Amended Taxes

I don't remember when it was, but it was sometime over ten years ago when I first left the 20th century to file my taxes electronically.  The process was relatively easy, until the end.  On clicking the final button to file, I was given the an error that essentially said:  The IRS has received your filing but it can not be processed as your name and social security number do not match.  I'm quite sure I knew both of these.
I was at a dead stop without knowing if I was done filing or not.  There was no online help available other than a page saying that my name and social security number didn't match (Ahhhh that is what that means.  Helpful, NOT....).  Calling the IRS about this meant spending a looooonnnnggggg time on hold, meaning I never actually got help there either.
I returned to the 19th century and have stayed there.  I can hold a grudge forever so I don't see that changing.

This year was no different.  The forms don't change much year to year, so I only pull my hair out on any new things I've done to myself.  To be honest, I'm quite sure I sometimes get stuff in the wrong box or form, but often the intent in the background is clearer than the forms.  So as long as the final numbers work out, the IRS will leave me alone.

Unlike the Federal Government, the state has a very simple online filing system.  Why the IRS can't do this is controversial.  First, they could.  Tax preparation is big business with about $5Billion being spent at places like H&R Block.  Add in tax software like TurboTax and that amount can easily be doubled.  These industries lobby hard to keep the filing process difficult so they can keep making money.  It is quite scary, however, that people need help filling out the 1040EZ.  I'll end that commentary right there.
There has been talk for years about getting prefilled out forms from the IRS.  This is probably not as straight forward as it seems, and there is probably legitimate concerns that something will be missed resulting in paying too much, or too little.  But even if we could start with the single source of what has been sent to the IRS, the filing process could be much easier.

After filling out my paper forms, I quickly and easily finished my state taxes.  Only then did I find that one small 1099 form lurking in the pile of paper.
ARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!
Since my Fed filing was paper, fixing that was easy.  But now, the numbers don't match between the Federal and State.  Would the state come after me for that?  Would the state come after me for the trivial increase in my taxes.
As frustrated as it was to file amended taxes, it is much less frustrating than if I get called before The Man.  I figured out the increase to my state taxes, and completed an amendment to my taxes on paper forms.  Again, I may have gotten some numbers in the wrong boxes, but the end number was what it should have been.  If the state objects too much, they can fix it.
Then I faced another conundrum, I have a local tax which has numbers that do not match the Fed or State numbers, but the increase in tax from that one 1099 form was zero.  Zilch.  Nada.  Still, unmatched numbers may be a horror to some bureaucrat.  I ended up amending my local filing for absolutely no change in the bottom line.  Since again some boxes might not be filled out correctly, I suspect this may create some head scratching for the bureaucrat.
The sad thing is, the amount of extra cost to the state and local entities will far exceed the trivial increase in taxes.  Not my problem.

The other outcome of this exercise was that it was very plainly laid out how much taxes were taken from this very, very small 1099 (with apologies for the double superlative).  Because of the way the tax tables work, the Fed took 39% of it.  This number actually could have been zero, if the starting point was near the bottom of the incremental tax table amount.  The state took 6% of it and the stamps to mail it took another few percent.  Obviously, this income was not worth it for any of us, my incompetence not withstanding...

I suppose it is an academic question at this point, but I wonder if any of the tax entities would have come after me for the error of a very small missed 1099.  It certainly wouldn't be worth their time, but the principle might  be.
If nothing else, this year will be a good test of my theory that I'll be left alone as long as the bottom line is right.

See you at the audit.

Belated Edit:
I ended up using the wrong form for the amended state taxes.  They sent me the correct form, with very incomplete instructions as to how the already paid additional tax will be applied to the resent amendment.  I can only hope their records will tie this all together.
They also included some of the worst photocopies I have ever seen of the correct form.  I suggest they apply any additional tax I am paying towards a photocopier that creates legible copies.  I suspect that the trivial increase in the amended tax is already consumed in the filing and now refiling of it.
Bureaucracy at its finest!

The Comfort of Free TV

Several years ago, I donated to my local NPR station.  I do listen to NPR often and the local affiliate was at risk of disappearing, so I thought this was the right thing to do.  There were two outcomes to this.  One, the station was taken over by another NPR affiliate - while this did keep the station with similar programming, the truly local segments were no longer.  Two, that donation created voluminous junk mail asking for donations - I know this is the source since my name was misspelled and that misspelling now shows up on the resultant instant-recycling.
I once looked online to see what some of the NPR voices looked like as people - they look absolutely nothing like their on-air personalities and it has greatly affected my listening.  You just can't unsee that.

