A couple years ago I constructed a graph of what percentage of my total tax expenditure went where, and I decided to do the same thing for 2009. My tax situation is a bit different now, as since my last chart I’ve had kids and I purchased a significant amount of land from my parents. This shows out of all the taxes that I keep track of, which agency gets how much of my total taxes. This includes taxes on income in 2009 (modified by refunds received in 2010 for the 2009 tax year), taxes on assets, and sales taxes that I kept track of. This does not include other taxes on expenditures like gas tax, cable tax, meals tax, or sales tax where I didn’t enter the sales tax amount as an itemized split into my finance program (since I’m not worried about tracking it that closely). I would have preferred a pie chart, as it’s more customary for this kind of thing, but it’s hard to show a negative percentage in there very well. Total appears to not be 100.00% due to rounding.
![[2009 Tax Expenditure Graph]](https://files.cooperjr.name/blog-media/2010/2009taxes.jpeg)
Category Archives: Imported from Livejournal
The Charlton Town Moderator Race
The race to be Charlton’s next town moderator is now a three-way affair, with me being challenged by Joshua Evans and Carl Kaliszewski. The deadline for getting nomination papers in with signatures is today, although the Town Clerk’s office isn’t generally open on Fridays. As of Wednesday morning, neither of them had submitted their papers yet, but I assume that they have by now.
Campaign signs have started popping up around town this week, so we started deploying our signs as well.
I’m definitely looking forward to an interesting race. Hopefully a newspaper or school or someone puts on a candidate’s night.
Charlton Town Elections
I made a phone call to the Town Clerk this morning to see who’s taken out nomination papers so far.
Joseph Szafarowicz took out papers to run for selectman against Mr. Boria. He’s the person who ran unsuccessfully for selectman against Mr. Swensen last year.
A Joshua Evans has taken out papers to run for Moderator against me.
I expect to turn in my nomination papers to the town hall this evening. This could be a very interesting ballot in May.
Edit: fixed Mr. Szafarowicz’s last name
Random Life Update
- Well, 2010 hasn’t been much kinder in the health department so far. A few weeks ago, Hannah, Jessi, and I were sick with something for a couple days, and this week my wife and I have had a cold/cough/sore-throat that hasn’t been fun.
- On the plus side, last week Peter decided that he would start breastfeeding regularly after all. This is very good news.
- This week, I officially took out nomination papers to get elected as Moderator at the upcoming May 1 election. I have about a month to collect 44 signatures from registered voters of Charlton. I’m also contemplating officially creating a campaign committee, but I may wait and see if the race will be contested first.
- This weekend, for our Valentine’s weekend date, my wife and I will be attending a Magic Judge draft. The premise is that some people will be playing and some will be judging, and the people playing are going to try to cheat in various ways to see if the people judging can catch them. It’s a training exercise that sounds like a lot of fun.
- And speaking of judging, I’m definitely looking forward to judging at PAX East. Tentatively, I’ll be on the evening shift on Friday and Saturday. I should have some time there to enjoy the rest of the show when I’m not on duty, too. I only wish that my wife could come.
Random Life Update
- Peter’s posterior tongue-tie got corrected yesterday. He went through the procedure well (it’s really a rather simple procedure), and has more tongue movement now. It still remains to be seen if it’ll help him breastfeed.
- I’ll be judging the Magic Worldwake prerelease in Hartford on January 30, and I’ll be judging a variety of Magic events at PAX Boston in March.
- Hannah’s learning new words and skills every day. It’s really quite amazing to watch.
- I’m very excited that Scott Brown has a shot at winning the Senate seat. I don’t agree with him on everything, but he’ll be much better than the alternative.
2009 in review
When I look back at 2009, the thing that most sticks out in my mind is the number of health issues our family has had. I’ve had some colds, Shingles, and Swine Flu. Jessi had gestational diabetes and gall bladder attacks while carrying Peter. Hannah had an infection which lead to being on antibiotics as a precaution for most of the year, and probably for most of this year as well. Peter didn’t want to nurse (likely due to posterior tongue-tie) and had jaundice and lost a significant amount of weight before finally getting back to birth weight yesterday. And those were just the most significant issues.
So, in many ways, I’m glad 2009 is over. But, it hasn’t been all bad. I got appointed as Moderator in May. Our son was born and is mostly healthy. And, I kept my job and I know people with much worse health concerns. Things could have been much worse. But, I sure hope that 2010 is better.
