Philip Weiss

Death and taxes

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, if only because I like hearing myself talk.

I hate taxes. Not paying them. I’m fine with paying my taxes. What I hate is the recordkeeping. I am a crappy record keeper. Or rather, I’m a great record keeper, but a lousy record organizer. I always have something more entertaining to do, so I tell myself I’ll deal with some set of papers at the end of the week. But I don’t. So they all go into a box. And then the box fills up. And then I need to assemble all the tax stuff from the stuff previously filed when I did it and picking out the stuff I need from the box. Then I have to track down stuff I think I need, but I don’t have immediately at hand in my box of papers. This usually entails calling brokerages who ask me a security question I can’t remember because I only call them once a year and they set up the security question on that phone call two years ago. Or having to figure out whether my brother or my father has the record I need, and then making the trip to Everett to get it.

I should explain that last sentence. I’m not only doing my taxes, which are fairly easy. I’m also doing the taxes for my father, a trust set up for his benefit, and my mother’s estate. Hopefully this is the last year for the estate. The money has been distributed, but the paperwork ain’t done. Last year I also had taxes for my grandparents and my grandparents’ estate as well as the previous four entities.

Actually doing the taxes won’t be tough. I’ll take all this paperwork and dump it off on an accountant. (Except for my personal taxes, which I can handle on my own.)

But getting all this together is both frustrating and mentally tough. I get a sense of dark ominous dread when trying to sort through all of it, which makes it even tougher to do, so it gets put off. That makes the dread worse, and the spiral intensifies.

I’ll get it all done. I always manage to break through. (Or I don’t, and I will pay a penalty that isn’t threatening to life or limb…)

One thing that occurs to me as I write this was how much easier mentally doing my grandparents’ estate and taxes was. In that case, I had a lawyer who laid everything out and essentially acted as a project manager. I’m a pretty good project manager, but not for myself.

On the plus side, this should be the last year I need to do any taxes for my mom’s estate. And the records for my father’s and his trust’s taxes should be simpler, because all the accounts are now consolidated in just a couple of places. One of which is my personal broker, with whom I have a great relationship. If I can’t find something for my dad’s trust, I know I’ll be able to get it from him with a minimum of fuss.

A Million Hoodies for Trayvon Martin

Have you been following the news about the murder of Trayvon Martin? He was a young teenager who was followed, confronted, shot, and killed by an overzealous neighborhood watch captain who thought Trayvon looked suspicious. There’s almost nothing to say about the tragedy that someone else hasn’t said better, so I haven’t commented about the incident itself or the failure to arrest the perpetrator, George Zimmerman. However, it will come as little surprise that I think the police probably haven’t done their job and have now gone into a reflexive mode where they aren’t going to re-assess their mistakes because to do so would be to admit they were wrong. People find it hard to admit when they are wrong, and when a lot of people will notice, it’s even harder. So many people’s course of action is to cherry pick everything that shows they are right and find ways to minimize things that indicate they are wrong. But, I could be wrong about the Sanford police.

Anyway, a fellow named Daniel Maree has organized A Million Hoodies March for Trayvon Martin. It’s part march/rally/protest, and part what I thought as slacktivism. The march is in New York City later today. Of course I have opinions on marches and protests, but they are conflicted and not based on any kind of actual evidence at this point so I am not going to express them because they are likely wrong.

The second part of the Million Hoodies event is that the organizers have asked people across the internet to take pictures of themselves wearing hoodies to show your solidarity with Trayvon Martin’s family. My initial reaction was Ack! Not more slacktivism!. But my initial reaction to the posting of people wearing hoodies was wrong, as illustrated by this exchange posted by comedian and political commenter Elon James White.

Elon James White:

[REDACTED]:

Um no. This guy IS suspicious. I would totally purse clutch and traffic dodge to avoid and I’m not sure of the message here. March for hoodies?

[REDACTED]:

I grasp the point racism is rasicm, no dress code needed. But we need to watch our PR and how our message is distributed. The above is not helping or helpful to disseminate the message. It’s an image of a thug in a hoodie. Treyon was not a thug, he was a child and this is the image that should be used. And the main goal is to make the “point” as EASY to grasp as possible. We can march and protest and leverage petitions, but if our attitude is, “read between the lines to get my point”, then we move no one. We also need to utilize the most powerful, personable images we have. This guy is not one of them.

