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What did you do this week?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
What I did was decide that I'm having enough of this crappy situation I'm in. It all feels rather more hopeful now, so I figured I'd go all-in on working my ass off through the following months.
For one, I decided to go ahead on my personal website regardless of how bad of a name I have for it. This one issue has been holding me down for months, and I should've went ahead much sooner. If I am to make anything of myself through my online publishing, the best way to cripple myself is to hold off on creating the very platform I mean to use.
Then, I made a plan on what I actually have to do. It's much easier to work when I have a clear set of things I must do – something I figured out very well while working on Intergrid. It felt so much easier to get going when I knew exactly what I had to do. Replicating that formula – which is as old as the notion of planning but I'm only discovering it right now – helps.
Then, I'm also planning on starting to publish things people might be interested in. Fixing Intergrid bugs, adding the promised export function and some quality-of-life features (like clickable footer). Some writing and worldbuilding work, including publishing the first story of Frontiers. Publishing design experiments.
I've also set out a goal for myself: making $100 through my own work throughout spring. If I can make anything – one dollar, two, ten – that would be proof enough that I can make it into something stable eventually, by making a small variety of quality creative products. The $100 goal is for my birthday: if I can make this much or more, I can celebrate it really fucking well. $100 would double my budget and let me spend a couple more days away, relaxing.
It's a hell of an ask, but I'll be damned if I'm not gonna work for it.
I bit the bullet and did my taxes. Somehow, despite being unemployed all year, not paying a dime of income tax, and declaring less than $6000 in self employment income, they're giving me a refund of $700. I'm not sure what I did, but that seems way higher than I expected. I was going to double check everything, try and figure out where the mistake is, but instead I decided to say YOLO, fuck it, I need that money. If they do audit me they'll see I'm poor.
Anyway, I highly recommend Simpletax for any Canadians wanting to file their taxes. It's by donation, you can pay $0 if you like, you don't even need to sign up for an account, and the whole process is very straightforward. Before this I used StudioTax, which is another awesome by-donation service, but it's a lot more like doing your taxes by hand. It might be better if you have a lot of complicated deductions, but otherwise I'm really happy with Simpletax. I'm a big fan of telling people not to use TurboTax. Intuit is a really scummy company who does a lot of lobbying to ensure taxes stay complicated so they can continue to sell their products. They're obligated to provide a free version, but they do their very best to hide it and trick people into paying anyway.
I've used SimpleTax since 2015, before that my dad was awesome enough to do my taxes. But SimpleTax was surprisingly easy haha
Mildly offtopic but what do you mean by 'do' your taxes and why would you need an app for it? Can't they just automatically take all the money they need from your bank account every month or at least send you a check telling you what to pay?
Well, in my case I'm unemployed / self-employed, so there's no way they can know how much I've earned unless I tell them.
For regular employment though, in the US and Canada, typically what happens is your employer deducts taxes from your cheque, remits them to the tax agency, then tells them at the end of the year how much you made. The amount your employer sends the agency really ought to be the right amount, and the government really ought to know how much you worked, and whether these numbers add up or not. The government really should be able to do the math themselves in 95%+ of cases and send you either a bill or a cheque, but tax companies like H&R Block and Intuit (TurboTax) lobby the government to prevent the system from being modernized.
https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-free-simple-hr-block-intuit-lobbying-against-it
Income tax (which is usually the tax that people "do") is calculated annually. At the end of each financial year, you work out how much you've earned, you work out what deductions you're allowed to make against your earnings, and that results in your taxable income. The government then provides tables which calculate how much tax you pay on that annual taxable income.
In many places, your employer is required to deduct an estimated amount of tax from your regular wages, and send that to the taxation department. So, every week or fortnight or month, an estimated amount of tax is deducted from your pay and paid to the taxation department on your behalf.
However, you don't know how much tax you actually have to pay until after the end of the financial year. That's when you sit down and "do" your taxes: you calculate your earnings, you decide your deductions, you calculate your taxable income, the government advises your actual tax, and you compare that to the estimated tax you've paid throughout the year.
The app (or website or other software) is there to help you do all these calculations. You input your earnings, you input your deductions, and it calculates your taxable income and the amount of tax you have to pay. If it's a good app/website/software, it will be pre-populated with some data from the taxation department to help you. For example, here in Australia, you can do your tax on a website provided by the Australian Taxation Office and, for the majority of taxpayers, all you have to do is enter a couple of deductions and press "submit" - everything else is either: pre-populated from data the ATO has already collected from your employer, your bank, and on; or calculated by the website.
