Category: January 2018

We woke up to snow this morning! John came up from Placitas last night, so I’m glad he didn’t wait until this morning. There is a sheet of ice under the snow and driving conditions are poor.

I still have that migraine, but not too bad today. The forecast is for strong winds later today, so we took the dogs out for a walk early while it was still nice out.

John looked at the webcams and it looks like there’s not snow in Placitas or Albuquerque. Santa Fe is higher elevation and gets more precipitation as well as being colder.

Now we’re going to spend the rest of the day at home. John bought a digital antenna and is going to try to pull the football games in that way. We don’t have cable – it’s a long story. There are several reasons – John had a feud with DirectTV and won’t buy it again. And Infinity isn’t available on our street in Placitas. It is available in Santa Fe, but in the long run we plan to spend most weekends in Placitas, not Santa Fe. And I certainly don’t need cable for anything myself. I don’t watch TV at all, ever. And I just use my cellphone to hot spot for internet, since I’m at work most of the time.

And who knew the Vikings would get this close to the super bowl this year? Yes, as most of you know, I live with a Vikings fan. Much dumbfounded excitement last Sunday as you can imagine, although we only heard it on the radio, lol, and then youtube afterwards for the replays.

If the digital antenna doesn’t work, we’ll brave the weather and head to a nearby sports bar. Go Vikings!

I’m so discouraged about my health (migraines) these past few weeks, and particularly this week. I had made so much progress this past year, I was practically cured!

First, when we moved back to New Mexico a little over a year ago, I used the move as a good time to start over with all the food in the house and go 100% organic. Cooking oil, condiments, tea, EVERYTHING. It made a big difference.

But it wasn’t until I moved to the rented casita in Santa Fe in September that I truly felt normal; better than I have in literally years. It was a very busy time, but I had lots of energy and felt well every day. It was delightful! I felt like a new person. I felt like I could do anything! New job! Coaching clients! No problem! But now I’m back to square one and I just can’t even stand it.

If you’ve never had a chronic illness, it’s hard to describe what it’s like to feel bad day after day. Everyone expects you to be cheerful and productive, because you look normal and it’s a regular day. People with a hidden, chronic illness do not get sympathy or special treatment like you would if you have a temporary cold or a flu or a broken arm or whatever. And if you did get special treatment all the time, you’d quickly become a drag on the system. Who wants to be that person? I don’t.

For me, anything that triggers my immune system, such as allergies or fighting a cold, will cause migraines.  Ever since Christmas – when my new house in Santa Fe was ready and we moved the dogs up here from Placitas – I’ve been miserable. Sick and crying and depressed and exhausted. Plus this week is worse, because everyone at work is fighting a cold, including me. And that causes migraines too.

But what am I going to do? When I got my dogs I had no idea I might be allergic – I don’t have any “hay fever” type allergies to pets – so I couldn’t tell.  Plus I’ve got no-shedding dogs! Poodles don’t even shed. And there’s a lot of things in the world that will trigger my immune system to go into gear, so I had migraines before I got dogs. I just had no idea they could make it worse. And I think I must have developed the allergy over time, because I don’t remember any obvious change in my health when I got Kai (my first dog).

But my health has been gradually getting worse for a lot of years (with occasional reprieves) and I just didn’t realize the difference my dogs made until I suddenly did not have them for 3 months. It was the healthiest three months I’ve experienced in a long time.

I’ve actually suspected I’m allergic to the dogs for a couple of years. When I quit my Sandia job in early 2106 and started working from home, my migraines got worse rather than better, so I suspected it had something to do with my home.

I’ve tried restricting the dogs to only one part of the house. But I don’t know for sure if that helps any, and John’s very resistant to that. He wants to hang out on the couch with them. What’s the point of having dogs if you can’t hang out with them? They need attention. Plus, in my house in Santa Fe, we put the doggie door in the master bedroom, because you can’t get to the backyard from the office.