Elon James White:

Oh HI [REDACTED] I’m the image of the “Thug in a hoodie.” Do you know who I am? Do you know what I do? You said that THAT’s an image of a thug in a hoodie and TREYVON WASNT A THUG. Ma’am, I’m not a thug. I’m an engaged political commentator with a background in I.T. I throw dinner parties and build studios from scratch. But YOU saw a thug in a hoodie.

Do you understand the problem now?

If there are a bunch of pictures of people wearing hoodies to point out that too often a black man looks suspicious but the equivalent white guy does not, well that’s a bit more than the usual slacktivism. Why do you think that guy (Elon up there) looks dangerous, suspicious, and thuggish, while this guy

Me wearing a hoodie

just looks like he has no fashion sense.

Sounders at Santos Laguna

Wednesday night, in addition to being the second leg of the Sounders/Santos Laguna C.O.N.C.A.C.A.F. series, is also Taco Wednesday at the Roanoke Inn. $1 tacos and $3.50 taco salads, they’ll put the Sounders match on, and I usually have half a dozen friends who go there for tacos and alcohol. Since the Sounders match started at 5, I got there early.

First half wasn’t the best, but we kept up with Santos. I saw some troubling signs though. Second half we fell apart. Four unanswered goals by Santos. After Santos went up 4 to 1, I started paying more attention to my friends than to the match.

In the post-game comments, Sigi Schmid talked about not winning the 50/50 balls. Those are the long kicks and headers that are directed in the general direction of a few players, hopefully playing in the opponent’s half, that the team hopes someone from our team can come down with. For some reason that I don’t know, Sigi’s Sounders have played that style of football for years. If your team has a size advantage, it’s not the worst strategy. In M.L.S. we generally won’t have much of a size advantage. Mexican teams tend to play smaller players who utilize speed rather than size. However, we still lost a lot of those 50/50 balls.

Rather than pin the blame on the players who just didn’t do a great job of it, I think Sigi really needs to reconsider the strategy. A) You need a size advantage. B) Those balls are harder to control than other methods of advancing the ball. c) The ball winner needs a person to dump the ball off too who is in the right place. You see the Sounders employ this strategy even on throw-ins. Last season whenever James Riley or Leo Gonzalez would take a ball from out of bounds, inevitably they waited 5 to 10 seconds , few players would move, and then they would throw down the field into a mess of players. I’d much rather we used methods that emphasize possession.

I don’t have a problem with our offense. We had a number of chances where Sanchez improbably saved a goal. It’s getting the ball down the field that was killing us. That and some really lackadaisical defending. I don’t know where our defenders were. Travel killed them? The heat? I don’t know the altitude where Santos plays, but perhaps that? Thoroughly outplayed on defense.

To sum up: 6-1 in the match, 7-3 in the series.

Ouch.

Alfred Edgar Burton

Usually when I stop at a cemetery to photograph the headstones for relatives, I will photograph a section or two around the one I’m looking for. Then I’ll catalog those graves with the photos on FindAGrave.com. I’ve found a number of relatives because other folks have taken the time to add listings that turned out to be related to me. Occasionally someone will find the listings I add and it will help them.

This grave is the first one I’ve run across where the person was semi-famous. It’s Alfred Edgar Burton, buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Portland, Maine. I snapped a photo of this one because his marker inscription said he was the first dean of M.I.T. Turns out he also accompanied Robert Peary on a couple of excursions to the North Pole and was also the father of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harold Hitz Burton.

Grave of Alfred Edgar Burton — Alfred Edgar Burton (1857-1935)

Irish Genealogy Seminar

My great grandmother Frances Eugenia Ryan Weiss was of Irish descent. Neither of her parents were born in Ireland, but all four of her grandparents came from that island. I haven’t yet finished documenting her parents or grandparents, but I’m getting closer to the point where I’ll want to start digging into their Irish history instead of their time in Canada and the United States.

Last week, I came across a post in a genealogy message board advertising an Irish genealogy conference to be held today at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard. Why not go, I thought? So today I got up a bit early (and even earlier when taking into account Daylight Savings Time) and headed over.