I don't currently pay for TV.  The cost is really hard to justify with the fact that, even when I did have satellite, I only watched a small number of the channels that I paid for.
I live in an area without any good options for unlimited internet access; streaming TV is also out of the question.  This leaves me with over-the-air television which means I am somewhat destined to know of many cultural phenomena only second hand.  I'll live with that.
Over-the-air television means I watch a lot of PBS.  Interesting shows will often show up while flipping, but there are only a few shows I target to watch.  My normal TV routine is currently being disrupted by the pledge week.
What I find most curious about the PBS pledge weeks - I think they happen about four times a year - is that PBS seems to get rid of their usual good and predictable programming, replacing it with a redundant clutter of rehash.  The strategy seems to be one of, "If you don't donate, we'll put more of this crap on..."
I don't know how many times I've flipped past Suze Orman oversimplifying personal finances during pledge week, or shuddered at the horror of The Big Band Years.
There is another possibility - I may not really be in PBS's market.  They want money from someone other than me.
PBS claims to be commercial free.  This is disingenuous.  You can call Subaru an underwriter of Globe Trekker, but Subaru is not handing out cash out of the goodness of their corporate soul - they want to sell more Foresters.

I still believe digital TV was a ploy by Michael Powell to kill free TV by limiting who has access to over-the-air channels.  It was possible to watch a fuzzy analog The Simpsons episode; it is impossible to watch a massively pixelated episode.  Mr. Powell's evil ploy was thwarted, largely because he did not envision what would happen in streaming media.
For those of us who can get a decent antenna TV signal, the result is more digital channels than we had analog ... sort of.

Many of these digital channels are quite redundant.  But they are often playing reruns from the late 70's to the 90's.  I'm surprised how some of these shows hold up after so many years.  Early Hunter (a show I loved in the mid-80's) is fun to watch when I'm in the right mood, but gosh did that show get bad in the later years.

Miami Vice is still good, but only in the context that, it in many ways, defined TV for several years.  The dialog is as over-the-top as the pastels are.  I was quite depressed that after watching a recent episode start-to-finish, the Ferrari never made an appearance once.  It is sad when the true star of a show is absent.

It is refreshing to see long lost episodes of Night Court.  Bull Shannon (Richard Moll) makes that show as much as Harry Anderson does.  I can only hope we'll get to see reruns of It's Your Move, but I won't hold my breath.

A few of the shows demonstrate absolute genius.  Newhart is as good as anything on TV now and I can't help but find the opening theme be unquestionably comforting.

I guess I should probably donate to PBS, but I really don't want the increased mail to recycle.  Maybe I'll just by a Subaru instead.  Do they still make the Baja?

Food From Trays

Full disclosure upfront:  I am going to be both unfair and hypocritical today...

Kroger has "Free Friday Downloads" which are online coupons that can be downloaded to get one specific free item.  The free items cover the range of groceries available at Kroger, being anything from candy bars on up.  I used to think these were designed to get shoppers to hunt for them, thereby forcing shoppers to walk through and look in more aisles of the store, but the Free Friday items are now always located near the front of the store, so the intent must be to drive web traffic towards Kroger.
One of my Rules for Life is:  Just because something is free, doesn't mean you want it.  Following this, some Free Friday items (gum), I don't bother with, while others are a risk free way to try something I wouldn't otherwise buy.

A few weeks ago, Stouffer's FitKitchen was the free item.  It promised, "Hearty Satisfying Meals."  Sadly, it wasn't, but at least the cost to me was about commensurate with the product.

The beans were rubbery.  The chicken was even more rubbery, and the sauce can best be described as odd.  The sweat potatoes were tolerably good.  Here is the part where I'm being hypocritical.  Some of my other weekday meals could be considered on par with Stouffer's FitKitchen.  I actually like frozen chicken wings.  Frozen pizza (with toppings added) are nearly a staple.  But the FitKitchen, frankly, reminded me of the 1970's TV dinners we occasionally ate as a child.
I would hope that either my memory of TV dinners is clouded and that 1970's culinary adventure was actually worse than I remember it, or by 2016 ready to eat meals could have advanced.  I suppose the one thing that the 1970's TV dinners had going from them was the lack of microwave ovens.  Coming in a plastic tray, Stouffer's FitKitchen has only the microwave as a cooking option.  Thinking back, I can't imagine how bad the 1970's TV dinners would have been if microwaves had been nearly universally available then.  To this day, I think I dislike peas just due to the memory of TV dinners.

