Saturday, January 20, 2007

C'mon, overpayment of tax!

I was slightly disgustipated that my W2 wasn't ready on the 1st of January. Actually, I wasn't exactly disgustipated, just a little bummed. I decided that today was the day to use "disgustipated" in a sentence. At any rate, my taxes were done within several hours of me getting that W2, and would have been done sooner, except that I didn't think it would be a good idea to be filling out tax forms at my desk when I had a stack of dump pouches on my desk that needed to be inspected.

Overpayment of tax is something I'm not really a fan of. Make no mistake: your "income tax return" isn't a discount, refund, or any kind of gift from the government. Its your money. It was always your money. What you've done is to loan that money to the government, interest free, for a year. That's money that could have been in your check, because you earned it, and wasn't. Getting "money back" isn't a great thing. Generally, I end up oweing a check to the IRS, but this time around, I didn't adjust my witholding to break even or owe. I decided that this wasn't the year for that, and as a consequence, I'm getting a sizable sum of my money sent back to me. What's sizable? This time, about eight bills. That's too much to let them keep, but its pretty well already spent, anyway.

At least I'm not going to throw it away on useless stuff. A few hundo of it is going to Madtux to replace my current desktop computer. I have had it with Windows. Its become a giant, lumbering slug of an OS, and I'm tired of fighting with it. I'm sick of it getting ill all the time. I'm sick of my system being attacked and finding weird stuff hidden in places I can't find. I appear to have a dialer in one of my registries that I can't find, and its dogging my system big time. I'm willing to try just about anything to be able to work and play better on a 'puter, so I'm taking my friend Josh's advice and getting a Linux system. It'll do all I need it to, without the annoying too-hip-to-stand-himself-much-less-for-me-to-stand-him Mac guy, and the idiot Windows guy who's clearly the Assistant Manager at Burger-Ama. Are you noticing that I'm developing an unhealthy dislike for stupid commercials? Maybe I need to give up on finishing my Business Management batchelor's and get a master's in advertising.

Nah.

The other thing I'm spending my money that the government horked from me on is a case of ammo for Schwaggie, my AR. I have about 250 rounds of good ammo left, and that's just not gonna go very far. With all the changes I've made to her of late, adding a Troy rear Battlesight and a Comp M2 Aimpoint, its probably going to take a little bit of time to zero her again. That does raise the question of what to do with the former carry handle, though. Hmmm...

There may be a splurge in there, too, since I feel I MUST HAVE a new buttstock. As I stated here earlier, I added the CAA Stock Saddle to the carbine, and so far have been relatively pleased with it. However, because I work with a large number of gun whores, my rifle's not as cool as theirs. I already know I can shoot; that's not the issue. The issue is that my rifle isn't as cool lookin' as it might be, and as we all know, "its not how you feel, its how you look...nobody cares how you feel". At least in terms of rifles.

Where's the rest going? Into savings. Sometimes being responsible sucks, but I gotta do what I gotta do.

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