Checkmarks between the travel

Rototill the garden - check. Finally finish the taxes - check. Fly to California - check. GTD - filing of personal paperwork - check. Close out personal mailbox - check. Laundry - check. Take a red-eye to New York - check. Visit to garden center - check. Buy first plants of the year - check.

OK - I like this GTD system. It forces you to write down all of the little nagging stuff that you have to do but never remember or get around to doing. Plus about 90% of my annoying paperwork is off of my desk. I highly recommend the book and the system.

This weekend, W and I rented a tiller and tore up the garden plots around our house. We are also preparing a plot behind our back fence which has ambitions to be a vegetable garden. If all goes well, we'll be begging you to take tomatoes, onions, peppers and herbs off of our hands in a few months.

Saturday afternoon, we went out with our friend Sara and her two adorable kids in metropolitan downtown Mebane. We had sandwiches and sweet potatoe fries from our favorite local place, Strong's. Then we waked around downtown and visited the ever increasing number of antique / consignment / gift stores. So nice to just run around for two hours!

Tomorrow I take off for California, then on to New York and Connecticut and then back to RDU and home on Friday afternoon. (Hence the checkmarks between the travel and my photo from last week's trip to Connecticut). I'll arrive just in time to celebrate St. Patrick's Day! Green beer anyone?

Song of the day "Let Go" - Frou Frou

Taxes, money and paper

Can I just express how ridiculous I feel that our current US tax code is? Can anyone simply figure out what a tax basis is on investments made through a company stock purchase program employing dollar cost averaging and discounted purchases? I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person but after trying to retrieve my "corrected" 1099-DIV and 1099B forms from the very incompetent *%^#$ Investor Services for over a month, the idea of trying to figure out the stock basis on a total payout of $156 is just not worth the effort! I spend 45 minutes this morning reading tax code on the IRS website. Isn't the proces of paying taxes supposed to be easily understood by the everyman? No wonder there are so many business and accountants making money off of doing other people's taxes. I guess I'll have to wait until Monday to call Mellon and request their assistance. Another few days we have to wait to get our tax refund.

So I am practically chest deep in paper this morning. W is out on a (very cold) bike ride that may last in indeterminable amount of time. I decided therefore to tackle my paper collection stage of the GTD process. I'm surrounded by manila folders, items I need to decide whether they will take two minutes or less to finish, reference items that need to be filed, and an open Palm Pilot for writing down my task items and someday / maybe lists. This could get dangerous by the time W arrives home. I may have 200+ manila folders all over the floor by that point (or possibly a bonfire in the backyard.)

Remember when you were a kid and thought that the coolest thing in the world was going to the mailbox and seeing a piece of mail addressed to you? I used to wish that I would get 'official looking' mail. OK, I was a wierd kid...I had a Franklin Day Planner in 6th grade. But now, I wish the mail would STOP coming. We only use one credit card a piece, have four total magazine subscriptions (Time, Cooking Light, and Golf Digest) and work with a limited number of investment companies, yet somehow we receive a seemingly huge amount of mail. It just ends up stacking up and feeling like a huge mental burden after awhile. Maybe this GTD process will help make it easier to tackle and a little less of a burden. One can only hope....