DUN GOOFED

Previous to this year, I’ve only had one year where I owed income tax at the time of filing. It was about ten years ago I think and I owed $60. No big deal. This year, I managed to screw up real big and this month, I paid over $2,000 in taxes owed. I’m still not sure what happened.

I made a marginal amount more money this year compared to last, well short of an extra $10K. Oddly, I only had an extra $500 deducted from my income compared to last year. You’d expect that to scale with income but it didn’t. I wasn’t aware so few dollars were being deducted. To add to my error, I didn’t buy enough RRSPs in proportion to my extra income. I would have had to buy well over another $5K in RRSPs to come out even this year.

All of this added to my folly and I paid dearly this year. I believe mistakes are fine, just as long as you learn from them. So going forward, I will implement new financial checks to help mitigate against what happened in tax year 2018. In January of 2020, I will begin assembling a financial snapshot and see how much I’ve made, how much was deducted, and how many deductions I’m eligible so far. That will give me some leeway to buy RRSPs before the end of February to offset any tax owing. My mistake was doing my taxes in April, when it’s too late to do anything.

What a painful lesson!

FOLLOWED

I “liked” a Tweet today from someone who I’ve met before. I think we’ve met twice. Anyways, this person is someone who does important and impactful things in life. Later in the day, they starting following me. I feel so embarrassed. I rarely Tweet and I just re-Tweet silly things about pop culture. I have nothing deep or useful to say, so I hope my new follower doesn’t think any less of me. I don’t advertise myself as a scholar or philosopher of any sort, so I think I might be ok.

RELIEF

I was lucky enough to see Avengers: Endgame this evening and I am relieved to be able to freely read things on the Internet again. Spoilers were running wild on the Internet earlier this week and to satisfy my curiosity, I went looking for tweets after I got back from the theatre. It’s crazy but people knew about and were spoiling nearly the entire plot of the movie almost a week ago. I had to install an extension my browsers that blocked out sections of web sites that mentioned any of the keywords for the movie and the characters. It felt so good to uninstall them tonight.

Oh and I have to mention the movie was fantastic.

A REVELATION

Last week I ordered a set of Bluetooth headphones. Several days earlier, I had been washing dishes at the sync and trying to watch a video on my laptop, which was on my dinner table. The sound of the running water and the dishware in the sink was so loud that it drowned out most of the audio. I’ve had this problem for a while. I wondered how great it would be if I had a pair of wireless headphones that I could wear while I did housework.

Previous to this, I had no real reason to buy such a device. I don’t listen to music while commuting and I’m not the type to listen to music when I’m out and about. So, it was my first foray into researching wireless headphones. My first discovery was that you could spend hundreds of dollars on such things. At the time of writing, the two best reviewed devices are Bose and Sony, both offering noise cancellation, and both at nearly $500 each.

I was not prepared to pay anything close to that. What I did find was a pair of Bluetooth headphones that were less than $40, with over a thousand 4.5/5 star reviews on Amazon. They arrived today and I just happened to have some dishes to wash this evening. Wow, watching videos while doing housework is so much better now. The headphones are really comfortable and they fit well enough to isolate a lot of the outside noise. They have no active noise cancellation at all but I don’t need such fancy things right now. I also relish the freedom of not having a wire to worry about. I was watching a video on my laptop and I needed some water. I instinctively reached up to take off the headphones because I was going to get up but I caught myself. These things had no wires. I continued to listen to the audio while I went to the kitchen. Amazing.

I feel like I am an old man discovering technologies that young people take for granted and have taken granted for a long time. I bet in 2030, I’ll be blogging about how awesome the holo VR sex sims are and I’ll wonder why I waited five years to try it.

SO LOUD

Almost two hours before my alarm was supposed to go off I was awoken by the sound of construction. I had no clue what the sound was, except that it was loud, annoying, and prevented any kind of sleep. I knew it was not pile-driving (the sound of which I’ve endured a lot of in the last year) but that’s all I knew.

The infernal racket lasted until my alarm went off but such an alarm was not necessary this morning as I was already awake. I started the day off in a tired state and I knew it would not be that great of a day. Once I got on the train, I could see from above what was causing the noise. It was equipment that was pumping concrete for the new sidewalks at the new apartment block next door. The bottom of the complex is being finished and I guess the sidewalks are ready to be made.

I’m exhausted now and I hope they did whatever they needed to do today and don’t have to do it again tomorrow.

EASTER MONDAY

While those fancy banking folks enjoyed their day off, I went to work today. There was a surprising amount of people at work. I expected more people to take the day off but there was almost the entire team was there.

Lunch time seemed really busy at the cafeteria as well. I was somewhat tempted to work at home today but I’m glad I didn’t. I got a moderate amount of work done at the studio, so overall it was a pretty good day.

HUNGRY

I’m about to go to bed and I’m kinda hungry now. I’d love to have a snack but there’s all sorts of reasons not to eat before you go to sleep. First, it’s apparently a great way to get fat. I have heard from many people that eating after certain hour in the evening impacts your weight much more than if you ate the same thing hours earlier. Second, I sometimes get heartburn if I eat something and then lie down to go to sleep.

Oh well, I’m gonna drink some water and head to bed. I’ll eat when I get up tomorrow morning.

LONG WEEKEND

Just one more day remains until the long weekend. It’s a three-day long weekend and for government employees and some select private sector ones it’ll be a four-day long weekend.

I always say that I’ll take the Monday off and use a vacation day but I never do, partially because I want to hoard my vacation time for when I really need it. Oh well, since lots of people at work will take Monday off anyways, if I go to work, it should be a quiet day and that won’t be so bad.

BUSY

There’s a good chance I’ll be working late a few days of the week soon. I worked late one evening last week. For dinner, we could basically choose anything from Skip the Dishes within $15, give or take a dollar or two. Our team, however, suggests three restaurants a week that we should order from, just to make the logistics a bit easier.

I ordered some Indian food and it was damn delicious. I had butter lamb with naan bread. It arrived on time and my food was still hot and tasty. It’s never great to have to work late but at least the food is good.