Daley Ponderings

Faith has started calling Jonathan, "Ohnny-int"  This is related to how she says medicine ("meddy-int") and other words that end in /n/. She also says her own name, which sounds unfortunately rather like "Hate" but the /t/ is a bit softer, maybe halfway between that and "Hathe".... (More)

Heather asked me to give her the monthly time logs for invoices today, so I took the opportunity to run my brand new script that shows how I've spent my time over the entire year. I averaged: 13.7 hours a week on directly billable work 7.6 hours a week on maintaining the company, phone... (More)

"Francis of Assisi is alleged to have said, 'Preach the gospel always; if necessary use words.'  That may be a great medieval sound bite, but it falls short of what the Bible teaches about evangelism." I used to like that quote, and the evangelism models it leads... (More)

I was telling my mom the other day about how strange it was that Pittsburgh is all but closed down after the snowstorm on Saturday.  Even the major roads (5th, Forbes, Negley, Penn) are not plowed, or rather, seem to have been plowed after one foot of snow fell, but then they didn't come... (More)

Taxes weren't too bad to calculate this year, though last year we paid TaxAct, so apparently, they decided we aren't ever allowed to go back to the free version again, unless I sign up with a new username.  So, we ended up just doing them on paper, and discovered that in some ways, TaxAct... (More)

Since I am in the category of people who is expected to see my health insurance double or triple, I wonder why people are spending so much on their health insurance.  I do see that since we are "poor", we'll likely get free or heavily discounted health insurance under Obama's... (More)

So, any bets on whether I'm missing something?  I've just finished our 2009 taxes, tentatively, since we'll have a bit more income and expenses, and I didn't add in a couple other numbers that will be easier to calculate later.  But, thanks to all the new credits, we have a refund... (More)

I mentioned our new wood stove previously, and asked some of you for recommendations, but never got around to writing about it here.  We've had it for a couple months, and it has been great!  We ended up buying an Englander 13-NCI . I don't remember what the 13 stands for, but 12 is... (More)

Heather remarked at dinner tonight (at the Olive Garden - thanks Wightmans, we've got 7 more dinners at this rate to celebrate our anniversary) that we are a rich family: we now own two cars and two houses.  I did realize that some people spend more on their cars than we spent on our... (More)

Tom asked for some statistics for his blog, and I figured I might as well look them up for mine while I was at it.  I am not particularly surprised by the results, so perhaps not worth posting, but in case anyone thought the world was interested about our kids...  ... (More)

I haven't looked at how much time it took us to do taxes this year - I thought we were doing pretty well, time-wise, until we blew 8 hours or so today finishing them off (or is it them finishing us off, I'm not sure which...) I noticed a number of places where the strange, complicated... (More)

We finished our taxes today, and the kids were around while we were doing it, and then we went out to the Olive Garden, since we didn't feel like cooking at 8PM when we finished the taxes.  On the way home, we were talking about how much the meal cost (Jonathan has various data points on... (More)

The IRS hasn't published their calculator yet, and I have been reading about lots of people trying to figure out what to do with line 70 on their 1040 (ie. the famous RRC that is causing probably more time wasted than was worth the money that was sent out last year. So, I wrote a... (More)

Mydad had mentioned a news article story a month ago about some company charging a whole bunch of people $.01 each on their credit cards; presumably with the thought that no one would complain about a $.01 charge, and since they charged a million people or something, they made a bunch of... (More)

And we just discovered that there is yet another Pittsburgh tax we didn't know about, and maybe even a couple different taxes we may or may not owe.  I called Pittsburgh to cancel our estimated tax forms that they have continued to mail to us, even though we now live outside of Pittsburgh. ... (More)