$144.31

Never have I been so happy to owe the IRS money.

When you get an envelope from the IRS in late May, you get scared. the “A” word crosses your mind.

You start praying that it’s not an audit, just interest because you paid late.

It was interest, lucky for me.

Oh, and I found my DVD battery charger. Now I just need that damn cable…

Ow ow ow ow

I need a vacation from my vacations. Quite a bit happend this weekend, this is gonna be a long post.

It’s a three day weekend, right? So Saturday I spend most of the time packing up my stuff in hopes of getting it out of my room; this is after I’ve moved over my comic books (side note: when a person’s comic book collection weighs more than they do, do they get a medal or something?) and my few of my old boxes from before so I actually have room to manuver around in. I get a few boxes moved over, mostly stuff that goes into the garage, get really tired and play around and eventually get suckered into dinner and karaoke.

I sleep in a bit and go to a BBQ on sunday and get sunburned (not too badly, fortunately, just enough to have people say “you got a bit of sun didn’t you?” but not enough for them to say “Damn, man, doesn’t that hurt?”) , becoming very grumpy due to some over-the-top antagonism on Luke’s part, which involved me taking out my frustration on some other people and going into the corner and sulking, and playing some weird San Diego mutant of baseball which doesn’t involve running, and we did it with a wiffle ball. Then band practice and crashing at home.

Sunday, I was planning on seeing Pearl Harbor, but was so dang tired from the days before that I didn’t feel like driving up the city. So I decided to pack some more. I tackled the messiest corner, and managed to get most of my magic/gaming cards packed into four medium sized boxes (18″x18″x18″ each).

If there’s anything I’m taking away from this weekend, it’s that paper is damn heavy. In hindsight, I should have traded off number of boxes for space efficiency, because each of those four boxes was so heavy I could barely lift them, they were 75 pounds each, easy. Yes, I’m fairly weak. I get three of them into my car (the fourth wouldn’t fit) and unload them into the garage. I then park the car and try to get them up to the third floor where my room is.

It’s about this time that I started fantasizing about Star Trek transporters, pulleys, levers… anything that would keep me from actually having to get those boxes up the two sets of stairs. I tried rolling one box up, but about the time that it got to the second floor, it started coming apart. I pushed it along the ground to the base of the second set of stairs and left it there. After a short rest, I managed to carry the second box all the way up to the third floor in one go. After a slightly longer rest I managed the same for the third box, but it took two stops.

It was about this time that I laid down on the floor and literally fell asleep. When I woke up about an hour later, I decided to just leave that first box on the second floor and left.

I’ve still got a ways to go, but I managed to throw away quite a bit of trash from my room. Another life lesson I take away from this weekend: When a box sits in your closet for three years and you only add stuff to it, you can most likely throw away most of it… at least the stuff on the bottom. And so I did. I threw away quite a bit of old computer hardware cards that is so ancient, it is antiquated by single chips. There was an entire AT memory expansion card the size of a letter-sized envelope that was ONE WHOLE MEGABYTE, and an 80-column card for an Apple ][e, and an Epson Printer Adapter for an Apple ][e… etc. I even threw away a 1.2GB hard drive.

One positive from this weekend: I found the driver disk for my webcam, so I can actually use that again. There’s still a few pieces of MIA equipment in my room, though.

Tonight, I pack books. In small boxes. *sigh*