Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1418
Death prep with the "when I die" doc, tax prep, 1099s, WC audit, photo sorting, just a ton of boring year-end tasks. Snow day.
Good morning, friends. Snow day. “Home Learning” today, due to snow, which I don’t think is very much for a one-off First Grader day? We shall see. I’m not even sure where Jane is. I woke up at the blissful 7:30, she did not bug me, did not wake me up. She is off playing somewhere. She does not seem to care about breakfast, which is fine with me, having recently kicked up my Ozempic dose.
Hrm you know what? I feel like a bad parent writing that. Let’s go check on her.
Okay yes. She is fine. On her phone. She has found a mysterious button that when she presses it it makes a gold coin sound. We have that phone locked down six ways to Sunday — all she’s supposed to be able to do on it is DuoLingo and text us. But Apple’s parental controls are more opaque than concrete so who knows. This is fine.
Yesterday because of the snow she did her cooking camp online and it was SO FUN for her she loved Zoom so much and… it was pretty charming to see a kid with zero Zoom/Pandemic baggage. I don’t use Zoom at work, we use Google Meet, so Zoom is a rarity these days in my life. Every time I use it, reminds me of the pandemic and I get anxious.
But Jane? She loves it.
Attention Facebook readers: GMHHAY is leaving Facebook, migrating to Slack. This will be over a few months, and we’ll be completely off by March. I love you all. Please come join us in Slack. The invite link is in the comments below. If you’re an email reader, reply to this email and I’ll get you the link.
We have 60 or so people in the GMHHAY Slack now, it is going great. I wouldn’t say it’s quite reached the chattiness of the Facebook comments, but, again, doing better than I dared hope at this point. I can see a path to that. We need some sort of icebreakers. The introductions are going well, that helps. Maybe I need a daily horoscope, lol.
But the potential to have a close friend group, online and not beholden to Meta or Muskovites: priceless.
Got two projects going on this week, in addition to, you know, my job. First, been working on assorted tax stuff this week. I gotta do tax stuff for my work, of course, the esteemed mobile monetization platform Nimbus Advertising Solutions Inc. This is mostly the accountants and finance director’s job, but there are some chores for me in there. Also we use Justworks for all vendor payments and payroll and they handle 1099s and W2s just great.
Part of Tax Time includes working on the taxes for our pool company, Viridian Pools, inc., as well as its sister companies Viridian Contractors and Viridian Holdings. We have a CPA who will actually prep the returns, but I am the finance team, so I gotta do all the stuff around 1099s. We can’t use Justworks at the pool company, cuz we’re a General Contractor and they don’t take general contractors for some reason. So we use Gusto. Which handles our W2s (we only have 3) but not our 1099s. We could theoretically use Quickbooks for our 1099s, but I don’t like their payment system, it charges a percentage on every payment (one of the greatest scams in American business is the percentage-based cut of payments companies take give me a fucking break) and our bank offers free ACH. So I can’t use Quickbooks’ 1099 system either.
Theoretically I still could use their 1099 system without their payments sysem, but beats me how to use it without using their payments. Every year they redesign it for simplicity, and every year it gets more confusing. Plus: gotta pay em. So I prep all the data manually, and send it off to our local CPA. Buy Local. Except our accountant got bought up by a national company we’ll just ignore that.
Then there is the actual accounting and whatnot, and let me tell you, the books are a mess. The pool company’s books are solid, but holdings and contractors? Forget about it. Also there is constantly money moving between them as we get off the ground and I did not properly account for this in Quickbooks at first, so today I am meticulously going through all of 2024 and properly assigning the assorted capital flows to the correct accounts. I know there is this thing called “classes” in Quickbooks, and it is my goal to learn them someday (Scott maybe you can fly down for a consultation), but I suspect what’s really necessary is I have to buy three different Quickbooks instances, one for each LLC, and that fucking sucks and I don’t want to do it. I will suck it up for the Pool and RV storage Facility (coming soon! Sign up if you need a storage bay near Jordan lake), but it’s not worth it during the construction phase.
I dream of some sort of Quickbooks-like thing, only simpler, and it lets you have, like, four different businesses, each with separate books.
Definitely my strong suit, accounting. BUT I did get the 1099 info done yesterday, and out of 60 or so 1099s I needed to gather data for, I was only missing three W9s, so I think I deserve some sort of prize.
Never mind my own taxes. We’ll worry about that in February.
