ice ice baby

Yesterday morning I plucked a sheet of ice off the birdbath and, seeing that it was clear and brilliantly alive with fissures, I placed it on a sunny patch of sidewalk outside my house and got down on my knees to take some macro photos of it. Then I looked up and saw my neighbor staring curiously at me while he warmed up his SUV. Yeah, yeah, so I like photographing ice! You gotta problem with that, sonny boy? Okay, I do concede that it may’ve looked strange to see a girl in a nice skirt, knee-high boots, and a trench coat squatting on the ground, contorted in an unladylike position, with her camera shoved up against a piece of ice.

The good:

Last night, the fourth anniversary of the mess in Iraq, my friend Debbie and I met up for dinner at an Indonesian restaurant in Wheaton, Sabang, which has an eye-poppingly huge vegetarian menu. They’re not exclusively vegetarian, though, so it was a good opportunity for a carnivore like Debbie and an herbivore like me in dine together in Ebony and Ivory-style harmony. As much as I was jonesing to try the vegetarian lobster, I just couldn’t justify spending $23.95 on it (isn’t that the cost of real lobster?). Besides, what if I hated it? I’ve got to be stingy right now (see below) and can’t warrant spending almost $24 on something I could end up hating. Now, granted, it’s rare for me to meet a mock meat I don’t like, but anything is possible. So I went with the vegetarian cod in sweet and sour sauce with grilled vegetables instead. Mmm-mm! Heaven on a plate. For desert we got banana fritters that were so divine, they almost made me cry.

The bad:

David, my tax-preparing superhero, gave me the preliminary numbers of what I’ll owe the IRS this year. This is the second year in a row my freelancing shot me in the foot, tax-wise, because none of my freelancing checks get taxes taken out of them (not my choice, believe me). After last spring’s horror (I owed nearly $5,000 in federal and Maryland taxes), I decided to start paying quarterly taxes during 2006. This helped knock down how much I owe this year, but the damage still runs deep: I owe $2,671 in federal taxes and $557 in Maryland taxes. My 2007 quarterly federal tax payments will be $1,120—up from the $550 payments I made in 2006—and my quarterly state tax payments will be $410—up from the $250 payments I made in 2006. Methinks I’ll have to start peddling my flesh down on Logan Circle in order to pay these bills (not that anybody wants my flesh, mind you).


song heard most recently before posting:
Into Dust—Mazzy Star