Another year has passed and it’s time to do my taxes again. In the last few years I’ve received small refunds compared to say five to ten years ago when my refunds could be counted in thousands.
Is this also the year I decide to switch from using TurboTax to another cheaper tax return software? Maybe?
I don’t even know what to say about this. I actually did get hungry while watching the video though.
YouTube chef Andrew Rea attempts to cook the meal from the movie “A Quiet Place” in the above video. Normally, Rea just tries to faithfully recreate the food featured in a particular movie or TV show but in this video he also attempts to cook the meal while maintaining the silence heard (or not heard) in the movie.
So I lost my phone briefly today while I was at work. I had gone to the washroom to take a poop. I put my phone on a metal ledge they have in all the individual stalls. It’s a convenient ledge to put things on while you do your business. I normally remember to grab my phone from the ledge once I’m done but I was really tired today and I guess I forgot. So, like a moron, I just left the stall without my phone.
I didn’t realize I didn’t have my phone for almost two hours after the fact. I was at my desk when I noticed it was missing. I tried using the “find my phone” feature but it hadn’t synced in two days and Google thought my phone was still at home. I was hoping that since it was lost at work and not in public that someone trusty-worthy had taken it to the security desk.
I hurried downstairs to the security desk in the lobby and I saw my phone even before I had a chance to tell the security people what had happened. I mentioned to them I lost my phone and it was sitting right there. They made me unlock the phone, which I did, and I was re-united with it.
This was the first time I’ve ever lost a phone for any amount of time and it’s an unsettling experience. Even though most of my data lives in the cloud, it still sucks to lose all of that. I gotta make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Tomorrow evening will bring a 40% chance of flurries. It’s almost March and we’re still getting snow forecasts. I can’t remember the last time we had a winter where it snowed so frequently. Amazing.
I enjoy sous viding cooking and I tried something new this weekend. I wanted to sous vide a lamb shank. Normally, I put my sous vide ingredients into a re-usable silicone food grade bag. The lamb shank, unfortunately, was too big for this bag. Instead, I had this bag that you could use in oven, rated for temperatures greater than 350 degrees F. It was also waterproof and large enough to hold a small chicken, which easily fit the lamb shank I had.
I dunked the whole bag with the lamb shank and fixings into the water bath and sealed it with some clips. Now, for this enterprise, the recipe called for sous viding the lamb shank for 24 hours, way longer than anything I’ve made with the machine. I was hoping the bag would hold its integrity.
I watched it for the first ten minutes and everything seemed fine. An hour later, I returned and I could see oil spots appearing on top of the water bath. I immediately knew the bag had sprung a leak somewhere. I had to take the bag out right away, lest more of the gunk got messed up inside the sous vide machine’s internals.
There was no real way to rescue this operation. I didn’t have anything else to put the lamb shank in. I’m going to buy a larger silicone bag that can fit larger cuts of meats and try again.
About two weeks ago, I bought a tablet for my Mom for her birthday from Best Buy. A week later, the tablet dropped in price by $30. What perfect timing on my part. I checked to see if Best Buy had a price adjustment policy and they did. The policy stated that if the price dropped within 30 days of purchase, I could come in and get refunded the difference.
I was kinda skeptical since these type of things don’t really turn out well for me but I was willing to give it a try since $30 is $30. Anyways, I brought the receipt to the store and to my surprise, it took me less than five minutes to explain the situation and get my $30 back.
Anyways, I guess the lesson to be learned here is to always check the price on items that you’ve recently purchased. If the price has dropped, you could be entitled to a refund of the difference.
After the long weekend and then a sick day, this week turned out to be pretty short. Tomorrow is Friday already. The interesting thing is snow is forecasted to fall again Friday morning. I’m not sure if the snow will fall before, during, or after the morning commute. Is there another snow day before the week ends? I shall find out tomorrow.
I saw Dr. Ken Jeong live at the Orpheum on Tuesday night. He was great! His stuff was funny but also personable. A lot of his material was mixed in with a revealing look at his family life and his friendships in the entertainment industry.
At the end, he took medical questions from the audience. I believe only one person actually asked him a real medical question though. Come on people, we should have asked him about our prostates.
I stayed home today because I wasn’t feeling well enough to get my ass to work. It turns out that was a good call on my part. It started snowing just after the lunch hour and it didn’t let up until after dinner time. The roads were a mess by the time the afternoon commute arrived. All the snowed that had been plowed and shoveled away was replaced by this new snowfall.
I tried to do as much work as I could from home and I was actually productive enough get something new working. I’ll need to finish it up tomorrow. My sinuses are still clogged and I’m hacking a fair bit now but I think I should be ok to go to work tomorrow.