I worked half days, it was nice to see everybody again, but it was also nice to play lots and lots of Risk of Rain 2.
This week has been a bit of a weird one for me as I saw my status change from ''extended vacation'' to ''basically unemployed.'' As I've mentioned in the past, I'm a teacher in China and the coronavirus has made the next few months very uncertain. I got the news yesterday that my school (and others around the country) is closed until further notice. I've been staying with my parents in Florida and until yesterday I had been dicking around playing video games, reading, cooking (having an oven and the ability to cook at low heat has been amazing) and going to the beach. Now I'm on the hunt for some service job that I wont feel bad about quitting if my school opens up this spring. If the virus keeps the school closed until summer, I probably wont return to China until next year since I was already planning to come back after the Democratic Convention so I could support the 2020 nominee in a pivotal swing state.
This whole thing is a huge bummer. I really miss my students and I feel bad that several of them are going to lose all the progress that they worked so hard for last year. Plus, since they're four they're all going to be so much bigger next time I see them. And, ya know, people are dying.
On the brighter side of things, I'm reactivating my old phone number today. I didn't tell many people I was leaving for China, so I hope there are a few mesages waiting for me.
I made a fantastic Tom Swiftly post from yesterday and got no attention and I'm still reeling from that tbh
I went for my Gastroenterology exam (procedure?) yesterday. It fucking sucked. I'm usually okay with medical stuff, dentists, needles, being prodded and poked, i tend to get quite passive until it is over, so i choose to not get the sedation.
This felt like torture. You are told to concentrate on your breathing because when you stop breathing, even for a moment, your gag reflex kicks in and you start retching. There is literally a nurse there acting as a weird combination of hype man and meditation instructor just to keep you concentrating on your breath. I was on my side with a numb throat, mouth guard in and a tube down my throat. I'm fine for a few minutes until i start retching. However there is no relief , nothing but small amounts of water comes up and you can't move or pause the exam because you still have the pipe in your throat and the nurse is doing her job so i'm retching and retching and my cheek is filling with water so breathing is getting harder to do, adrenaline kicks in and my heart rate shot to 170. I managed to get my breathe back under control a few times and long enough for them to complete the examination and take the biopsies.
I'd like the opinions of others who have had done because i dont know whether i am just a softarse when it comes to deepthroating pipes or whether that level of discomfort and retching is normal.
They pump you full of air to expand your stomach so they can look around and when they are done you need to fart and burp real bad, being raised correctly i literally couldn't fart in an observation room full of nurses so i hold them until i get home. The long farts were fun at first, less fun when they continue for hours.
The immediate results were weird. I have a couple of nodules that shouldn't be there (they took biopsies of them) and there wasn't any damage they would expect for someone who has coeliacs (my reason for the gastroenterology) but they took a biopsy however the results will take a month or two. I just hope i don't have to do it again.
This week was meant to be a busy one leading up to the arrival our our baby on Monday. This week was meant to be filled with hospital appointments (midwife's and ultrasounds) we got to Tuesday before all those plans went out the window.
My wife had a gestational diabetes appointment on Tuesday and was having some pains in her lower abdomen, the endocrinologist wouldn't let her leave without seeing someone about the pains. The pains didn't stop and only got worse over the evening until close to midnight we were told baby needed to come out, after lots of waiting because other people were in a bit more of an emergency than us we had out little girl at 0715 Wednesday morning, a tiny 5lb 4oz and 47 cm 32 weeks on the damn knocker. All the nurses have told us she is a great size for being so early and she was a 1 in 80,000 birth because she was an en caul birth.
Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of that and neither did anyone in the operating theatre. So that's been my week.
Came back from Chicago earlier this week, ended up changing my flight to one at 5am (was originally supposed to leave at 2) because there was supposed to be a pretty big snow storm and we didn't want to get stuck (the storm ended up not happening, so the loss of sleep was mostly for nothing).
A coworker put in their two weeks while I was out. I still don't know where they're going and I think they've been in the office one day since I got back. Fortunately I've only needed to ask them something once.
I didn't do much this week. I went out last weekend, and caught a cold. I've been sniffing and sneezing and coughing all week. I worked from home all week, instead of part of the week. I haven't been anywhere or done anything.
I was talking to my manager this week, and I made a joke that if I got on a train with my sneezing and coughing, I'd probably cause a mass panic. She joked that I'd be more likely to be taken away and quarantined on Christmas Island! Like every joke, there's a grain of truth in that.