Today was tax preparation day. I think I've got everything ready to send to the accountant, but I'm never sure. Taxes seem to get more complicated every year. My big problem this year was that I keep accidentally putting things in the wrong category in Quickbooks. It took quite a while to look for missing items and move them to the proper class files. At least I'm pretty good about entering transactions in Quickbooks now. Doing a search in a software program is a lot easier than sifting through mountains of receipts in an accordion folder. I was pleased that I actually made money writing for magazines this year. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was a start.
I never did take the Allegra-D that I bought yesterday. I guess all the dire warnings on the box scared me away. Now I've got to go find something else. I should quit reading the fine print on pill bottles. I shouldn't even watch the TV commercials. Just about every pharmaceutical product on the market warns of some sort of horrible side effect. I seldom have an adverse reaction to medication. My problem is that I often have no reaction at all. A lot of pills just don't seem to work on me. It's just as well. I hate to depend on pills and still think that staying active and eating healthy food is the best way to avoid getting sick.
It was so warm today that I not only washed the car, I cleaned the dirty wheels as well. Land Rover wheels seem to get coated with oil and dirt unusually quickly. I hate cleaning them because I have to get down on my knees and scrub all the gunk away. The older I get, the harder it is to get back up off the ground. I'm going to need a cane one of these days. I guess the effort was worth it. The car looks great now. I don't drive much, so I probably won't have to do this again for a month or so. Dawn probably hopes she won't need a bath again for another month or so as well.
I talked to my editor at SpaceFlight Magazine today. He said he'd leave it up to me what to cover next. This is good and bad. I'm not really sure what I want to do next. It will probably just depend on how hard it is to get clearance and the proper credentials. I think that Kennedy Space Center has discovered that severely restricting access makes life a lot easier. Life will probably never go back to the pre-covid days when NASA created special events for social media influencers and it was easy to get a press pass.
Last year at this time I was getting ready to spend several weeks out at McDonald Observatory. Every March they hosted a special series of Spring Break star parties that would often attract up to 500 people a night. When I became an on-site volunteer I kind of thought that I'd be going back to the observatory every March. Not this year. I have no idea when the observatory is going to open up again, but I don't think it is going to be soon. Hard to believe that it's been a full year since the Covid madness started.
I've learned a lot this year. I'm not a people person and do pretty well on my own. I've discovered that it is very hard to do anything in isolation however. Getting invited to view launches at Kennedy Space Center involves a lot of interaction with other people. So does looking through big telescopes out at the observatory. I'd like to resume these activities but I'm not sure that life will ever go back to the way it was before. I'm just sitting her like everyone else, waiting to see what happens next.
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