Peter at 2½ weeks
Today’s been my first day back at work since Peter was born. After 2½ weeks, he’s still not feeding well from the breast, and hasn’t been gaining weight. He’s still not back at his birth weight (which ideally happens by around 1 week). We’re working on feeding him a lot via bottles so that he can get some more calories in him. But that’s a lot more work, and we still have to take care of Hannah, too.
Yesterday, our lactation consultant said that it appears he has posterior tongue-tie, which could be a big contributing factor. (Other factors are just that not getting enough to eat quickly becomes self-reinforcing, as he doesn’t get the energy to have the next feeding and develops some jaundice.) So, we’re working with our doctor’s office today to get a referral to a specialist in tongue-tie recommended by our lactation consultant, based out of some hospital out in Concord.
So hopefully seeing this specialist and correcting the posterior tongue-tie will help get things back on track. Peter’s doing okay for now, as he does like bottle-feeding, but it’d be nice to have all the benefits of breastfeeding and make it easier on all of us for him to get up to the weight he should be at.
[Technical] “Wiretapping” with VOIP
We do have an appointment with a lactation specialist on Monday, and I spent a good chunk of Friday calling between the doctor’s office and the insurance company to see if they’ll be covering part of the cost. We likely won’t find out before we go, however. But, the experience inspired me to do something I’d been thinking of doing for a while for situations such as these: hooking my computer up to record phone calls to companies.
My first thought was to dig up a modem from around the house and try to hook that up in such a way that the computer could record via it. But then my second thought was that since our phone service is VoIP (Vonage), it ought to be possible to just collect the digital data that’s already there and record calls that way.
Here’s what I did. I set up our switch (A small-business-grade PowerConnect 2716) to have two of its ports on a separate VLAN, so that they were disconnected from my “normal” internal network, and only connected to each other. Then, rather than the cable modem being plugged directly into the Vonage router (which serves as my home network router), it gets plugged into this separate two-port virtual switch, and the other port gets plugged into the Vonage router. Then, I set up port mirroring, so that all the traffic that goes to and from the router gets copied to another port. That port gets plugged into the spare network card on my computer. (That is, my computer has its normal network card for day-to-day use, and a separate network card that doesn’t even have an IP, it’s just there to listen to a copy of the traffic happening between the cable modem and the Vonage router.)
Now I have a method of sniffing my Internet network traffic. This may turn out to be even more useful when the kids grow up some and I want to add more Internet monitoring. But for right now, I just want something that captures the SIP packets that Vonage uses and assembles them into audio files for me. I discovered Oreka, which seems to do the job quite nicely. I just need to have the Oreka service running whenever I want to record a call, and it automatically puts the spare network card into sniffing mode and writes out WAV files for all calls that happen while it’s running.
All in all, it was much easier and works much better than I thought it would at first. I’ve looked up the wiretapping laws, and Google’s results say that Massachusetts is an “all-party consent” state, so I need to make sure to notify the other party when I’m recording a call. But I think my wife is actually looking forward to saying “This call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes.”
Quote of the Day
“CAUTION: These diapers, like almost any article of clothing including cloth diapers, will burn if exposed to flame. For your child’s safety, always keep the child away from any source of flame.”
— Warning on Walmart’s “Parent’s Choice” brand diaper boxes
The First Week
The first week with Peter with us has been quite an adventure. I think that difficulty of raising children is multiplicative rather than additive. (That is, if one could quantify the effort in raising one child as 10, then the effort in raising two children is much closer to 100 than it is to 20.) Part of the trouble is that Peter hasn’t much wanted to drink milk straight from the source, so we’ve been feeding him pumped milk and formula, primarily with syringes and then bottles. He had lost more than the average amount of weight before starting to gain again on Wednesday night, and has had some Jaundice, so the doctors have been monitoring him on a regular basis. If all goes well, today will be the first day that he won’t visit a medical facility of some sort for checking bili levels and weight. (Although phrasing it that way makes it sound more ominous than it was. Things were going mostly okay, we just needed to monitor things to ensure that they started getting better rather than worse.)
But he’s been eating enough now, even if he prefers a bottle, and is a beautiful healthy boy. We may end up consulting with a lactation specialist to see about getting him to breast feed better, but last night he did fairly well, so maybe he’ll figure it all out on his own soon anyway.
But it’s been tough getting any sleep. It feels like Jessi and I have been running on all cylinders all day and night for the past week. I don’t know how Jessi will deal with the children by herself once I go back to work after Christmas, but maybe things will be less hectic by then.