Time To Reinvent Myself

At 81 years of age my working life has come to an end.  Now I need to devise a plan for the rest of my life.  I don't want to spend it on the couch watching TV.  Not exclusively, anyway.  I don't want to feel useless.  

My priority for the time being will be to regain my physical health.  I start a new round of physical therapy tomorrow.  PT has done a lot of good for me so far but I have a ways to go.  I have an exercise table that I bought from Amazon several weeks ago, still in its cardboard packaging.  I need to install it in my spare room upstairs and start using it. 

Tax Season Ends Next Week

 The Tax Season is winding down and this may be my last hurrah.  

I will soon be free to do other things.  

But what?

Resting and Refreshing

The tax season has ended and I’m home trying to rejuvenate and lose this feeling of fatigue and angst.  It was a brutal tax season. 

The good things for today is that I have a remaining cigar, the company of my dog and cat, and it looks like rain.  I like rain.

One More Week of Tax Season

Only one more week of labor in the tax office.  I will be glad when it’s over.  

Slow Day at the Office

It’s February First and it’s still early for tax preparation.  So I sit here waiting for my last client of the day.

What would I rather be doing?  Laying in a warm bed, cuddling with my dog and cat and watching TV.  Oh well.

Back to Work: Tax Season Starts Today

 Bummer, I have to start work today, doing taxes.  With Covid and Newsom's ridiculous prohibitions, it will be a challenging tax season.  A lot of tax returns will be prepared virtually, with clients sending their tax documents to us through a secure server, with reviewing and approving the completed return the same way.  Many clients will not have to come into the office.  Face to face meetings will be rare, or conducted via video camera.

I'd rather stay home and work on Adobe Illustrator projects, but that doesn't pay the bills.

I have my biggest and best Illustrator project in progress and I hope to post it this week.  It will feature King Tutankhamen.  

I find ancient Egypt fascinating, mainly because of its art and sculpture.  Massive temples and statues carved out of stone with primitive tools, boggles the mind.  Many of these artifacts are thousands of years old.  The massive Great Sphinx was staring out across the sands two thousand years before Christ walked the Earth.  King Tut was dead a thousand years before the same event.  Wow.

The After-Christmas Mindset: Put Away The Ornaments, Time To Get To Work!

Funny, when the clock strikes midnight on the morning of December 26, Christmas ends abruptly.  Now all those candy canes, Christmas lights, Christmas trees, Christmas songs, and various other holiday hoopla seem so passe.  My son, his wife and two dogs left for Los Angeles this morning, and the house seems empty now.  However, I won't complain.  I really enjoyed this Christmas season.

Now the warm fuzzy feelings of holiday cheer are replaced with a more serious focus, getting back to work, defeating progressivism in all its forms, making money, paying bills.  I really need a hard shell case for my string bass, to prevent bumps, scratches and bruises when transporting it to practice.  The case costs around $400, with $200 more for freight, if I buy it online.  However, my bass is worth around $4,000, and I need to protect my investment.

I am looking for new employment for the coming tax season, and have had several interviews, with another one scheduled for Monday.  All seem interested in hiring me, so I just have to pick out the one that suits me best:  paywise, and proximity to home to limit the commute.

I am scheduled for cataract surgery in the middle of January.  Not looking forward to the surgery, but it will be nice to see clearly again.

Lucky October

October was an especially lucky month for me.  My long favorite team, the San Francisco Giants, won the World Series in a hard-fought, seven game matchup against a powerful team.  I interviewed for a temporary assignment as the stand-in Director of Finance for the Monterey chapter of a large, national non-profit organization.  I was the only one interviewed, and was offered the job, which I accepted. Then, one day after October ended, my youngest son was married in Corona, (Southern) California.  Three days later, the Republican wave occurred, sweeping the despised Democrats out of office all across the nation, to my great satisfaction.

The Director of Finance job is quite challenging.  It is temporary, as I am a fill-in for the vacant position until a permanent replacement can be found.  I don't accept permanent jobs, as I am supposed to be retired.  I like working during the tax season, but like sleeping in the remaining nine months of the year.  Right now I have to leave the house at 6 AM in order to arrive by 8 AM, and have been reintroduced to the joys of commuting through heavy traffic.