There must exist a world, somewhere, between Chris Kimball's fantasy land and the TV dinner where most of us live.  Yes, some of America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country foods are touted as simple.  But having both time and energy to go the Kimball route on a daily basis is a delusion.  Staying in the PBS world, I once saw Caprial admit going to McDon... on occasion with the kids - this was refreshing, but that show has become unwatchable now that they have some truly bizarre onscreen husband-and-wife dynamics.
America's Test Kitchen plays its watchers disingenuously.  When not wearing a costume, Chris Kimball likes to start the show with the absolute worst example of a dish, and then improve on it - thus setting the bar impossibly low for success.  He also claims to have a "very small kitchen," and yet Cook's Country is reportedly filmed at his farm in Vermont.  By that standard, my kitchen is a thimble.  

Walking through Kroger yesterday, I paused by the frozen dinner section.  "TV Dinners" designed for oven cooking still exist.  Many of these are now in paper or plastic trays which is a little frightening, but I guess it works OK.  So maybe the unhappiness with the Stouffer's FitKitchen should be against the cooking method, not the cuisine?  Either way, the frozen meals were left in the freezer - available for the next shopper who wants to eat over 1 pound of food.

I actually think much of the food I grew up on would be pretty unpalatable by today's standards, or by my standards today.  But TV dinners, something special when I was young, don't seem to have improved much since then.  Perhaps the real issue lies in the fact I've been eating them wrong all along.  After all, TV dinners were created to be eaten off of steel TV trays, sitting on the sofa, while in front of the TV, with shag carpeting underfoot.  Shudder.

Office Detritus: The Things We Leave Behind

This can be a brutal time of the year accompanied by major funk brought on by cold winter days, the monotonous cycle of work-eat-sleep-repeat and little good to look forward to.
This funk may grow again this year, but I am hopeful it won't as I have three things going for me.
First, winter hasn't been too heinously bad.  This weekend is cold on a nearly intolerable level, but we've had a couple really nice weekends recently allowing bicycle riding and even some grilling.
Second, I have a trip coming up.  Not only does this give me something to look forward to, but the thinking and planning (an integrally fun part of the trip) allows for something to break up the monotony.
Third, I am in transition to a new job at work.  While I won't get too jazzed up about work, the change allows for some corporate repletion, even if it ends up being bleakly short.
This transition just sort of happened.  At first I wasn't too sure about it, but now that I'm two weeks into a five month transition, I'm realizing that I'm quite ready for new problems.

My work transition has me working out of two offices, or rather, my old office and new cubicle (damn, it feels good to be a gangsta).  As I sat in my new cubicle on one of my first days in the new job, I opened all my desk drawers.  As usual, the previous denizen had done a reasonably good job of cleaning it out, but there was still some flotsam and jetsam.
The previous occupant must have been very paper oriented as there was no shortage of folders and folder tabs.  These will end up in the shred barrel soon enough, but there were much more interesting things:

• Five pairs of scissors.  Why did "Rod" have a need for not one, two or even four pairs of scissors, but five?  I can only hope that they are remnants of past employment civilizations.  I'll keep one of these and the rest will be discarded.
• Two telephone headsets.  Why did "Rod" need not one, but two telephone headsets?  This is a standard office cubicle where talking on the phone with any degree of decorum is difficult, so one phone is a stretch.  Two headsets looks like a problem.  Reusing these feels almost as gross as rewearing someone else's pants, and they'll likely end up in the landfill (sorry future generations).
• Six opened boxes of staples.  I'm quite sure all the staples that the world will ever need have already been manufactured.  Every work location I've every moved into has at least a partial box or two of staples.  But six?  I guess I'll keep these, future archaeologists will assume these are some type of office idolatry and I must be in a very sacred place.  Oddly, there was no stapler.
• A vast assortment of pens and highlighters.  I kept a couple felt tip pens and sharpies.  I have no affection for highlighters and am partial to gel ink pens.  "Off with their heads!" says the Red Queen to the rest of the writing paraphernalia.
• A powered USB port.  I've never needed one of these at work, but I guess I could someday.  I'll stick it in the drawer likely to be discarded later in office life.
• Various other sundries:  pennies (keep), paper clips (in the stables camp), toothpicks (um, really gross), rubber bands (keep, but discard when they start to deteriorate), screws taped together (cubicle must be missing some critical hardware somewhere), and other things that I, frankly, have no idea what they are...
• The most curious thing though has to be this Plantronics device.  I'm really not sure what it is, but I strongly suspect it has been supplanted by cell phones long, long ago.  My suspicion is that since this was probably really expensive initially, "Rod" must have been unable to appropriately discard it when he left the cubicle even though it now has negative residual value.  Curiously, I have not thrown this away either, yet...

