Deep in the Heart of Taxes

Several years ago, I was scurrying around just before the filing deadline, trying to finish my taxes because of an inadvertently exotic investment. I had bought shares of the Boston Celtics on the New York Stock Exchange, more on the grounds of thinking it was cool to own a little bit of a sports team than anything else. When it came to doing my taxes, I learned that just because something is sold on the NYSE doesn't mean it's a stock. The Celtics are (or, at least, were) a publicly traded limited partnership. This meant filling out additional tax forms. I waded through 40 some odd pages of instructions on limited partnerships only to find a sentence that told me that none of the above applied if the partnership was publicly traded. There was even some statement that you had to include but that the IRS had no form for. (You had to type it out yourself on another piece of paper.) I filed my taxes on April 14th, sold the shares in the morning, and only had to wade through all this one more year.

(it is a bit of a digression, but my friend, Steve, gave me a hard time about selling off the shares. Steve is a big basketball fan and was getting married that summer. I contemplated giving him a few shares in the Celtics as a wedding present. But I decided that was excessively cruel, especially as he was marrying an Australian woman and moving to Melbourne.)

Anyway, since then I have diligently stayed away from exotic investments. Or so I thought until I spent three bloody days trying to find out what to do about the negative original issue discount on my inflation protected treasury securities. I did eventually figure it out, despite the IRS. I'm now waiting to see if my e-filed return got accepted or rejected. And debating about whether to do the Virginia return now or hold off until the morning.

Color Me Belated

The meme says to list 10 things of the assigned color. hahathor assigned me "salmon, or peach, or shrimp. Whatever you like to call that color."

If you want to play, leave me a comment and I will assign you a color

Pale orangish pink is really not my sort of color, so coming up with ten things is tricky

1. Wild salmon. I stopped eating farmed salmon after smelling the fish farms of Chiloe.
   
2. Coral.
   
3. Bell'aroma or Peace hybrid tea roses. At least those are the only ones in that color family that the catalog I glanced at listed under fragrant roses. And roses without fragrance are not worthy of being called roses.
   
4. the crayons that replaced the ones that were labeled "flesh" when I was a kid
   
5. parts of the sky at dawn
   
6. parts of the sky at dusk
   
7. a weathered brick wall
   
8. a plush charm quark
   
9. the flesh of a pomelo
   
10. a white kitten that clawed apart Phyllis Schlafly's wardrobe getting salmon polyester all over itself
    

I do like peaches, by the way, but in my experience they are usually more yellow than peach-colored.