Honors and Benefits - But A Middleman? No Thanks.

So we are members of AARP. That is supposed to bring us benefits.

One of the benefits is tax preparation help.

And I guess AARP member beggars shouldn't be choosers, but I'm not exactly thrilled with the help being offered.

Apparently, we can go to their tax prep center and they'll do our taxes for free. I would much rather, however, have an AARP discount on tax preparation software so I can not only continue doing my taxes at home as I've done them for many years past, but also help me kids with their taxes using the same software, getting a lot of bang for my buck.

Because with free tax prep help, all I'm really getting is a chose and a social interaction I'd much rather avoid.

With a discount on tax software, I'm getting a chore and the ability to amortize the cost of the software over a minimum of three returns, thus helping more people and not involving an extra middleman in my taxitude.

I'd rather not be Gil in this situation, rocking back and forth with my pathetic bag of receipts awaiting the doom the AARP taxman bringeth. I'd rather see the doom come myself.

I Hope I Got the Stupid Finger Pointing Right

Getting ready to film my own stupid scam Internet video

Old Testament? Not my Favorite

I'll admit the Old Testament is not my favorite bit of scripture to teach.

A few weeks ago, my wife got to avoid teaching this particular tale from Genesis 9:

After the whole ark business, Noah gets a bit drunk and passes out in his tent, starkers. His son Ham comes in, sees the naked dad, and he and his brothers cover Noah up.

Upon awaking, Noah learns of the thing and curses Canaan, Ham's son. Grandkid gets cursed because his dad saw grandpa's ding-dong.

Even our lesson materials has this to say:

This week, I get to avoid talking about other drunken escapades where Lot's daughters get Dad drunk and have sex so he can have, well, I don't know I guess. Descendants? Because his daughters don't count?

Our materials say this is included to show origins:

So that'll be fun. I guess it does show that you could take the daughters out of Sodom and Gomorrah, but not Sodom and Gomorrah out of the daughters.

Anyway, this is what I feel like sometimes:

 

We have state legislators who want daily Bible reading to be part of the public school curriculum. Fine. But they have to read these parts too.

Are They *Really*?

The Guardian is trying to get me upset about the loss of trade paperback books.

Their story sez:

But the era of the “pocket book” is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.

Romero, who grew up in the working-class, Latino and industrial city of Hialeah, Florida, says: “I don’t remember a bookstore. I had the library in Miami Springs across the bridge but in Hialeah around us, what was in walking distance because we didn’t have a car, was the Publix [supermarket] and sometimes we would get books from Goodwill [thrift store] as well.

“They had that democratic aspect to them where you can just find them anywhere and it always felt like it was the pick ’n’ mix candy-type store where there is something here for everyone, whether it’s the Harlequin romance novel or something very pulpy like a sci-fi or horror novel that you could quickly get.”

I'll admit: I don't remember book stores either. I mean, we had Pioneer Book, sure. But I was a big borrower from the library, and sneaked books off the classroom shelves in elementary school. While I do remember buying books from a grocery store as they describe here, they were exclusively Peanuts comic strip books.

When I was serious about buying books, it was the thrift store. Deseret Industries, one of our local thrifts, occasionally ran sales when they had too many books and I could come home with ten for a dollar. Those were heady days.

I still shop a lot there for books, abut also hit up used book sellers on the Internet as well. As far as I'm concerned, there is no book shortage.

I just bought a new little pile last weekend. It's fun.

COOKIE DOUGH!

 

I know that doesn't look like much more than a mixer churning away in a garage, but to us and Troop 1010, it's a big deal.

Since 2019, the troop has made cookie dough as a fundraiser. We've made the dough in a school cafeteria and the back rooms of the scout office and a regional restaurant, but those opportunities were closed to us.

We did score this mixer from the scout office, and Keaton and his Dad got an outlet wired for it in the garage of their new home. Best yet, the mixer works. So we can make the dough. Both kinds.

Help Me Sort This Out in My Head

 

Help me sort this out:

I've been a fan of Vangelis -- and by extension, a certain amount of synthesized music -- since I first heard the music as part of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series.

Obviously, a lot of talent goes into synthesized music; it's not just computers doing the work. Though it is the computers helping the work to have beautiful and dangerous sounds to it.

I'm sure at the time there were people who weren't all that keen on synthesized music: "There's no skill," they'd say, as compared to learning how to make a violin sing, or dare I say it, a banjo plink."

But it's still there. Filling a niche that I'm glad synth music found.

I'm struggling with the battle against large language models and such. Though I agree there's rather a leap from creating "good prompts" that can produce prose that's actually worth reading.

But I dunno. Maybe I'm getting weak on this. Maybe in the future LLMs will find and fill a niche in writing and just be that small part of it that fills a distinct need.