I shouldn't and won't beat up "Rod" too much.  I've never met the guy and probably never will.  But I also know that once my job transition is complete and it comes time to vacate my old office, I will probably leave a few parting gifts to a future generation of subterranean office dwellers.  

I guess the only question will be:  What do I do with my partial boxes of staples; do I begin breaking the generational cycle of office detritus?

The Unabomber and Punky Brewster

Two historic events have been in the news recently.  These feel incongruously tied...

The 20th anniversary of the arrest of Ted Kaczynski (AKA The Unabomber) is coming on April 3.  Yahoo! News has published a number of stories about Ted, mostly about his life and writings in prison.  Much of this reporting has been well worth reading.  Ted Kaczynski's life's work in writing is being preserved at the University of Michigan, where Ted earned his PhD in Mathematics.  As far as serial killers go, Ted has to be one of the more fascinating and enigmatic characters.  It is much harder seeing the writing of Jeffry Dahmer being preserved in perpetuity by an academic institution.
I was in college when The Unabomber's Manifesto was published in 1995.  The internet was in its infancy at the time, but it was available online and I downloaded and read it in entirety.  I've tried more recently to read it and its repetitiveness made it hard to complete.  Or perhaps my attention span is now shorter than it once was.
I had graduated by the time Ted was arrested in 1996, but was still fascinated by the story of the Unabomber.  What I found most compelling about him was that, while his methods were madness, his message was hard to argue against.  I've met a few PhD's who I struggled to understand how they got their degrees, but good schools like UofM don't typically just hand them out and, it was easy to see Ted's intelligence.  Still, one must ignore the bombings to think truly think this.
And that makes his message harder to take seriously.  How a few random bombings, often against bit players in technology, will affect any real change is, frankly, a really dumb idea.  It did get his Manifesto published, but the New York Times likely did that to sell more newspapers over any other reason.
One other fascinating aspect of Ted's life was that not only did he believe and espouse the dangers of modern technological society, but he lived what he believed in a small cabin without electricity or running water in Montana.  It is much easier to write about the destruction of the world, Al Gore style, finger-wagging and living a very comfortable existence.
A few years after his arrest and conviction, OFF! Magazine published Ship of Fools by Ted Kaczynski.  I heard a blurb about this on NPR and wrote the magazine editor for a copy, which I still have.  This led to a short correspondence with the magazine's editor, Tim Lapietra.  I continued to get OFF! for a few years, giving me insight into the fringe left of American society - a scary place indeed.  I wish I could find Tim's final editorial from the magazine as he made some personal observations of the fringe left and what it was really preaching.

And 10 years before Ted was arrested, while the Unabomber was bombing computer store owners, the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up over coastal Florida - the other historic event in the news this week.

I can vividly recall the first space shuttle launch in 1981.  I was riveted to the idea of, not a rocket, but of a spaceship blasting off and returning to earth to be reused.  The space shuttle was infinitely more cool than a rocket.  I even had an Estes model rocket designed to look like the space shuttle - painted flat white (with house paint), just like the real thing.
By 1986, space shuttle launches were become routine, at best, and maybe even boring.  In order to bring public attention back to the space program, NASA held a contest, American Idol style (long before reality TV invaded), to transform a commoner into an astronaut.  A school teacher, truly "one of us" was chosen.
Our school classroom was not one of the many which watched the doomed space shuttle Challenger launch on January 28, 1986, but it was all the talk at recess.  Being of a certain age when things blowing up is cool, the initial reaction of many of us was, "Gosh, it is a spaceship, don't they blow up all the time?"
Being probably too old for  the TV show Punky Brewster, I'm slightly embarrassed to still remember the episode post-Challenger that dealt with the Challenger destruction.  Why this memory is stuck in my mind almost as vividly as the actual destruction of the space shuttle is yet another mystery of the feeble mind.  We are not in complete control of our memories!

