Sunday, 05 February 2012
Today we tried to watch the Super Bowl. My wife even prepared chili in our crockpot. Unfortunately, we discovered the Big Game was set to air on NBC. Around here, that’s channel 11.
We don’t get channel 11.
Not sure why, but our antenna does not pick it up at all. This is another example of technology regressing: if TV was still broadcast analog, we would have been able to pick up something, even if it wasn’t very good. But, no, thanks to digital, all we had was a black screen.
“Hey,” you say, “Why don’t you guys get cable?”
“Hey,” I answer, “Because I don’t feel like paying for 20 channels I won’t watch just to get one channel that I intend to tune in once a year.”
My wife tried all sorts of MacGyver maneuvers to get NBC into our home, but nothing worked. We even received an 11th hour invite to a friend’s home, but since we are all quasi-sick (it’s how we spend our Februaries), we decided to stay home.
I discovered that, for the first time ever, the Super Bowl would be streaming online. So I proposed that we set our laptop up in the living room, hook up the speakers, and watch it that way. Yes, that is a small screen, but it’s not like we really care about the Super Bowl.
The first thing we discovered was that the streaming would not work on my laptop; it kept closing my internet browser for no reason. So we used my wife’s computer. However, the external speakers didn’t work on her computer (which is very odd since our headphones work just fine), so she just turned up the volume on her laptop as loud as possible, which still is not loud enough.
Once the Big Game began, we enjoyed our chili, along with barely-audible sound and a constantly freezing stream. When the first commercials commenced, we realized we weren’t watching the Super Bowl commercials, but a crappy trio of commercials designed especially for people watching online:
-A series of commercials featuring Rainn Wilson. I think I saw about ten of these commercials, and I still can’t tell you what they were advertising.
-A series of commercials extolling the wonders of GE. Since NBC is owned by GE (the three notes struck when the NBC logo appears are, fittingly, G, E, and C), this was basically an “aren’t we awesome?” bragfest.
-A series of commercials advertising an upcoming movie titled Act of Valor, which looks like it was paid for by the Department of War Defense. It might be an interesting movie if it didn’t look just like 500 other movies in the budget bin at KMart. I think the plot is something like a hey-look-how-brave-we-are-that-we-got-our-own-men-out-of-a-place-they-shouldn’t-have-been-in-the-first-place kind of thing.
At half time, there was no Madonna, just a black screen with words telling us the program would resume soon.
Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. We’ll never know. We shut down the laptop and did something far more interesting. We went to sleep.
Online Super Bowl Streaming: F
Monday, 06 February 2012
I dropped off my taxes today.
Yeah, I gotta admit defeat. In 2010, I made a major blunder in doing my taxes; a blunder that would have caught me several hundred dollars had a friend not casually mentioned one item I missed. It took two letters to the always-helpful IRS to get matters straightened out. After that, Jennifer said I should just admit that our lives are too complicated now for me to continue doing our taxes myself.
Problem is, I always hated the idea of having to pay someone else to do my taxes.
In fact, there was only once in my life that a professional did my taxes: in the tax season after I turned 18, I received a coupon from H&R Block saying that they would do my taxes for free. So I stopped in. It took them about ten minutes. Other than that, I have received help from time to time. Another friend (not the same as the one mentioned above) did my taxes for me one year and, for a couple of years, my mother-in-law-to-be did my taxes. But over the years, I kept on top of things just enough to know how to do them. For a time, I was even the go-to guy at work when co-workers had questions about their tax forms.
But after 2010’s blunder, Jennifer strongly suggested we have them prepared professionally.
So, I put the word out, and a co-worker suggested STAT Enterprise in Crystal (and they don’t even appear to have a website, otherwise I’d put a link RIGHT HERE). For about $60, they did my taxes and filed them online.
Today, I dropped my taxes off there again. It’s a little embarrassing to say, “Hey, my life is so complicated, I don’t even understand it anymore” or, perhaps more correctly, “I’m too stupid to do this here cypherin’ correctly,” but what can you do?
Call STAT Enterprise, I guess. No, really, call them: 612-481-3283. Tell them James sent you. That way I’ll get a kickback.
Tuesday, 07 February 2012
Things I did today…
-Dropped off internship papers with my adviser
-Attended class at Hamline
-Put in a 6.5 hour day at work
-Met up with a woman who contacted me on Craig’s List and sold her a lamp
-Returned a set of office chair casters to Office Max
-Sold a shirt and book to Once Upon a Child
-Filled my car’s tank with gasoline
-Faxed in papers to the accountant who is doing our taxes
-Installed a bumper sticker on my car’s trunk
-Signed up to volunteer at St. Paul’s Annual Citywide Clean-up
-Signed up for a health evaluation to take place at work next week
-Signed up to attend Physics Force 2012
-Dined at IKEA, where we serendipitously met up with friends and shared a table with them.
-Obtained the correct office chair caster we needed (also at IKEA)
-Read a chapter out of the book for class
-Watched an episode of Little House on the Prairie
-Updated this blog
-Read two chapters from The Kidnapped King with my son
Yikes, no wonder I’m tired.
It cost $80.00 to have him do our taxes.