Month: February 2016

Here’s an actual email from someone applying for a job at Zing:

Seriously?

I was at a party tonight, and Kyra sent me a text from home.

She’d been accepted to BYU-Idaho a couple of months ago, and has been waiting to hear from BYU-Provo. Apparently they made announcements today on the web site, so she decided to check.

Now she has to decide which one to attend…

And that’s a wrap.

My corporate taxes are finished and on their way to the Gov.

Now it’s on to the adventure of my personal taxes. The big question– as it is every year– is whether I owe money or have been giving the Gov an interest-free loan for the last year…

Well, the tradition continues… Morgan’s mom sent me another birthday card this year.

I think it’s been 28 years now, all because I wrote my birthday on her calendar. Awesome.

We’ve been working on a project for a few months, and it’s just ballooned way beyond what anyone originally envisioned. The client keeps delaying the launch because another person somewhere in the management chain has a new idea or wants to tweak some little thing.

Finally, in a moment of frustration, I emailed my contact at the company and explained that I’m just not sure how best to proceed. Since she’s in charge of the budget and we’ve already exceeded what she’d allocated, twice, I want to be respectful of that. Her response was, verbatim:

Brilliant.

Of course yesterday was my birthday, and as we were out at dinner (pizza, naturally) Kyra asked if I’d like her to make me a special treat. She knows chocolate eclairs are my favorite dessert, although caramel-frosted chocolate cupcakes are also near the top of the list.

I told her that eclairs are a lot of work, but she insisted. So we picked up a few ingredients on the way home, and I kept her company in the kitchen while she made them.

Not surprisingly, they were awesome. What a great daughter.

Well, it’s the end of an era. Amazon is now officially collecting tax on orders placed via the internet.

Remember the good ol’ days when you’d save a few bucks buying things online? (Well, technically you’re supposed to report those purchases to the Gov and pay the appropriate taxes, but I’d love to meet the guy who actually does that.)

I installed the Google Fit app on my phone yesterday, just to play around with it and see how it compares to an old-school pedometer. It turns out the step count is pretty close– within about 5%– and it has some other cool features like average speed, history, and of course maps.

Today I walked over to a friend’s house, and the resulting map makes it look like I was in some kind of spastic drunken stupor.

I’m pretty sure that’s not the path I took, although the start and end points are accurate. Maybe my pocket blocks the GPS signal or something, I don’t know…

A couple of weeks ago, we decided that every Sunday we’d have a “family activity” where we make a batch of cookies and take them to someone… a friend or neighbor. So today I finished up my lasagna while Zack and Kyra took responsibility for the cookies.

Of course we have to sample some of the goods– quality control and all that. I think this is going to be a great tradition.

Yesterday was an awesome ski day. I headed up to Winter Park with a group of friends and we had a great time. The weather was amazing, the snow was just right, and I didn’t slash Mark’s leg with my ski like last year…

On the way home we just had to stop at Beau Jo’s in Idaho Springs. It’s definitely the coolest old-hotel-turned-restaurant around.