Fun and taxes

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

I had the best weekend. Those are going to start slowing down, as the school year grinds back to a cruising speed, but it's sure good while it lasts.

First, I skipped lunch on Friday, so I could go home early and get to work on my taxes. Well, of course, I had almost everything I needed—my mortgage company failed to send me my 1098/99, and I couldn't figure out how much I spent on car registration taxes. (It's right here .)

Those facts alone would be enough to irritate some people out of a great weekend, but it just allowed me to get to dig into a geeky project I've been working. “Dig in” included hundreds of paper documents and my new document scanner. The scanner only cost me $308, and it scans about 25 pages a minute to pdf for the ultimate in nerdy instant gratification. I simply can't calculate the hours upon hours I've spent trying to get representations of paper documents into my computer. Since I have tried many high-speed document scanners, I don't really want to endorse this one, but I will say there are a good variety of them on Amazon.com

And it wasn't just nerdy fun, I was also able to do some regular fun stuff. I finally broke down and bought a used elliptical machine because it seemed like I was never going to get to the gym again, so I burned in the neighborhood of 1,200 calories on Friday and Saturday. I even got to see the awesome 12 Years a Slave at an actual theater.

While I thought the movie was really well done, it was more disturbing than entertaining. In fact, between that and the fact that my honey and I have been re-watching Game of Thrones, my dreams have been pretty crazy the last few days.

Finally, bright and early Monday morning, the mortgage company came through with my tax documents, and I was able to TurboTax my filing in.