I've seen writer friends experiment with LLMs and I have to wonder: Used right, they're not all that bad. There are certainly ethical concerns based on their use of electricity and their training based on plagiarized works of actual meat-spacer authors, that I won't deny. That's a big part that still keeps me from using LLMs in my own work. Maybe that's too big a leap to make.

But I'm not sure.

Still sorting things out in my head.

Moved

I didn't take any pictures -- which now seems sad -- but we successfully got Lexi and Keaton moved into their house today.

It's a big deal.

They feel like they're rattling around in the space, after leaving a 2-bedroom apartment for even smaller digs with us as they looked for a place to live locally.

But I can see the gleam in their eyes as they look past the piles of boxes and such at the possibilities of having all sorts of places to put the stuff they've got and plan for the future.

It's kind of exciting for them.

And for us, because it means we have a lot of stuff that's moved out of our house now. Last time I had to restart the router, it took ten minutes to move enough boxes to get to it.

And soon one of the two pianos we have in the house will join them. We'll get a wall back. I don't know what we'll do with it, but we'll get it back.

Honda Mileage - Another Missed Milestone

I've been watching the odometer in my 2005 Honda Pilot for this particular set of zeros to come around.

Not that there's anything significant about 260,000 miles other than the fact that I missed seeing 250,000 miles roll in.

So, of course, today this happened:

At least it got warmer.

Summer in Liverpool, 1992

 

We buy a lot of used books. Part of the fun is finding annotations, abandoned bookmarks, and in the case of this copy of "The Complete Ripping Yarns," an inscription on the inside front cover.

I can't make out the signatures, but the text says:

To Lillian,

A bit of very British humour from a very funny T.V. series written by two of the Monty Python team.

Hope you enjoy it!

Happy Birthday.

Summer in Liverpool 1992

With love from (illegible names)

All of this for only $7.

A Dog for All Seasons: A Reflection

Note: This is less of a review, more of a personal reflection.

“Oh. That book,” my wife said when she saw me holding our copy of “A Dog for All Seasons” by Patti Sherlock. “You do know the dog dies at the end?”

Sorry for the spoiler. But as it’s a book about a dog, we all pretty much know how it ends. Because that’s pretty much how every book about a dog – or any animal – ends. Sure, not “Rascal,” by Sterling North. But damn few else.

And, in the end, we all know Rascal died too.

Thus is the nature of living, whether with animals or humans. Life passes. And we’re rarely prepared for the end of it. Dogs, who live in the moment, maybe have the better point of view, at least in the realm of mortality.

Once immortal, maybe we can learn things from each other.

Our own dog Dottie, now sixteen years old herself, gave us a scare last week, tumbling down a flight of stairs to end up in a shaking, crying heap at the bottom.

I’m not sure I liked how I reacted, yelling chastisement at the dog for not waiting for me to pick her up before she went pell-mell down the stairs, because picking her up is just what we do now when any amount of stairs are involved. She won’t ascend the four wooden steps on the back porch and balks usually at going down them, so I have no idea why the fourteen carpeted steps to the basement were so appealing that day.

So I was mad. Surely she didn’t understand the words, but knew the tone, and that is not what she needed. Chastisement in the moment rarely helps when all we really need is comfort.

Madder still it happened after hours, when no vets were open to see her. Madder still she woke crying during the night and I sacrificed sleep to hold her in my arms as we both fitfully tried to get some rest, waiting for the sun to crawl over the horizon.

Our vet was booked, so we took her to a vet we’d used previously until our emergency backup dog, Daisy, quailed at the ride there, knowing each time she was riding to her doom. We picked a vet closer to home so the anxiety of the trip was as short as the several-block trip.

The vet gave Dottie some pain meds and a cautious bill of health, and for the most part she’s been fine since. But I still don’t like that I yelled.

It didn’t help that at the bottom of the stairs Dasy was too fixated on getting her nightly rawhide to bother with her injured sister, and that I hurled the treat bag at our oldest, asking for help in a less-than-nice voice.

So when George kicked Duncan, the dog in Sherlock’s book, I felt a wince of regret. Never mind I’d stayed up that night cradling that little idiot dog in my arms after the fall. I’d hollered at her. Not what she nor our oldest needed at the time.

But that’s what pets do. They bring joy and laughter, sadness and pain. It’s what all creatures do. I can imagine God wanting to pick up our shaking forms at the bottom of a metaphorical staircase we’ve just tumbled down, irritated that the help that was forthcoming was ignored or the counsel given was forgotten, even momentarily.

“For those of us who have been loved by a great dog, who have, in turn, loved the dog back, we can say, and this is not too large a statement, we have known Glory in our lives,” Sherlock writes at the conclusion of her story.

Glory, indeed.

And maybe, when inevitably the dog passes and is with us no longer, a little bit of grace as well.