Refund

I completed my tax return today, earning a bit of a refund which is nice.  However since I've been making estimated tax payments throughout the year, this is maybe not as good as it sounds.  All I know for sure is that (a) rather than complete the tax return myself using tax software, next year I think I'm going to pay a little bit extra for someone else to do it for me, and (b) I decided to celebrate completing my tax return by ordering a pizza from the local pizzeria.  I was already wary about how expensive it was (the prices have maybe doubled in the last few years), but the quality seems to have gone significantly downhill as well, so I don't think I'll be eating from there again. 

Backyard Action

I realized I hadn't checked my trail cam for a few months, so here are the highlights.  Lots of deer action - no surprise since I've also been seeing them often for myself when I look or go outside.

Winter Has Come

Despite the clocks having gone forward and it almost being spring, look what I woke up to this morning:

This is the view from my bedroom windows.  It's quite unusual to have our first lowland snow of the winter so late in the year.  And boy was it coming down thick and heavy.  Fortunately it was warm enough that it didn't really stick to the roads or driveway.  

Shaving

When I was working in an office, I shaved roughly every other day.  Then when I started working from home, I shaved roughly twice a week.  And the last few months, I've been shaving only about once a week.  I think that's a fair reflection of my state of mind and how much I care about my appearance.  That's not good.  I'm also in serious need of a haircut.  And my clothes suck.  I really need to start caring more about how I look.  

Wake Up

Look what I ordered which finally got delivered today - a flashy 4K release of a cult classic film from 25 years ago, and one of my personal favorites.  I haven't seen this film in a long time, so I'm very much looking forward to rewatching it.  And another great addition - or more accurately an upgrade, since I already owned the film on Region 2 DVD - to my film collection.  A collection that I'm really proud of.

Income tax

Washington is on its way to introducing a personal income tax for the first time ever.  Fortunately it shouldn't impact me - it's being called the "millionaire's tax"because it proposes a 10% income tax on households earning over a million dollars a year.  Which I don't have a problem with - but I think a lot of people do (unsurprisingly, mostly Republicans).  I don't mind as long as it's not a gateway to imposing income tax on everyone in the state - one of the key benefits of living here.  It's one of the few states that doesn't have income tax - but makes up for that by having one of the highest sales tax rates in the country (10.6% where I live).  With the taxes and the Iran War, we now also have one of the highest prices of gas (petrol) in the country as well.  All this tax talk reminds me that I haven't done my tax returns for this year yet.  Which is always a "fun" way to spend a weekend, and something I need to do before the end of the month.      

AI Questions

We've got an all-hands meeting this week with the topic of "Scaling and adopting AI to transform how we work".  Horrifying.  In advance of the meeting, we have been asked a couple of questions to "help shape the discussion" and to create some stupid word clouds.  Here are the questions, and the answers I submitted:

Q. What word(s) come to mind when you think of an organization that is successfully utilizing AE?

A. Singularity

Q. What word(s) come to mind when you consider the AI change journey ahead?

A. Layoffs

It said that the responses were anonymous - I really hope that's the case.   I just checked the word clouds, and neither of my words appear anywhere.  Of course AI is going to ignore my responses.