The job is in Monterey, California, one of my favorite towns.  It is a very scenic town on the coast, and I see ocean waves breaking on beaches as I commute to work in the morning.  Lately, traffic has been terrible due to road construction, and it takes more than an hour to get to work, and just as long to return home in the evenings.  I hope to make some extra income, as I need it for some dental bills and for a new acoustic bass amplifier that I plan to buy.

I don't know how long the job will last.  Maybe one, two or three months.  Then I'll find another one, if I so desire.  If I do good work on the current job, more will be easier to get.

My new daughter-in-law is Korean.  She was born in South Korea.  Her parents, very nice people, do not speak English with great fluency.  Her mom wore a traditional Korean dress to the wedding, and looked quite fetching in it:  a red blouse with a long black skirt.  She is anxious for the wedding to bear fruit:  she wants grandchildren.  We are on the same page.

Work Cures My Depression

I have been working for a well-known, nationwide tax company (yes, that one).  This is my second tax season with them.  The pay is terrible -- minimum wage -- but I am not working there for the money.  I am working there to increase my knowledge of individual income taxes and for the pleasure of doing something productive.

I like working with the clients, meeting the people, helping them to solve tax problems and to minimize their taxes and take advantage of deductions and credits that may be available to them.  However, this week I was hired for the busy season by another CPA, a good friend with whom I worked as a corporate consultant for several years (making a bundle in the process).  I will be working out of town on weekdays, but working at the tax agency on weekends.  I will be quite busy through April of this year, and making some decent (though not great) money for a change.  My friend, the other CPA, without an income for many months due to the recession, bought an audit practice near San Francisco so he would have an income again.  He asked me to work for him through the busy season, and I agreed.  The pay is a lot better than at the tax agency.

I have been largely without work for three years, all the years of the Obama Administration.  Now Obama didn't cause this horrible recession, but his party did -- and Obama has done everything possible to prolong and deepen the recession, whether intentional or not.  For three years my only activities have been blogging and band practice.  The band practice came to an end in August when I told the band leader that his singing was simply awful.  (This, only after months of subtle hints and tactful suggestions on singing lessons.) He did not appreciate my honesty at finally saying what everyone else knew.

In any case, I have been depressed since Obama came to power.  Now I know what old people in old folks' homes feel like, unproductive, unneeded, unchallenged, with no purpose in life and nothing but death to look forward to.  I spent a lot of the day feeling sleepy and took marathon naps throughout the week.  No energy, no ambition.  For some time, I have wished that the dark angel would tap me on the shoulder and get me out of a useless existence.  This isn't surprising.  I read that the suicide rate in places like Greece is soaring since the economy there crashed.

This past week, though, my friend asked me to work for him and I have been very popular with clients at the tax agency.  Suddenly I am busy, needed, productive, and challenged.  My sleepiness has disappeared and my depression is 90% gone.  I have energy and, holy mackerel, my libido isn't as dead as I thought.  It too is showing signs of life.  I wouldn't have thought this turn-around in my mental attitude was possible.  Work does this for a man.  Work is life, purpose and meaning.  It is, for me anyway, the greatest cure for depression.

Taxes and More Taxes

Sorry for the lack of blogging this week.  It has been one tax return after another.

No Super Bowl for me today.  Just more taxes.

Chillin' Out

In my last few days at work I have been very productive. We are having our annual audit and I have done so much work greasing the skids for the auditors; creating the trial balance, financial statements and footnotes using their own software; making many adjustments to clean up the books; and preparing multitudinous schedules and analyses. Today and yesterday I prepared the tax provision, which is quite technical and mind boggling. I love to wrap my mind around complex problems and solve them. I can make Excel tap dance across the stage and sing Dixie; I be an Excel STUD, even if I do say so myself. Pivot tables, anyone? Nested if statements? Nothin' to it.

I figure I have saved my employer about $50,000 on the audit fee this year; but he's too dumb to appreciate it. In any case, I will leave that place with lots of confidence in my skills and abilities.

I got a call this week from a guitarist who has an acoustic group and they would love to have an acoustic bass player. So tomorrow after work I am going to go by his place and jam a bit, find out what we both know and how well we mesh. It should be fun. Playing with live musicians is so much better than just practicing to records; if you mesh well you energize and inspire each other.

He's going to give me a CD of their recorded music so I can start learning their repertoire.