The fact is, I’ve got 3 dogs and I’ve had them a long time and I’m very attached to them. Two of them are seniors and there’s no way I’m rehoming my dogs. Maybe John could keep them in Placitas, but that’s my house too and we spend every weekend together. And he travels a lot for his job and can’t really be dealing with dogs all the time.

One thing I can do is try to figure out what about my dogs is setting off my immune system. I’m not particularly hopeful, but I’m going to look into trying to cure their chronic eye irritation. It’s common for poodles to have goopy eyes, but one of my dogs has it really bad. I’ve taken him to multiple vets, and they all say the same thing. They say it’s not an infection, that it’s allergies, and there’s not much I can do about it.

But I’m not convinced. When I got my other two poodles, neither one of them had problems with their eyes. It seemed like over time they both got it from my first dog, who continues to have it the worst. I’m thinking – if it’s contagious, then it’s not an allergy. I’m going to try a topical antibiotic, and see if that helps the dogs any. Who knows, maybe if they are more healthy, I will be more healthy. Although I don’t have any problems with my own eyes, so it’s hard to imagine there is a connection. I’m always coming up with these crazy theories, trying to figure out how to keep my migraines away.

I’m sorry to be such a downer. It’s just that I’ve been on migraine meds for several days straight. I went to the doctor yesterday and my blood pressure was sky high (a side effect of the migraine meds). They’re probably going to want to put me on blood pressure meds (which I’ve been on before), but the blood pressure meds directly counteract the migraine meds, so they make it harder for me to control the migraines.

If you care to know – the mechanism for that is simple. During a migraine, the blood vessels in the brain are dilated. So the migraine meds counter that by constricting the blood vessels. As the blood vessels constrict, there’s less room for your blood volume, so your blood pressure goes up. Blood pressure medicines dilate blood vessels, providing more room for your blood volume, lowering your blood pressure. So I’m going to take something that dilates my blood vessels simultaneously with taking something that constricts them?

I’m just so worn down and exhausted. It’s Saturday, and I really wanted to visit my friend, and clean my house, and wash my windows, and go for a jog, and cook something for John, and post all my blog posts (I’ve got about 10 of them in draft). But I like my blog posts to be funny and interesting and cheerful, and that is not possible when I’m exhausted and crying.

 

I spent today trying to write an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure, ie. step-by-step instructions) for a process that I’ve never actually done myself. That pretty much sums up my job.

I understand my job a little bit better than last month, but I’m still getting incomprehensible phone calls and emails. Like this one:

“I certainly don’t know the AQBCR data transfer components but the error that you’re getting appears to be related to an owner cross-reference table and I wouldn’t think that missing Tempo attachment data (do you even synchronize that data?) would be related. The fact that you’re getting a unique constraint violation looks like it’s trying to re-insert data that already exists which also doesn’t sound like it could be related to missing blob data. I would take a look at that particular constraint and see if you can figure out why it might be failing but again I don’t know your data transfer components.”

I mean, “missing blob data”? Seriously? That’s a thing? Or is someone just yanking my chain? From what I can tell, that email means, “I know something about your problem, but I can’t help you. If you knew more about your problem than I do, maybe you could help yourself.”

I swear my job is just translating specialist-speak into English. And that’s just the database stuff. The gibberish related to oil refineries, gas plants and compressor stations is even more incomprehensible.

Meanwhile, our Bureau Chief is retiring (that’s the boss above my boss). I’m predicting my boss will get the position. Which means, yes, once again I’ll be in the position of wondering who my new boss will be!

It’ll be 10 years this year!

And now I’m exhausted and going to bed.

My dog has a rubber neck.

Seriously, she was chewing that while wearing it – and it only dangles down from her collar by a few centimeters. Or did.

One of my primary challenges for this upcoming year is prioritizing. I enjoy my new job, but I wasn’t working an office job during most of 2017. That means I’m going to have to stop doing, or do dramatically less of what I had been doing in 2017.

Since starting this new job, I’ve seen a dramatic decrease in hours spent coaching, interacting with friends & family, hiking, jogging, cooking, reading, and blog posts. Every one of those is making me sad.

