Life During Wartime

Holy cow, have I ever been busy lately!

Work has been, if not exactly insane, at least multi-faceted. No shortage of things to do, in fact I have something like five projects I want to finish - or at least make large dents in - this week. Sheesh!

Beyond that, we're ramping up on our fantasy baseball league for 2003. Our old commissioner/scorer has moved out of the area, so I'm the new commissioner and a couple other guys are going to split the scoring duties. For my part, this means I'm spending time sending e-mails to people who might want to join the league, since we had four openings. It looks like we've recruited enough people (sorry if you suddenly got your hopes up there!), but it's taken time to sift through all the potential recruits, even with the old commish taking on a bunch of the work.

Then, I "hosted" the Apple Listening Club today, which basically involves putting together some music to play and a little handout with the artist and track info. It wasn't a big deal, but it took some time. I played some of my favorite modern progressive rock, which meant I only played 6 songs in the hour. If you're curious, here's what I played:

1. Liquid Tension Experiment, "Paradigm Shift", from Liquid Tension Experiment
2. Dream Theater, "Surrounded", from Images and Words
3. The Flower Kings, "Kings Prayer", from Space Revolver
4. Spock's Beard, "At the End of the Day", from V
5. Jadis, "No Sacrifice", from Across the Water
6. Marillion, "Man of a Thousand Faces", from This Strange Engine

So it was fun.

Debbi and I kept busy cooking this weekend. She made a sirloin tip stew in her crock pot, and I made potatoes gratin on Sunday to go with some pork chops (lesson learned: pork chops really do turn out better on the grill if you brine them first). The potatoes turned out very well, considering I felt sometimes like we weren't quite doing it right. Definitely a dish to repeat.

Plus tonight I did some long-delayed cleaning of my apartment. And over the weekend we did some shopping, including browsing the nursery near my house to get some ideas of things to plant this spring, not to mention spending an hour or so pulling up weeds on my patio. (I've pretty much uprooted the planter behind the bench, since there wasn't anything I really wanted to save. I'm going to replace the top layer of soil to hopefully get rid of most of the roots I might not have gotten hold of with my first pass.)

All of this has left me a little bit frazzled as of tonight. But I think the rest of the week will be fairly smooth. Not exactly a lazy time, but less frantic.

I got a little good news this weekend: My tax return from my accountant, which says that I'm actually going to get a substantial refund this year, which I didn't expect at all.

2002 was my first full year paying a mortgage, and I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that I seemingly didn't adjust my withholdings enough to compensate for the mortgage interest I'm paying. That's the bottom line, I think. Beyond that, some stock I sold ended up getting reported in a rather bizarre manner (involving a Disqualifying Disposition and such) which ended up being even more peculiar than I'd thought at first.

I'm still figuring out exactly why the numbers worked out the way they did, but obviously just not having a big tax debt like I'd expected is a great thing! A load off my mind, really. (Especially with the property tax bill around the corner...)

There's also a war on.

I've been paying only superfluous attention to it. The details of the war don't fascinate me (like no doubt they do my media-addicted friend Jim). I swiftly got bored with NPR's wall-to-wall coverage this past weekend, and have mostly been getting my news from the paper.

I'm not really in favor of the war, but I'm not really against it, either. There are valid reasons to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq, but I think the Bush administration has been astoundingly incoherent in voicing those reasons (which have little to do with terrorism, less to do with weapons of mass destruction, and even less to do with 9/11). I also think it's just this side of criminal that the Bushies are pursuing the war to the exclusion of the economy (though their idea of helping the economy seems mainly to be to give big handouts to their rich friends, a la the Reagan years).

Mostly I'm just distrustful of our current government. Obviously I want our troops to come home safely, but I wonder whether many of them will be stuck in the Middle East for years to come as we grapple with the aftermath of this conquest (especially if, as was suggested to me, we then use Iraq as a staging ground to conquer other important chunks of the region).

What a mess.

On that cheery note, it's time to get ready for bed. I'm getting back into the swing of bicycling to working several times a week, now that spring is here (which means "highs in the 70s" here in the Bay Area), and I'm really looking forward to Daylight Savings Time so it's light when I bike home in the evening.

Gosh, I love bicycling.