halfshellvenus | Taxes are done

A big relief, as always, and the California state returns are in a manila envelope, waiting to go to the post office. The combined federal and state returns are the size of a substantial pamphlet now. I mentioned earlier that we had significant capital gains this year. I don't know what gets into our financial advisor sometimes (though she's really good at her job), but every 5-6 years this happens and our AGI suddenly balloons. This year? We owe about $2500 in federal taxes and $2300 in state, and that triggered a need to pay estimated tax payments in 2026. What a pain! Note that if the government(s) owed us this much back, we wouldn't get interest on the extra withholding, so why the panic?

I tried to go to our company's website to adjust my W-4 instead, but none of the links were working yesterday. Might be under maintenance. I also wanted to use the employee benefits webpage to rent a car for our upcoming trip to San Diego, but it was misbehaving too. More crap deferred onto my never-ending TODO list!

I finished reading Terminal Chaos, the second book in the Station Eternity series. That was fun— and only took me 4 days, as opposed to the 11 days to read Adventures In Calamity Physics. I knew Calamity was taking a long time, but geez! And now I'm a third of the way through the second book in the How To Become A Dark Lord And Die Trying series. It's also fun, though with way too many footnotes. My main complaint is a common issue for a lot of male authors writing female main characters: the women are highly sexed and also bisexual. It's like they're fanficcing their own creation. \o?

My bike is still in the shop, where the earliest I could possibly get it back is late tomorrow. Feeling antsy! But I got some errands done Friday and Saturday that I would normally have to split across weekends. Friday, I bought Easter candy. Saturday, I took my broken violin bow in to have it repaired and rehaired, and saw that I was near a Home Depot, so I went there afterward. I bought some CLR for the hard water stains we get, some of which showed up about 4 months after we moved back into our house. I also got a new salvia plant for the one in the front yard that 1) Died last year and 2) Whose replacement the gardener killed with Roundup. Plus some morning glory seeds (to replace the plants near the garage we lost in the fire), and a houseplant to put in the clay pot our daughter hand-painted for me as a gift. That means I have some gardening to do this afternoon...

I've been staying up too late watching Doctor Foster on BritBox, because it's an addictive train wreck. Need to get back on DST newtime again.