Estimated progress.
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
Rain finally came to Atlanta mid-September, on a day when I focused on trying to make any visible progress I could in the big stack of Things Left Undone.
This included plowing through a bunch of bankers’ boxes to discover, with some delight, that I could throw away some 60% of what I found without even having even engaging more than one brain cell—I won’t need Grandview High School alumni newsletters from 1997, I guarantee you. And that tin of Altoids, circa 1999? Well, let me just try one…mmm…not bad, a decade later.
But the big progress was made by reconciling our various electronic banking and credit card accounts (yes, to the penny,) and sending off the estimated tax payments that the Internal Revenue Service really prefers you to shoot their way every quarter. And for all the computing power around me, I really can’t see into the future for the rest of the year’s income and expenses, so making tax estimate payments carries a level of fuzzy math along for me that kind of unwinds the self-satisfaction I was generating over reconciling and balancing. We’re straight with the Feds, but who knows how many people will call before the end of the year offering work? There’s the possibility of zero, and there’s the possibility of many multiples of what I’ve brought in so far.
Reply hazy, ask again later.
Must. Put. Thoughts. Out. There.
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
It’s late Sunday night and Mad Men is on (but we’re recording it,) and my adverbs aren’t doing as well as they should, but I’m bothered by the number of things I’ve seen, composed words to share with you in my head, and then never managed to get them committed to this fine, surely permanent form.
So, like so many others who do this kind of thing, I write a paragraph like this as much to me as to you: Must. Put. Words. Out. There. They don’t do me nearly as much good bottled inside. They’re happier, free on the internetwaves, banking, packet-colliding, being shunted from switch to router to hub.
So, so much. Local politics. The snowiest of leopards. The most oleophobic of phones. The plans for a journey of several thousand miles that will begin with a single tank in the prius. The art of putting old letterhead in an IBM typewriter, composing, and sending an actual written letter. All of that, bottled.
But, hey, it’s late Sunday night and Mad Men is on (but we’re recording it.)
