I went to the feds to file all my back income taxes ever, today. They run a little office in the bottom floor of the Fed building downtown, where the IRS employees will assist the feebleminded or differently-literate with their tax forms for free. I know how to add, I just wanted a tax-familiar person nearby to ask about what materials I needed to properly file for all those years of truancy. Well, it turns out I had everything right there, but they could only help me with 1998, because the other returns were out of the range they were authorized to help with. I have to go back tomorrow. No, today. I have to go back today, to the wacky upstairs room in which they CAN help me. Tax returns are neato. Free money! Now I feel justified for keeping oodles of financial records in the closet. Another benefit of all that waiting in line on beige carpet: I can ditch the paperwork that I now know is unnecessary to filing. I also made another deposit to my burgeoning car-fund account. I did a lot of walking around downtown, and got very cold and soggy. Also, Seattlites with umbrellas are dangerous, especially the short ones that wave those spines around at my-eye level. Beauracracy and loud public idiots got me down today.

Of course, as soon as I got home, I went straight into my world of plastic squares with letters on them and glowing phosphor-coated glass. First thing I meet? Loud public idiots. Yes, thank you Yahoo for allowing people to sign up whoever they want to random mailing lists. I sure was curious about how I could ACCEPT CREDIT CARDS ONLINE and that hilarious joke about the 40x40x40 plan!!!! kthx!#$!

Mostly, I'm spending my time writing an operations manual and a test plan. My technical writing skills aren't too bad, but it's been a long time since I had to explain something to someone who was seeing it for the first time. I'm avoiding the words "obviously", "self-explanatory", and "duh". It's not easy. Why does it fall to ME to write the manual? Because I wrote the software and never told anyone else how it works!#!%!#$ Duh obviously self-explanatory

Simultaneously, I'm listening to the musical ideas I've spooged onto disk over the last few months, trying to weed out the worthwhile ideas for further development and introduction to the band. Sometimes I just don't know what the hell I'm thinking. I wrote this song with cuicas (those things that sound kind of like cartoon seals. Art! oot!) and bagpipe noises and it's just... possibly the worst audible thing ever. I guess it's good that I'm not letting good taste influence my musical direction? No, I'm not worried - the more songs the better, no matter how crappy. I'll make judgement calls later, once I've got a whole lot going and higher probability of something worthwhile lurking amongst the arf-arf jingle cats-esque kind of crap I come up with at 4 or 5 am.