While I realize that there aren’t many peeps clamoring to hear my latest random musing on whatever, I know it’s not a best practice to disappear for a few days w/out posting. But I’m feeling particularly bummed and find that it’s better not to indulge in, um, self-indulgent self-pity and introspection when I’m in this state. It goes nowhere. Besides, I talked and cried for a long while with friends and I felt better and want to keep it that way.

So I’m doing lots of crossword puzzles. New York Times crossword puzzles. I bought a book of 365 of them with a funny cartoon of Will Shortz on the cover. As I told my friend Theresa earlier today, “when I write the letters in the boxes, everything makes sense.” It restores a sense of order in the same way that cleaning your surroundings helps restore a sense of order and CONTROL when your mind and emotions are in total disarray.

I’ll leave the cleaning for tomorrow.

So… I just imported my blog archives (from Movable Type) from 2005 through December 2007 into WordPress. And then went through all the entries from December 2007 back to December 2006, tagging them as archived and deciding which ones to leave unpublished in this iteration of the blog.

That was something along the lines of 537 posts. So almost 1 a day for those two years… except the last few months of 2007, I wasn’t doing much writing.

But now there’s lots of old stuff to plug through. I might have to add an actual archive widget to the sidebar. Yup yup.

Aw, crap. I guess I’ll be spending some time tomorrow playing with CSS and making sure this site lays out the same way if you’re viewing it in IE or Safari.

I know it’s Firefox compatible, but I opened it up in IE today (don’t know why - it just seemed like a thing) and noticed the entire sidebar shifts down below the posts. It’s probably a CSS/IE issue since there are some elements that IE doesn’t recognize/work with correctly.

And that’s where it’s at. Boo. Tomorrow, though. I just started watching Season 3 of “Lost.”

Yes. That’s a gnome in the new header art.

He’s actually a garden gnome, but he lives indoors. His name (I swear - it was on the box) is Flör, the Reading Gnome. Here is a slightly fuller photo of him on a bookshelf. Because that’s how he rolls.

And those are NOT sunglasses in his hand. Nope. Reading glasses. Reading glasses to make him look distinguished.

And gnomes make me think of Amelie, which I will now watch. Here’s a Yann Tiersen song from the gorgeous Amelie soundtrack - Les Jours Tristes.

Please to enjoy, thank you.

One of the benefits of not being wealthy, not being involved in a multitude of investment opportunities and not being a homeowner/married person/parent is that my taxes are so easy to do. Really. I used TurboTax this year and last year because it makes it so redonkulously easy, but I’ve done it the old school way, too. And an even older school way before I knew any better — going to an alcoholic accountant/family friend who used to do my taxes until the fear of an audit made me think better of such things.

I guess I’m a reluctant fan of TurboTax. The end part of the process (just before you file) is annoying because they try to sell you on their professional tax review, audit-proofing, etc. (all at an additional cost) but I have to appreciate that - it’s the cross-sell. The rest of it is pretty painless so I can’t complain overall. However, I do not use them for the state taxes. While they include one free state tax return with the software, they charge an additional $17 or something if you want to e-file the resulting return through TurboTax. Ha ha. There’s the catch.

Most states offer a free e-file option through the official state website - and most state taxes are simple-simple -simple. No itemized deductions, no craziness. Just “How much did you earn?” and “Did you buy a house or spend insane sums of money on medical care?” then “OK, well you should’ve paid this and you paid this. Your return/amount owed is _____. Have a nice day.”

In any event, I’m all e-filed for state and federal and should be seeing my moderate federal return magically appear in my bank account in the next 9-14 business days. My whopping $1 return from the State of New Jersey should appear even sooner.

Guess who’s going to be putting that mad-cash-money towards a new tube of lip balm?!??!

In an attempt to get ahead of this whole “new year, new you” trend, here’s the beginning of a brand new researchgirl site - today, Dec. 1. Not so much with the “blah blah rant rant rant.” I’m going for, “Ooh - interesting cool things!”

I’ve got some widgets [and how I hate that word] over on the right here –>
They might look a bit different over the next few weeks. I’ll be doing some manual formatting since they’ve got issues in php format and seemed to work better in javascript form.

They exist to reveal the things I’m listening to/reading/watching, for better or for worse. Yes, you’ll see Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” at some point. I was feeling nostalgic.

And now to work.