Space shuttle launches continued after a hiatus, with new o-rings.  Despite Punky Brewster, the astronauts still must have been reminded of that old joke during prelaunch readiness that, "this thing was built by the lowest bid!"
Manned space missions are even more boring now than they were in 1986.  After the 2003 Columbia destruction on reentry into the Earth's atmosphere (Don't make spaceships out of Nerf!), the majority of time in space was spent making sure the shuttles survived launch with a few minutes to look at an ant farm sent into space by a grade school in Topeka, Kansas.
Unmanned missions continue to provide much more data, and excitement, at a fraction of the cost and risk.  Mars Curiosity and Rover provided real data and vivid images long after they were expected to die a quiet death on the surface of an alien planet - something impossible with a manned mission.
Meanwhile, manned missions are now using Soviet Soyuz technology derived from the 1960's to put humans in the International Space Station.

And maybe that is where the connection between Ted Kaczynski and the Challenger destruction actually do come together.  The Unabomber was railing against the technological destruction of humanity and society, while the Challenger brought this to life with horribly tragic and visible consequences.  And now we're reduced to using cold war (ancient, but still probably unacceptable to the Unabomber) technology to put humans into space, to accomplish things of questionable value relative to what modern automation and robotics can do.
So while Ted's message against nearly all technology is impossible to live - not many of us want to live in shacks in the woods, perhaps a Luddite can help us think about what technology can, and should be used for.  And more importantly, an Atavist can help us think about what it should not.

Stories I Tell Myself

A short time ago, I was complaining about the lack of winter having the effect of prolonging 2015.  The 10th day of the year came with winter in full force.  Temperature dropping all day.  Wind howling all day.  So brutal that only a short dog walk was tolerable.  With a planned plumbing project apparently not needed, I sat down to read Stories I Tell Myself by Juan F Thompson.

I've read much of what Hunter S Thompson has written in book form, so when I saw on a website somewhere a reference to the book written by Juan, his son, I immediately requested it from the library.  It was listed as "In Cataloging" which often means a long wait, but it was available within a day.  I originally planned to read this on an upcoming trip, and I rarely sit down and read an entire book in one sitting.  But I did so with Stories I Tell Myself on that frozen windy day.

The book tells the story of Juan growing up in the shadow of his father.  I was sort of expecting something along the line of  Agusten Burrough's Running with Scissors, but Juan's growing up was substantially more normal than that.  If I were to compare it to another Burrough's book, it is almost closer to A Wolf at the Table, but not with the same level of overt brutality.  Largely, it sounded as if Juan's youth was grounded much more in his mother, with his father a figure to be feared.  After his parent's divorce, I read between the lines that there were several years with minimal contact between Hunter and Juan.  Juan alludes to this, but doesn't come right out and say it.
Juan also goes out of his was several times in the book to point out that he is describing things from his memory and that his memory may be incomplete or possibly erroneous.  This is part of the narrative that runs through the book, and I found it interesting as also something I've become increasingly aware of.

The most prominent theme in the book is one of the relationship between fathers and sons.  This almost seems to be more important at some points than the fact that Juan's father is the famous and eccentric Hunter S Thompson.  Still, after reading books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Screwjack, growing up with Hunter does have aspects and events that might be expected.
It was somewhat shocking some of the other figures who appear in the book:  Jimmy Buffet, Kieth Richards, John Kerry - if more than eccentric, Hunter certainly had a diverse A-List crowd he moved in.
Sometimes the right book comes along at the right time and Stories I Tell Myself was one of those.  As my dad's recent death has had me pondering my relationship with him over the years, Juan's book allowed for a different perspective and some introspection.  Not that my dad, although he did work in the book publishing industry, should be compared to Hunter as this would be like trying to compare peacocks and robins, or maybe peacocks and suspension bridges.

The other thread running through the book is the overall theme of growing up.  All of the painful moments of awkwardness, confusion, alienation, childhood difficulties are laid bare.  This is more poignant as Juan appears to be somewhat clingy to his mother and quite an introvert.
Like most of us, Juan eventually finds his own life and ends up surprisingly normal, even somewhat boring at the end of the book.

There was one detail of the book I found somewhat maddening.  Juan first goes to college at Tufts and writes about being lonely and quite unhappy there.  Transferring to Colorado University and spending a year in England suites him better before returning to the US to finish college.  He writes, "Upon my return to Boulder for the first of my two senior years, I declared English literature my major."  And on the next page he graduates.  This implies graduation from CU in Boulder, but his bio states he graduated from Tufts.  So either he transferred back to where he was previously miserable, or his bio is wrong.  Either way, something is missing either in the story here, or in the editing.  While a minor detail, I find this hard not to perseverate on.

