15 April 1999: Happy Tax Day

Thursday, 15 April 1999:

Happy Tax Day

Nyah, nyah; I paid my taxes nearly two months ago!

Yes, it's been another busy week. I took a chunk of Tuesday evening off as downtime, but have been quite busy otherwise.

My downtime on Tuesday basically involved pulling out my collection of the Alan Moore issues of Supreme and reading almost all of them straight through. They're quite good, a sort of homage to and pastiche of Superman, with the added twist that the hero has just returned from two decades in space and is recovering his memory after a lengthy bout of amnesia.

If you're an Alan Moore fan, you may want to know - as I just discovered yesterday at the comic book store - that Moore is writing the new Youngblood series, although I must admit that the first two issues are not much to write home about. I guess Supreme will be returning sometime in the next few months, which should be fun.

Of course, Wednesday is also gaming day, and last night we played the new Städte und Ritter expansion to The Settlers of Catan. It is certainly a more complicated game, but it's quite playable. It will probably take us a few playings to get used to the new twists the expansion puts on the game. Now if only I could find a copy of the 5 & 6 player expansion for it, but since the importer, Mayfair, started having its latest bout of financial problems right when it came out, it's extremely hard to come by.

Yesterday I also went down to AAA to get auto and renters insurance, in preparation for registering my car. Since I wasn't sure just what to bring, I packaged up my title and registration and brought them with me.

When I got there, I got the unhappy surprise that my title had disappeared somewhere between my office at Apple and the cubical at AAA where I was being helped. And a fairly thorough search of both the AAA parking lot and the Apple lot, and many hallways in-between, turned up nothing. I reported it to Apple security, but don't hold out hope of getting it back.

This is ironic since I've been very, very careful with my title, knowing that I need it rarely (not even for insurance, it seems!) but that it's important to keep track of. Fortunately, it's not a huge tragedy; it's cheap to get a new one (albeit no doubt I'll have to wait weeks for the Wisconsin DMV to process my request), and California will let me register my car without it (they just won't issue a California title until I can give them the Wisconsin one). But it is a big pain in the ass. Sigh.

I'd thought I'd secured it soundly in the pocket of the binder I brought with me, but apparently not. Why it slipped out and my registration didn't, I may never know.

Anyway, car insurance (for my car, anyway) is not significantly more expensive here than it was in Madison; another $100/year or so. Renters insurance is about three times as expensive, though, and doesn't cover earthquake damage. (You can buy $5000 worth of earthquake insurance through the state at exorbitant rates, but that hardly seems worth it.)

Anyway, I cleared that hurdle (accidentally creating a new one for myself), and can proceed with the next step in registration - the dreaded California smog test.

Other than that, I've mostly been working or writing my APAzine (which I finished tonight). I'm also trying to move forward on closing my Fullfeed account and moving everything to Spies. Hopefully that will happen next week... I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, on Sunday is the fantasy baseball draft, for which I have done basically nothing in the way of preparation. So you can guess what I'll be doing the next few days...

Michael Rawdon (Contact)