OH also: did you know that all General Contractors get audited for workman’s comp every year? Not just their insurance, but you have to provide the COIs of every vendor you used. Last year’s was a mess. I have been better this year about getting them from our vendors — only time they answer your email is when they want to get paid. But i did not account for the fact that they expire througout the year? So I’m not 100% sure to see how this will go. I will probably have to check the expiration on each one and get a new one from each vendor whose COI is expired. Except if I don’t currently owe them money, they may not send it. We will see!
A longtime reader first-time emailer wrote in the other day and had a great quote that I loved. It said something like: “the whole movement of ‘creative entreprenurship’ is really just something that turns artists into accountants” and my god have I never felt so seen.
This is boring, isn’t it! Imagine spending hours and hours on it! Days! Many days!
The other project I’m working on this week is the annual update to the “When I Die” doc. This is a Google Doc, printed out and kept in a specific place in the house (with a QR code on it to link back to the digital doc with all the links in it), which acts as a guide for Emma to deal with all my shit if I unexpectedly die. I update it at the beginning of the year each year. I have taken a first pass for this year. The radical IT infrastructure re-work in the house is making for some heavy lifting in the revisions. Also it occurred to me in the shower the other day that I have a life insurance policy and that was not reflected in the doc which seems… a pretty big oversight! There’s also a whole sad-ass section about dealing with my crypto from the last heyday — even though I knew it was dumb I went and did some playing for a while. BUT NOT THIS TIME fuck that shit. The whole section is embarrassing.
It is not super fun to think about your death once a year and the impact it’ll have on your loved ones. And I’m just talking the logistical impact! Poor Emma is going to be overwhelmed. I have a rough plan to eventually “wind down operations” a bit, but not… till my 60’s? And not till things shape up a bit more with Jane to see things like: Does she want my legos or band t-shirts or records? Is she going to live in NC, in one of these houses, or is she going to go off into the big scary world? Need a little generational guidance.
So here’s to hoping I make it ten more years.
Also got all my photos sorted from 2023 using my patented brilliant photo sorting method. All my photos from my phone get uploaded to my computer nightly via Dropbox into a folder called “Camera Uploads” — the selfsame folder I plumb to give you the fun and often-nonsequitur imagery in this newsletter. I try to file as I go but there were about 2,000 photos unfiled. Also gotta deal with my downloads folder, my “SORT” folder that sits on my desktop that I just throw things into to keep a clean desktop, and Emma’s Google Drive of Jane photos.
The one annual year-end task I haven’t done, for two years now, is sort the paper bin. Like the bin of old bank statements and shit that you think you should save but never actually need again. I don’t think I’ve gone back to that folder in… Well, occasionally you need a vehicle title? Or a birth certificate? But there is really not much you need in physical form anymore. Real estate titles. So the pile just slowly grows, for three years now, overflowing the very pretty, designer, grey wooden “Inbox.” It’s kind of a problem. How many years can this continue.
Jane is down in my now. Her teacher gave us a list of fun little assignments. I printed it out for her. She looked at the list — it included things like Venn Diagrams and persuasive letters and I am… kind of impressed that the school is teaching things!
I printed out the list for her and she said she would rather play Cities Skylines, and who am I to argue with her learning about city planning?
Moody and Quiet playlist for you today. It’s running a little long. One thing about constantly listening new music is that my playlist cup runneth over. I have so many in the hopper. This one is mostly new stuff, except for the Anders Parker, XTC and Neil Halstead. The Space Needle/Anders Parker revue went great, found a lot of great songs through the corpus, will be adding them to other playlists. We talked about XTC yesterday. The Neil Halstead is residual from it being the last “splurge” record I bought in December — personally delivered to my door by a local dude, Discogs coincidence. Oh the Kirsty MacColl is old too — someone last month online made a passing reference to how great that song was and I threw it in the queue and they were right. Thank you, forgotten person.
On the new front: The ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT you will recall, is on my Top 10 of albums of 2024. FOr new new, the new Efterklang is awesome man I would love to see them again. Feel like they had a middling album in there somewhere but this one is solid. LOVE the new Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn. On paper the new St Etienne should really do it for me, a lover of moody music, but it doesn’t quite click with me. Love the new Dot Allison. Listened to this Myrian Gendron album yesterday, don’t know anything about her, don’t know why it was in my queue but it was really good. Will do more investigating.
Okay! Have a lovely Thursday.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.