Don't panic...

This will just be a quick post on the events of the last day or so. Lots of activity, yet nearly imperceptible productivity. E came up for a very much overdue visit Monday evening, and I'd taken so much time screwing around (instead of getting dressed and heading to the store for much-needed ingredients) that she got here probably 15 or so minutes earlier than I'd have guessed, and ended up having to meet me at the local market, where I was shopping for dinner. Nice. Nothing impresses chicks like ill-preparedness. All in all, a great opportunity to catch up, and she's eager to head back in a couple weekends to meet the gang.

Tuesday finds me up at the relative crack of dawn (in my world, anyway), 9:30am. Ugh. throw together some breakfast (and smell like maple bacon for the rest of the afternoon), start sorting out my tax forms in preparation for the long road ahead. Get an unexpected text from D. As chance would have it, she's working in the neighborhood (and was yesterday as well, without having called me the whole time, curse her!), and did I have a few minutes to meet her for lunch? Duh. 20 minutes later, we're sitting at Vinnie's, an oyster bar not too too far from my domicile. We have very nearly two hours to talk about the state of things, our mutual sheer amazement that one or both of us hasn't shot/killed/maimed the other, as well as making a complete mess of a gigantic plate of all manner of sea critters (SO need to look into finding a bushel of blue crabs...)

Head home, download parts of 5 years worth of tax forms, then decided to call T, as today's pretty much the only chance I'll get to see her this week. Spend the evening with her, take in Made, the hilarious Jon Favreau/Vince Vaughn mob comedy. Good times.

Promise myself that since she's gone home early in order to let me sleep, that I'll go to bed early in order to be productive tomorrow. We'll see how that goes. I'ts just before midnight, and I'm nowhere near ready for bed. Grr.

A note on taxes: I've decided that instead of spending all kinds of time trying to figure out/research whether or not not filing one's return for X number of years results in a defaulting of one's refund for any given year in question, I'm just going to go ahead and file for all the years for which I have W2s and/or various flavours of 1099s. I thought I'd come to terms with all the money I'd invariably lost from this alleged restriction that the government's placed on late returns, but it doesn't really make sense that they'd just randomly get to keep it all. I mean if that's really the case, I'ts sickening the amount of money I've lost...I could probably buy a boat (granted, not a nice fancy one or anything, but still) with the money I'd have thus gifted to the uncle. So that being said. we're left with: 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. I've also made the determination that the last actual year I filed my taxes was in 1999, for fiscal/calendar year 1997. So I'm officially seven years and one month behind. This is far and away the absolute worst example of procrastination I've perpetrated in my life. Hrm. OK, on second thought, getting my '67 Cutlass convertible fixed probably languished for longer, and I ended up not even finishing that little endeavour, but just sold the car as-is/as-was (for considerably more than I paid for it many, many years prior, and in significantly worse condition than when I purchased it) without actually having fixed most of the problems. Ah well, a story for another day.

I've also encountered a substantial delay in the writing process tonight, as in my search through old computer files, I've stumbled upon my old old old files from like 5-10 years ago, and rooting through some of that has been quite nostalgic, in all the good/bad senses of the word. More on my findings at a later date (one thing this blogging experience has taught me is to squirrel away anything that might be used as an anecdote and/or constitute otherwise servicable blog fodder, especially if it shapes up to be a complex and/or convoluted account.) The downside, is of course that I've a damn good chance of forgetting the whole thing, and the fodder is than lost forever, never to be duplicated.

In other news, it appears that the latest iteration of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is due out Friday. I absolutely LOVED this book as a kid, and I might have to suspend my moratorium on movie theatre attendance to see this (maybe Tuesday afternoon...anyone?), as the trailer looks decent, I read a couple decent reviews about it, and the cast list looks pretty strong (Mos Def, Sam Rockwell, and John Malkovich, to name a few). It's been ages since I've anticipated a film's arrival enough to go to said project's self-aggrandizing web site, but I REALLY loved this book as a kid. So much so that Douglas Adams was probably responsible for the formation of any semblance of a sense of humour I had as a youth. We'll see how it goes, a review will definitely be posted once I've seen it.