day off until key dropoff

The end of the year has a number of meaning to me. I mainly review the year and think of its pluses and minuses in my development towards finality. 2013 was a fair year. Economically it seems square with 2012, so no regression is good. My family has been healthy, though we have burned through over $5K in HSA funds.

Nothing sticks out. I have a job, which is much better than being on unemployment. I would never consider bringing another child into this world if I was not working. I could work more, but childcare is so expensive that avoiding it is like free money in a strange way.  If you spend $20 a day for a kid to be watched, then I saved easily $10K ($20 X 2 kids X 5 days X 52 weeks= $10,400, plus not having to pay taxes on money saved means an additional chunk saved considering Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes are still owed on the money paid towards childcare).

HSA will be beneficial when tax time comes, for the medical expenses would have been made regardless of HSA, but HSA saves us whatever % of income tax we'd have paid on the money that we were spending. Lowest tax bracket is 10%, so that's a minimum of $500 less in taxes owed.

Dull stuff, taxes, but I think of them a lot after reading Rex Stout's reasoning via Nero Wolfe.

I'm reading Richard Zacks's Island of Vice, which has given me a new perspective on William McKinley's successor in the White House. I once wrote a paper on President McKinley's untimely assassination. I didn't have anything nice to say about McKinley's term in office given my impression of Mark Hanna as his puppet master.

Though I am not done, I am glad that Richard Zacks told me about his research when I emailed him that I enjoyed one of his previous books regarding pirates. I still have the email dated November 7, 2007, which seems a lifetime ago.

--- Richard Zacks <rzacks@echonyc.com> wrote:

> always glad to cement a marriage...
>
> Thanks for your note... it gives me a boost as I try
> to make sense of Teddy
> Roosevelt, prudish police commissioner of NYC,
> 1895-1897. I'm a tad behind
> schedule but hope to have a book out late next year.
>
> Sorry for the delays... I toyed with writing fiction
> but it doesn't suit me
> to make stuff up. I prefer the strange but true to
> the merely strange.
>
> If you have a friend or neighbor to tell about the
> books, pls. go right
> ahead. I have delusions of... being surrounded by
> adoring eyes, followed by
> applause. I would probably run off the stage or trip
> down the stairs but
> it's a nice delusion.
>
> Richard Zacks

 TR had his fair share of haters. Wonder how he would have reacted to today's blogsphere.

Quiet day. Kids are home another week and I had the day off until I got a call needing my key. Someone from corporate had inadvertently pocketed a manager's key during an inspection and is now out of state. I live 20 miles away from my job so the venture takes an hour roundtrip, which is much shorter than anyone else who was available with a key to spare.There's worse things.

My New Year's resolution is to embrace the happiness I have achieved. Sure I'll look for opportunities and be forward thinking regarding taxes and the like, but I have to remember to be thankful for the family with which I have been blessed despite my personal failings.

Inbox purge galore

I have had a couple dozen or so e-mail accounts over the years. I use quite a few regularly. 1) I have my original school address from '96 that I was allowed to keep upon graduation as a gift, but can't use as my primary address. 2) I have my original yahoo account which I set up in '97. 3) I have a iwon.com account that I set up in hopes of winning something back when that domain existed as a search hub that I now use as a spam account. 4) I have my graduate school address, that I use when I want to seem less anonymous. 5) I have my ISP address. 6) I have a gmail account. 7) I have a "work" email as well.

I could have soooo many twitter accounts, but why would I do that? Back when I was young and full of ideas, I thought it would cool to create interactive extrapolations of characters to a book I was writing to give a ready made audience upon its publication. I developed the idea before social media boomed when things like collegeclub.com existed. The idea fizzled when I had other things that were prioritized thus left to be never followed though since it was tedious and ill fated given that I was basically spamming acquaintances with assumed names in hopes of getting a conversation going through those infamous forwards that you tell something about yourself and pass along like a chain letter. Not sure if trolls existed then, but it was of that same nature of antagonizing banter to generate a persona based on semi-fictional reactions. I needed dialogue and lacked a sense of character depth to think originally. Blogs didn't exist then, since Livejournal.com and Diaryland.com were years away to be able to appropriate others' thoughts. Very tedious endeavor it was.

Do chain letters still exist?

Anyways, I have a lot of email accounts that I use daily for things, when I could get by with just one since I forward most of my mail to one account. I have my accounts set up to forward copies, so that I have full inboxes when I only rely upon one account for any extended period of time. I cleaned out several thousand email from a few account yesterday. I wonder how long it will be before they are cluttered again.

Twitter Cracking down on the Haters

So I was mentioning the other day that Twitter is for Haters, and what do I read: Twitter prepares curbs on hate speech.

Not sure what more I have to say on the matter other than some people that live alone with their cats need to make friends with the outside world and stop "venting" their hate for the whole world to see.