, especially this year.

It doesn't matter, though. He loves me, and I love him, and we both know it. We don't need conversation hearts or love bears (from the most blatantly, cartoonishly sexist ad I've seen in years) to tell us this.

May your Valentine's Day be entirely satisfactory, no matter how you celebrate it!

Karen

Update: I gave John a bag of desert widflower seeds intended for his birthday, and a valentine adapted from the one of Cayenne above. He's taking me to a brew pub. (I don't drink, but there's food.) That'll work!