There are a few revelations about Hunter I found surprising as I read the 272 pages.
First, I was surprised at the level of money issues he faced.  It reads like this was mostly self-induced, as it often is.  But I would have thought that a famous writer who had sold millions of books could endure poor money habits without as much effect as was eluded to in the book.  More than anything, this probably supports the notion that no matter how successful a person is, living at the end of means is dangerous.
The other revelation was Hunter's relationship with drugs and alcohol.  I had always assumed that his consumption of drugs and alcohol was somewhat exaggerated as part of the persona that sold his wares.  Peter Whitmer's unauthorized biography When the Going Gets Weird makes mention of health issues early in his life from overindulgence, and I inferred from this that as he aged, he was more careful - or possibly he needed to be more careful.  Apparently, overindulgence in both alcohol and cocaine was a daily occurrence and it is somewhat surprising that Hunter lived as long as he did.  Still, the effects of this debaucherous lifestyle become clear through the end of the book and the end of Hunter's life.

The book ends with a narrative around Hunter's ultimate suicide and final, spectacular sendoff.

The book was a good read and a different take on an interesting man.  As with much of HST's writing, it wasn't always clear if the main thrust of the book was about Juan, or Hunter.  I'll end, not with a something about Juan Thompson or Hunter Thompson, both of which would be easy, but I'll end with a quote from Peter Hamill's A Drinking Life.  Because while Juan's story is distinctive as the only son of an eccentric, gonzo father, the larger story isn't unique - but is the same story experienced through history of growing up and becoming an individual separate from where anyone came from.

I was myself now, for better or worse.  I was forever Billy Hamill's son, but I did not want to be the next edition of Billy Hamill.  He had his life and I had mine.  And if there were patterns, endless repetitions, cycles of family history, if my father was the result of his father and his father's father, on back through the generations into the Irish fogs, I could no longer accept any notion of predestination.

2015: Saudade

Somewhere around late August, too early, I started looking for the end of 2015.  Not that 2015 was a bad year ... overall.  I didn't use my vacation time too well, but that which was used appropriately, I enjoyed.  Planned trips worked out and the impromptu ones were a brief hoot.  Some longer term issues at work have (largely) improved, and my work hours allow me to leave when I want more often.
I may have even been pushing for the end of the year, but it was like pushing on a rope; time will pass at its own rate.  Never faster, never slower.

"Certainly a measure of this reactionary navel-noodling can be attributed to the standard metaphorical casting of autumn as the season when winter's deathly breath first fogs your rose-colored glasses, but on a more fundamental level I think it has to do with the reaping of gardens and good intentions, both of which tend to come in well below spring's predictions." 

Michael Perry (Truck - A Love Story)

Christmas came with the winter solstice behind it and the new calendar waiting to be hung on the wall, but Christmas morning woke up to 50 degrees after a Christmas Eve bike ride warm enough to wear shorts.  

On a rational level, I enjoyed the uncharacteristically warm December; my heating bill certainly has.  The warm weather made for more bike riding and some of the most comfortable deer hunting I've had.  Yet, the lack of winter was bringing with it a sense of prolonging a year that needed to end, the warm weather behaving as a nagging sense that something is unfinished, the epoch won't advance until some beastie somewhere is set free.

For the fourth year, I've time lapsed daily pictures of my back yard.  I very likely have the most photographed back yard in the township.  Proof that the year started and is over.

Bronnie Ware's Top Five Regrets of the Dying is repeated all over, so it isn't included here.  But it is worth rereading occasionally.  The last regret is one that seems to request attention after 2015.  Happiness is a choice.  It sounds so easy, and it probably can be.

There are already things to look forward to early in 2016.  An annual trip south is actually quite close.  A trip west, very far west, to scrawl a few difficult check marks on of the bucket list is being planned.

Since Christmas, winter does seem like it may have arrived.  With winter winds and daily highs nearer freezing, the calendar can be changed.  I'm not sure if the beastie has been slain or set free; only time will tell.

Looking back over the four years of time lapsed video brings with it a sense of hope.  Winter, in some form, will always come.  Winter will relent to spring, bringing green and good intentions.  Summer will bring the deliciousness of muggy mornings and evening walks watching the Queen Anne's lace and chicory grow.  Fall will bring the hopefulness of the treestands.  And winter will come, yet again, with the right mindset, accompanied by happy reflection since happiness is a choice.

Thanks for everything.