Movies, more snow, taxes 2007, and running. That’s pretty much what sums up mine and Jen’s past weekend.
Friday night we rented a couple movies and watched the first one that night: Eagle vs. Shark. It was a cute New Zealand flick about a shy girl who falls for a dorky guy. There were some great laughs. It was both funny and sad. Who will you root for? The eagle or the shark?
Saturday we awoke to another 8 inches or so of snow, so spent some time snow blowing, roof raking, and shoveling.
Then we spent most of the afternoon working on (and finishing) our taxes. We have a pretty good system down where we start with this spreadsheet that summarizes all our income, interest/dividends, and deductions (mortgage, charitable, DBA business expenses, and miscellaneous), then we use the spreadsheet to help us fill out the “tax organizer” that we get from our tax preparer (we still use the same awesome tax professional we did in San Francisco). And that’s it! Then we just make copies of originals and FedEx the rest to San Francisco. It’s pretty painless and we always rest assured we’re in good hands with our Enrolled Agent.
Saturday evening we cruised down to Albany to meet up with Alex and Cati for drinks, pizza, and another movie: In Bruges. The movie was not so great. There were some funny moments, but the trailer is misleading. It’s a pretty dark and violent film, and I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone.
Luckily, before the movie we had some bright moments at a really fun British-style pub called Mahar’s. It’s a beer drinker’s place where beer’s the only thing on the menu — and plenty of it. Alex and I counted 34 beers on tap, and hundreds more bottled options. They do this beer club thing where you can print out a list of the beers you’ve tasted and work toward the ultimate of goal of 500 beers to get your name engraved on a plaque. Sounds like fun, but I’ll be sticking to my local mug club.
After just 4 hours of sleep Saturday night (1am to 5am), I woke up and cruised back down to Albany for the weekly Team in Training run (psst… sponsors still needed, please, in the fight against blood cancers!). It was really windy and I was having a hard time breathing, so I only did 9 miles instead of my planned 10. Alex and I did run together for the first 6.61 miles, though, which was cool, before my iPod conked out and I lost my run data. Luckily, though, I spent the afternoon hacking my iPod to recreate the lost run.
Four hours of sleep and a 9-mile run has a way of making one pretty beat. So the rest of Sunday was pretty lazy. Aside from aforementioned iPod hacking, and blogging about it, we just lazed around watching the tube and another movie: Waitress. It was a really great movie. I’d put it in the category of a dark romantic comedy, if there is such a thing. But less romantic comedy and more about a woman’s struggle to discover who she really is and to break away from her abusive husband.
Tragically, the writer/director, Adirenne Shelly, who also played one of the leading women in the film, was murdered in her apartment before the movie was released. The asshole who killed her got only 25 years in prison (meanwhile, introducing two people who want to buy and sell marijuana in Indiana can land you a life sentence; Jen’s reading Reefer Madness now so we were talking about this terrible injustice).