First, it wasn’t really a conference, but more of a seminar. In fact, most of the program materials used that word. But I was sort of expecting that. They had two speakers from Ireland. I’m not quite sure of their specialties. The first speaker spent an hour covering the various major repositories of records in Ireland today, both in Ulster and Dublin. His second talk went backward through time telling us what kinds of records were available for each time period. But that part of the talk only progressed to about the 1840s, which is just after my relatives left Ireland. Most people of Irish descent in America got here because of the potato famine of the 1840s and its aftermath. My families immigration predated that.

The second speaker was going to talk about the Scots-Irish and their immigration to the U.S. But man oh man was his talk a wreck. His accent was thicker, and he kept wandering away from the microphone. He also rambled all over without an outline and didn’t use any slides. He mentioned two really important books for researching Scots-Irish but couldn’t remember either of the titles, only that A.C. Myers wrote one of them. As in Arthur Charles, though I just made up those first names… He actually said something like that. A quick search tells me he’s probably talking about a fellow named Albert Cook Myers based out of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. He made it seem as if the books were written in the 1960s, but my Google search shows books published around 1900. Not that the books aren’t good. Anyhow, his presentation was a mess, so I started reading through the collections of flyers I’d grabbed from one of the tables.

After lunch, the first fellow returned and talked about the various kinds of church records available from the different denominations in Ireland. He jumped around again rather than cover them systematically. The other thing he did was spend a lot of time talking about all the information that could be had reading through annotations in the various records rather than the main records themselves. For instance, a baptismal register might have notations of later marriages as the registers were consulted to verify church membership for those marriages. That’s all well and good, but it is only secondarily useful. One needs to know to search for the baptismal register first. Basically, the talk felt like an excuse for the fellow to talk about a lot of the interesting anecdotes he’d dug up whole doing research for hire, rather than an overview of records available.

There was a break following that, and I left, skipping the last two sessions, both of which were planned to cover Ulster history and genealogy. As none of my family comes from Northern Ireland, I decided I’d be better off heading home.

I do feel a bit better about where to start though. There’s a ton of Irish genealogy web sites out there, but none of the guides I’d seen provided much of a guide as to what is important and what is not a good starting point. I at least have that from the first presentation. And a fair number of the flyers will give me information to browse over the next few months before I really dig in. I do think I’ll probably join the Seattle Genealogical Society for its Irish Interest Group. They also appear to be having an event related to Russian Germans later this month or next. Since that’s the background for my step-father, it’ll be of interest.

Last of the cassettes

I got rid of most of my cassettes 18 years ago, but kept a few. I got rid of my stereo 5 years ago. I am now going through the leftover tapes still on my shelf. Why did I keep these?

Baltimora – Living in the Background. Ok, this one made sense to keep. It was hard to find for a while.
Phil Collins – …But Seriously. But seriously, I don’t remember any of the songs on this tape.
Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms. Great album. Coulda replaced it with a CD or MP3 long ago.
Icehouse – Icehouse, Man of Colours and Measure for Measure.
The Polce – Every Breath You Take – The Singles. I kept a greatest hits tape on cassette? What was I thinking?
Two Hooters concert bootlegs. My favorite band ever. I need to find a way to transfer these to MP3.
Tom Petty – Full Moon Fever.
U2 – The Joshua Tree. I used to listen to this tape over and over and over. I think my musical tastes have changed.
Aerosmith – Big Ones. Someone left this at my house and I didn’t want to give it away in case they came back for it. In like 1991.
Two tapes labeled Matt Bender. I don’t remember what these are, if they are tapes of my brother speaking, mix tapes he made for me, or possibly recordings of his memorial service.
5 tapes of people telling their stories at a sober conference in Breckenridge that I went to in 1993 and 1994. Will call the Seattle office and see if they would like these. Otherwise, I have no need to keep them anymore.
A tape of Abbott and Costello routines. I’m pretty sure most of these (Who’s On First?) are on Youtube now.
Pump Up The Volume. Not the soundtrack. I recorded the audio from the movie.
Copies of albums made from CD: Was (Not Was), Lotus, and Don McLean. Not sure if I can find my Lotus CD anymore, but that will be hard to replace. The other two…

I swear I’m not a hoarder.