It would be a challenge to add anything right now, since most of my free time is going to doing a little bit of the things I used to do. But there are two things I really want to add or increase – time spent with friends and family, and a contentment exercise I’ll describe in a minute.

But first I have to find some things to decrease! One of the biggest mistakes people make with New Year’s Resolutions is trying to add to an already full schedule without removing anything. And I am a worst offender! Removing priorities is a hard, sad thing for me.

But I’ve decided I’m going to decrease my coaching. I’m basically going to quit for awhile except for a few exceptions. One exception is a young man the age of my son whom I’ve been working with a very long time, and he feels like a family member to me. Other exceptions are my close friends and family (some of whom I coach) because my first resolution is about increasing time with friends and family, and coaching counts as “time with”!

The other thing I hope to do less of is moving, remodeling, dealing with real estate and business and tax responsibilities. Some of that is inevitable, and some of that we’ve started and need to finish. (I’m currently looking for a landscape company, an estate planner, a CPA, and an attorney to help with our property LLC’s). Ugh! But going forward, I believe that this segment of my life will take less time and effort than it has in the last 2 years.

Ok, so now for the fun part – Now that I’ve identified a couple areas to decrease, I can name a couple of areas I’d like to increase!

The first is friends & family. They are very important to me – but you wouldn’t know it by the way I neglect them. I want to do a better job keeping up with my friendships. That New Year’s Resolution tops my list every year!

Secondly – about 12-14 years ago I was studying a set of philosophies that helped me work with my clients with Asperger’s. There’s a type of evaluative thinking pattern that’s particularly common in Asperger’s, but we all do it a lot. Instead of simply being curious about what we are perceiving around us, we almost instantly judge it as being somewhere on the bad-to-good spectrum, and frequently also have opinions about whether we like it or not, and whether it should or should not be that way.

Sometimes this evaluation and forming opinions about what is happening around us is useful and necessary. We basically can’t make decisions without being evaluative. So being evaluative isn’t wrong. I just don’t want to be constantly doing it out of habit for no reason.

But most of us do it out of habit, regardless of whether it’s actually useful. And in fact, once it becomes an ingrained habit, it can make us discontent, judgmental, and stifle creativity. Even if we succeed at “staying positive” in our evaluations, the very act of constantly judging can decrease our base level of contentment. It’s also mentally taxing.

In addition, in the latest relationship books, they are advising people to say, “Tell me about your day,” rather than ask, “How was your day?” The reason they are giving for this is that you’ll get a more meaningful answer and a closer connection. But that same advice also follows the practice I had been working on 12 years ago. Tell me ABOUT your day, rather than evaluate your day on a good-bad continuum and pronounce an opinion.

I’ve been thinking about how I can revive that practice. I do not have time to take on more study. But I think I can remember enough from 12 years ago to work on implementing some basics.

It’s the implementation that actually matters. Reading and learning new ideas can be entertaining. But, trying, daily, to be different than what comes naturally is a challenge.  We all know people who have read books and gone to workshops and learned a lot – but nothing changes!

So here’s my daily practice: I’m going to try to notice when I’m being asked for a good-bad judgement, and when I am asking others for one, and when I am volunteering one.  These instances are as common, simple and innocuous as, “Did you have a good day?”

When you start to listen, it’s amazing how often we use the terms such as “good” and “bad”, and questions such as “Did you like…?” and statements such as, “It’s good that…” in our daily speech. Even the concept of “it’s fine” is an evaluative conclusion. It’s a very necessary thought pattern that we do all day long. “It’s fine, I can hit the send button,” “It’s fine, I can proceed through the intersection,” It’s fine, I can go on to my next task.” But just because we have to make that evaluation all day to function, doesn’t mean we want to be doing it when we don’t have to!

