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Tax Prep Dun. Now the worrying…
I spent the day yesterday preparing to file my taxes. I hate this time of year so much. I don’t use any spreadsheets to track my income and out-going expenses so that means I have to sit down with my calculator and the tower of Pisa pile of receipts and add each one up by hand. This is a whole lot of fun for someone who claims to have Dyscalculia. Several times I had to take a break and tell myself over and over, You’re college educated. You can do this. and then practice breathing exercises for five minutes in the bathroom.
Every year I vow to start using ibank or quicken or some other program but every time I try to set up accounts I get so overwhelmed with all the tabs and buttons and possibilities I just end up giving up. I swear I’m going to do it this year though because there has to be a better way.
The only thing I have going for me is that I do like to be organized. I save everything and file it all away neatly like a squirrel. So that helps. I hope all my neatly typed reports get me points with the tax man because I think otherwise I’m going to be one big fat headache for him. Filing separately from Toby is causing a whole bunch of problems, naturally. I closed all of our joint accounts so now I can no longer access my handy dandy online tracking systems (which were really great when I needed to see what checks I deposited etc… I love that check image feature.)
Then there’s the whole what-can-I-write-off dilemma. Can I write off all the parties I organize? Does blogging it count as business? Party planning posts do generate a lot of traffic on this site but I’m thinking the IRS is not going to go for it. I’m thinking a bounce house is right up there with hiring strippers when it comes to red flags.
Of course all this busy work generated some sketches. I figure I’m ready if anyone ever needs to hire me to create some stock art of tax season.
In other 50mm news, how cool is that old hole-puncher my Aunt gave me? Her office mate moved out and left a bunch of stuff. Most of it was awful 80’s crap but this hole-puncher seemed like a keeper for me. It worked great for all my notebook organizing yesterday. The holes are extra big which is kind of neat.
I also finished the 2nd Stieg Larsson book. I know I’m late to that book-reading party. I’m really enjoying them though. Right after I finish each book I watch the movie on Netflicks and that’s super fun. Of course I have to watch these in secret from Bug when she is asleep though because they are NOT appropriate for children. Oh my goodness, some of the scenes are not even appropriate for me. But I do love the characters so I keep on watching, not even noticing that I’m reading subtitles. I have to say I’m a little disappointed in the 2nd movie though (I’m half way through it). They left out so many details! I guess that’s why you read the books first!
Bug got to have her own movie night last night. She really wanted to eat popcorn in bed and turn all the lights out “just like a movie theatre” but I refused. I do not like popcorn bits in my sheets! So I set her up with a beverage bar (she’s caught my cold now too and I wanted her to be hydrated) and popcorn and put my laptop far enough away that it wouldn’t be ruined if she spilled. I know Toby is probably looking at that last picture and hyperventilating over the possibility that some beverages might ruin the laptop that he paid so much money for but I am here to say that it was perfectly safe and now it’s back on my desk far far away from any evil liquids of death.
And that was my day! Now I just sit tight and wait until my tax appointment on Friday to see how much I owe the IRS. Or maybe I’ll get money back. I’m not getting my hopes up.
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An Explanation
You’ve probably been wondering what happened to me and this blog this last week. Me too. I might have more of an idea about it than you do though, so I’ll share what I know. You may have noticed my site has been down from time to time since the beginning of the year. And then it went down for good last Wednesday and couldn’t be resurrected from the dead at all. This could be due to some linkage from some big sites (Thank you OMSH and whoorl), the popularity of my Valentines maybe, my newfound ability to link from facebook (you crazy facebookites) or just plain bad luck. Or it could be spam, which is also bad luck.
That’s what my old server company said it was. They said I was being bombarded with so much spam that they called it a denial-of-service attack. A wha? I never really understood why I would be the victim of a DOS attack. I don’t have any credit-card information on my site. I’m not a bank or a credit-card company. Why would someone want to take me down and mess with this silly blog? I’m not even that big! I have some haters but not that many. Did I offend a troll who had hacker skills? Was someone using my site as a way to get to a bigger site? Maybe the government was taking me down because of the words “secret agent” in my domain name…ooh, conspiracy theory. Who knows. Nobody could really explain it to me.
So I moved to a new server company where hopefully if this happens again they can explain it to me. Or at least be there around the clock to talk to me when I’m freaking out. I switched to Liquid Web and so far I’ve been super super super happy. I even called them at three in the morning and they totally helped me. Nice guys on the phone 24/7. Who needs a husband?! It’s been wonderful.
Except for one little problem: I did not make a complete back-up of my old site before I switched servers. I thought I had. I had manually dragged folder after folder over from my ftp site to my hard drive late into the night. I even went to bed watching bars going across my screen from on my bedside table. I did wake up to a few errors in the wee hours of the morning saying things like a “wpchron” file wouldn’t copy but I figured it wasn’t that serious. I’d check with an expert in the morning and everything would be fine. I also did have some back-ups that I’d done before via my WordPress dashboard. So I figured I could put the pieces back together one way or another.
I was wrong. I did need that wpchron file and a bunch of other stuff that sounded like gobbledygook to me. And now my domain name was pointed at my new server and I had no way to get back to the old server to get those missing pieces. This is when I started freaking out and chewing on my desk.
A few days went by while I pestered all my friends who know anything about programming and WordPress until I finally came to the conclusion that I had to point my domain name back to my old server so I could do a complete back-up. Except I couldn’t do it. Even the great OMSH couldn’t do it. Something was screwy with my files and they wouldn’t copy. Finally, Liquid Web had to pull out some mad ninja hacker skills and the files got copied.
When that was done I pointed my domain name back to the new server and waited. And waited and waited and waited and waited. The dang thing wouldn’t propagate! That’s what they call it when you have a new site and it takes a while to show up on the internet via the many webbings of servers talking to each other. It turns out it did propagate (show up) but there was a “deny all ips” file in my website somewhere that made it look like it hadn’t propagated. Who put that file there? Crazy troll, I’m looking at you!
I know this sounds like gobbledygook. It sounds like that to me too. All I know is that every person who tried to look at my website got blocked so it looked like it was down. Eventually, Liquid Web figured out this was the problem and removed that file. And now I’m all fixed.
Hallelujah! I feel like I’ve aged about three years.
So you know what lesson I’ve learned from all this? Maybe I should stick to paper diaries and photo albums.
Just kidding.
