Garden

This lovely blurry cell phone picture represents my very first "real" harvest from my garden. I pulled up a lot of lettuce last week for use on burritos, too. The blueberry tomatoes, true to their name, are tiny! They make up for it in flavor and juiciness, though. I could eat them like snack food... mmmm! And the peas are amazingly sweet; I don't think I'd want to cook them because I'm afraid to ruin the fresh-from-garden taste. I did leave the beans on the stalk a little too long but they're still ok in soup (I dropped them into my ramen today with some leftover beef).

I'm proud of the garden this year. It doesn't look like much, but it's giving me some pretty good returns for a few days' worth of planting and watering.

Still jobless, though. Sigh.

DEAR

It's been quite uneventful around here recently. I'm taking a social psychology class which has me analyzing half the thoughts that pop into my head, an alarming increase from the 30% or so I usually think twice about. It has however shown me a few things about myself, I think. Being a usually introspective person, it's probably easier for me to step back and apply theories to my own thinking, but it might just drive me crazy (crazier?).

No hope on the job front. Tonight/tomorrow I'll try looking in Johnstown, because we found a real fixer-upper type house there and we want to try to get it, which will obviously be easier with a job. It's a big, old brick home with front and back porch tacked on at some later date, and it looks cheaply patched up inside and out but it's still structurally in decent shape, and has a full attic, a full (slightly damp) basement, and a newer-looking pair of furnaces and water heaters (yes, two of each - it was apparently split into upstairs-downstairs apartments). If my guess is correct most of the work it needs is cosmetic, which we can do ourselves (and boy am I excited about it). The lot also has a 3-bay garage, which is in far worse condition than the house (but that's ok, I don't mind rebuilding roofs!), and a tiny lawn where I could presumably put a garden. And it's priced to throw out at $16,900... gotta love foreclosures! I'm not letting myself get too excited about it, because there -was- another offer put in, and we can't offer what we don't have, but I do hope that we have a chance. I really would like a home.

In the meantime I sit here and check my email and my comics and blogs and wonder if I'll ever get a job interview when even Subway didn't seem to want me (although presumably their excuse is that they had hundreds of applicants). It's frustrating but there are little gems in everything. Today's was, of all things, spam mail.

From: "DEAR CONTACT MY SECRETAY FOR YOUR BANK DRAFT"
Subject: DEAR CONTACT MY SECRETAY FOR YOUR BANK DRAFT
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:12:30 +0300

DEAR

I'M HAPPY TO INFORM YOU ABOUT MY SUCCESS IN GETTING THOSE FUNDS TRANSFERRED UNDER THE COOPERATION OF A NEW PARTNER FROM PARAGUAY. PRESENTLY I'M IN PARAGUAY BUT BY NEXT WEEK I WILL BE IN CHINA FOR INVESTMENT PROJECTS WITH MY OWN SHARE OF THE TOTAL SUM.

MEANWHILE,I DIDN'T FORGET YOUR PAST EFFORTS AND ATTEMPTS TO ASSIST ME IN TRANSFERRING THOSE FUNDS DESPITE THAT IT FAILED US SOME HOW. NOW CONTACT MY SECRETARY, HIS NAME IS MR PRINCE UGO E-MAILADDRESSS: princeugo201@gmail.com ASK HIM TO SEND YOU THE TOTAL US$800,000.00 WHICH I KEPT FOR YOUR COMPENSATION FOR ALL THE PAST EFFORTS AND ATTEMPTS TO ASSIST ME IN THIS MATTER.

I APPRECIATED YOUR EFFORTS AT THAT TIME VERY MUCH. SO FEEL FREE AND GET IN TOUCH WITH MY SECRETARY AND INSTRUCT HIM WHERE TO SEND THE AMOUNT TO YOU PLEASE DO LET ME KNOW IMMEDIATELY YOU RECEIVE IT SO THAT WE CAN SHARE THE JOY AFTER ALL THE SUFFERNESS AT THAT TIME. IN THE MOMENT, I AM VERY BUSY HERE BECAUSE OF THE INVESTMENT PROJECTS WHICH ME AND THE NEW PARTNER ARE HAVING AT HAND.

FINALLY, REMEMBER THAT I HAD FORWARDED INSTRUCTION TO MY SECRETARY ON YOUR BEHALF TO SEND YOU THE MONEY AS SOON AS YOU REQUEST FOR IT. SO FEEL FREE TO GET IN TOUCH WITH MR PRINCE UGO HE WILL SEND THE AMOUNT TO YOU WITHOUT ANY DELAY,BEAR IN MIND THAT THE US$800,000.00 IN CONFIRMABLE BANK DRAFT

REGARDS,

MR WILLIAMS OKAFOR
DEAR CONTACT MY SECRETAY FOR YOUR BANK DRAFT

Contact the secretay I shall! If only $800k really was a few clicks away I would be a happy woman. Last week I inherited 5 million or so, but I forgot to send the nice old lady my bank information before I deleted the message. What would I do with that much money, anyway? It's better going to someone gullible enough to need it!

Something caught my eye today...

While I was reading a forum thread titled "Are we on the verge of serious economic collapse?" I came across a post that stated that Congress had just passed into law a little provision that allows taxation of property when you renounce US citizenship. My first reaction was Wait a minute, wouldn't we have heard about this one?, and then I went hunting.

Look what I found!
The so-called "Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2008", which is supposedly all about "[amending] the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide benefits for military personnel, and for other purposes.", hides a little gem in Sections 301-303.

I didn't read the whole thing, because it's a lot of legalese and politikspeak and references other bills that I haven't had the time and energy to muddle through, and I can't understand half of it without sitting down and writing it all out on paper 3 or 4 times paraphrased in normal human speech and then asking someone else if I got it right. I'm pretty sure they do that on purpose. >.> Anyway, the basic idea, if I understand correctly, is that if you leave the country or otherwise declare yourself no longer a US resident, you're to be taxed on all assets (home, car, 401k) that you have in this country as though they had been sold on the day before your expatriation, and at "market value" (which to me sounds a heck of a lot like "as high as we can appraise it"). Now, I -think- there's a $600k 'gain' limit before they start taxing you, which gives you a pretty good base if you actually had that $600k in cash and not invested in your in-ground pool and your car(s)... and they obviously won't tax you if you're taking a loss. They also make exceptions if you have lived here less than 10 years or are under 18 1/2 years old at the time of expatriation (oh how kind!). However, it's still awfully shady, and it seems to me that the articles pointing this out were right - there's really no reason to start taxing expatriation unless they expect a lot of it to happen. What are they preparing for?