Trying out co-working

Eastlake Mail has been offering co-working for a while. When I returned from my road trip, they’d rebranded themselves as Vybe Communications and really started emphasizing co-working instead of mailing services. I thought about signing up before I left. I stopped in Monday and chatted with the owner (or manager, not really sure which). He offered to let me try it out without charge. On Tuesday, I did. I didn’t get a whole lot done, but not due to the environment. With a 50% off offer for 6 months, I signed up. So for $100 a month essentially, I have an office now. I used it Thursday and Friday and did get a lot done.

I have one software development client. Perhaps I’ll look for more. And in the back of my head is that I’ll take on some genealogy work for hire. I have no idea how difficult it is to drum up business in that enterprise, but I know I’m pretty decent at the work, at least with some populations.

2012 Sounders season ticket package arrives

On my way out of the door to the office (yes, I actually have an office now) this morning, my phone rang and the caller I.D. said it was from the lobby. I wasn’t expecting anyone, so that meant it was a package delivery and probably my Sounders tickets, and it was!

I opted for actual paper tickets this year instead of the new season ticket cards. I lose wallet sized cards way too often to make that a good option for me.

The new tickets themselves do not have pictures of Sounders players anymore. Instead, there’s a view of Seahawks Stadium with the crests of the Sounders and each of their opponents. I wonder if that has anything to do with the rescheduled match last year. Did people get too confused about which ticket was which?

The scarves this year are black and green. I really like the new look, which you can see in this photo from SoundersFC.com:

In other Sounders news, I still haven’t decided where I want to watch the Santos Laguna away match. I could watch online, but the CONCACAF announcers are awful. I could go wherever E.C.S. plans to be, but that’s usually too crowded for me. I can’t hear the announcers over the yelling, chanting, and singing from E.C.S. I’ve watched at Forza, but they’ll let whoever is there vote on what to watch and the students don’t seem to be particularly huge football fans.

Sounders vs. Santos Laguna

Went to the game tonight. The first competitive match of 2012. It’s the first leg of a home and away series with Santos Laguna of Mexico in the CONCACAF Champions League, with aggregate goals determining who moves on.

The Sounders played really well. None of my issues with the Sounders play last year cropped up in this game. The team passed well. They did not rely on the long ball. Every player worked their butt off.

David Estrada continues to impress me. I don’t know if he’s really ready to be the starter all the time, but I am not going to be pissed when he does get starts. He’s way better than Pat Noonan. My only concern is that he got pushed off the ball a few times on the left, but so did Alvaro Fernandez. The Sounders seemed to get more crosses from the right.

Eddie Johnson substituted in for the final 10 minutes or so. I liked his performance as well. It’s still too early to tell if the Sounders overpaid for him, but I’m somewhat less concerned about how he’ll turn out now.

Johanson continues to move forward to create attacks. Fredy Montero created all sorts of opportunities too. Even Leo Gonzalez was pushing forward more frequently too.

And despite all the attacking, I never once felt like our defense fell apart, even when Santos scored. Santos had so many attacks fall apart against smart defending.

I was jazzed about the season before. Now I really am.

Writing more this year

One of my goals this year is to write more regularly. I often start writing something to post and end up discarding it after a paragraph or two. What stops me is a combination of I can’t write this as well as what someone else has already said and I am not going to reach the idiots I am castigating and Christ, this is a lot of research and editing to make this perfect and I wouldn’t want to read about my boring life. Plus a few more pieces of reasoning. All of these are only partially valid.

But the drawback is that all this crap rattles around in my brain anyway and if I don’t write about it, I’m going to steer my personal conversations around so I can say it anyway. Also, it’s nice to have a personal chronicle (i.e., journal) cause my memory is crapola and I am much more successful at that when it’s online.

And no one else has to read this if I’m not as eloquent as others, am preaching to the wrong people, I write something not particularly well back up, if it’s boring, or whatever else.

I don’t promise something daily, but that’s my loose goal. They’ll be spread out between the blog, LJ-only (probably fairly infrequent), and the book blog.