We tend to solidify into evaluative thinking pattern habits that aren’t always as creative or as curious or as open-minded as they could be. Our life, and the life of those around us, could become richer and more meaningful. Whether that would be good or bad – or if it’s just fine how it is – I’ll leave to you to decide 😉

 

Early California; imagine Spanish-Mission-meets-Art-Deco…

…amid miles and miles of surrounding fruit orchards, mostly gone now.

https://savingplaces.org/stories/californias-century-old-orchards-provide-a-link-to-the-vanishing-past#.WlWmXGKPLu0

The great-grandmas lived here.

 

I was planning to write about taxes, but this is my first blog post since the holidays, and I don’t want to try my readers’ patience. So we’re going to start out with a vaguely humorous and slightly relevant comment about Java Joe’s.

There’s a triangular-shaped shopping center where three roads near my house meet. Turns out there is both a Java Joe’s and a Joe’s Diner in that same shopping center. This became highly relevant when I was trying to meet up with one of those freelance tax accountants who have no office. I was so focused on the fact that I did not know what this tax consultant looked like, and wondering how I would recognize her, that it didn’t occur to me to wonder whether I was in the wrong place!

So the funny thing (in an ironic sort of not actually very funny at all way) is that I was meeting up with a tax consultant because I am out-of-compliance with my New Mexico State taxes. And the ironic bit is that I work in a compliance and enforcement department for New Mexico State. Therefore, I knew what it meant when the first two out-of-compliance letters came from New Mexico Taxation and Revenue, but the third letter came from the Audit and Compliance Division. Uh-oh, I’m caught in the cogs now. And unfortunately, air quality has nothing to do with tax evasion, so I can’t just go talk with a friendly coworker.

It’s not that I’m deliberately evading taxes. It’s just that at first I didn’t think I had to file gross receipts tax, and now I’m trying to file and can’t figure out how. In case you’re wondering, yes, we filed our regular state and federal income taxes last spring. But New Mexico has something else called a gross receipts tax. It’s like a sales tax, except it also covers services like plumbing and yard work and – guess what – life coaching. Pretty much anyone providing a service – lawyers, real estate agents, CPA’s, contractors, etc. have to pay it. Most of these professionals have local clients who know about the gross receipts tax, so they just add it to their bill.

But I don’t add it to my clients’ bills because none of them live in New Mexico and they’ve never heard of it, and I think it would make them grumpy. Plus, last time I lived in New Mexico I didn’t have to pay it because back then, my clients were considered exempt, because none of them lived in New Mexico. That is why I initially thought I didn’t have to pay it. I didn’t used to have to pay it. But now I’m hearing that the rules have changed and it doesn’t matter anymore where my clients live; it only matters where I live. (I admit, exactly where I live has been a little unclear recently, but it is still definitely New Mexico).

So I’ve gone online to try to file, but they have my account messed up. The only account that’s showing up in my online profile is our PIT, which is our personal taxes. I need the CRS account for my coaching to show up so I can file. That I can’t fix myself. It’s their system. So I’ve hired some CPA type person to go hassle them for me because I’m not willing/able to keep fighting this one by myself.

Are you miserable yet, listening to all this?

The kicker is today, while doing online research, I noticed that gross receipts tax might also apply to rental income. Oh shit. So I’m trying to get an answer on that, and I’ve seen everything from “Yes, it does” to “No, it doesn’t”, or “Only if you have three or more properties” or “Only if you have more than 3 properties” or “Only if they’re short term rentals.” Ugh. Which is it? Because we have exactly 3 rental properties, unless they count our second residence in Santa Fe as a rental property since it’s not our primary residence.

We already pay income tax on the income from the rentals. But gross receipts tax is different – it’s on top of income tax. I guess the way they can get away with that double taxation is that it’s officially the leaser/purchaser/client/customer who is supposed to pay the tax, not the service provider. But in practice, it’s the service provider whom the state comes after for the money. Anyway, let’s just hope it doesn’t apply to rental income, because it’s going to be bad enough having to pay gross receipts tax on a year and a half of coaching income (plus late fees).

Which leads us all to wonder – why don’t we just have one job and watch TV in the evenings like normal people?