Today's peeve is recipes in which ingredients and cooking methods show up like moles in a whack-a-mole game. One of today's recipes mentioned chicken buillion powder in the ingredients and never mentioned it again. (Fine, I left it out. I don't have any anyway.) The reverse for garlic, unspecified in the ingredients list but mentioned with some other ingredients that had to be sweated before being added to other ingredients. (I threw in a couple of cloves.)
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington
There's a reason I rarely use recipes and when I do I consider them rough drafts.
You may be using amateur recipes. Look, I don't know what your recipe source is, but an editor prevents that simple mistake (or rather, the editor's minion.) So here's a plug for professionally written, edited, and produced cookbooks and websites. All Recipes is great but it's amateur-land out there.Originally Posted by SteveinMN
Today's peeve is recipes in which ingredients and cooking methods show up like moles in a whack-a-mole game. One of today's recipes mentioned chicken buillion powder in the ingredients and never mentioned it again. (Fine, I left it out. I don't have any anyway.) The reverse for garlic, unspecified in the ingredients list but mentioned with some other ingredients that had to be sweated before being added to other ingredients. (I threw in a couple of cloves.)
Not crazy about All Recipes. Or Cooks.com. The huge number of relatively-undifferentiated results just ... it's like someone dumping a big bunch of folders on my desk and asking which one I want. Besides, they just don't have that many recipes I find interesting. I appreciate the plug for professionally-written/edited recipes. But I like finding home-style ethnic recipes from people who grew up cooking and eating that kind of food. So I'll just have to remember to proof the recipe myself. I guess I'm peeved at myself for not remembering to do that.
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington
All this left over Easter chocolate...not sure whether to put this into the 'peeves' or the 'gratitude'!
Really pissed at the Universe for giving my pug cancer. He's suffered enough in the past year or so, and now this. Give the poor little guy a break already, you big freakin' bully.
Well it's heck on earth time again. That's right taxes. It's not that I owe, probably not. No, it's worse than that, it's the sheer infinite insolvable complexity of the whole thing. Schedule D has gotten worse - more complex.
So suppose you have a taxable fund that reinvests dividends/capital gains etc. on a regular basis. It realistically becomes near impossible to determine the date of aquisition, when all these little piddly aquisitions (reinvestments) are going on all the time (or not all the time, but if you hold a fund for awhile ...). Now this used to be easily handled under schedule D by using an average cost basis and listing "various" as the date of aquistion (this may not be tax saving optimized but it is simplicity). But apparently "various" is no longer allowed (at least in tax software). So ..... sigh. And *this* isn't even tax complexity. I've had complex taxes this is just a very ordinary thing if you have a taxable fund that reinvests.
But still, I need some kind of long term solution to my tax problem. Possible solutions:
1) don't hold anything beyond bank accounts in taxable accounts. Only put anything else in IRAs, 401ks. Ok but this solution is stupid. It's locking the money up for what seems like forever not EVEN to save taxes, just because the complexity of taxes is driving me batty
2) don't have anything beyond bank accounts in taxable funds reinvest - instead have them cut dividend checks or whatever. I could accept this solution. It seems a really stupid choice just to have to make because taxes are so complex though
3) figure out some method by which tax reporting becomes straightforward for this. I.e. maybe if I used LIFO or FIFO, date of aquistions would show on broker forms and all would be happy. I don't know if that's true or not. I suppose I'd have to research it. Not a bad solution. Haha, I'm not even trying to minimize taxes here, I mean yes sure if I could do so without complexity I'd want to, but I'm mostly trying to minimize complexity - because the situation is bad
4) Always pay accountants to do my taxes and beg for mercy. Ok this seems like a great solution, right? The problem is if I'm struggling because the data is not on the forms, maybe they would too. I mean they know much more about taxes than me, so maybe they know a way out, that's like duh that I just don't see, but even tax accountants struggle with missing data *sometimes*.
They had to go and make taxes even more complex!
Trees don't grow on money
I vote for #4. Tax accountants (important distinction; accountants have specialties just like doctors and IT people) know the rules, in part because they can spend far more time on them than you and I. I know what we spent on our tax accountant this year would pay for several years of "TurboTaxCutatHome" but she found deductions I never found with TTCatH and has been well worth the $$.
My mom's and brother's taxes are far simpler than ours and change little from year to year. This year, instead of spending $30 on tax software for just their simple returns (frugal!), I did them by hand. Line by line, the rules are convoluted and have as many forks in them as a cafeteria. It does make one long for a simple flat tax. But I suspect that, if that ever happens, we'll be surprised at the positive behaviors which go away without special tax treatment and the unexpected shifts in behavior caused by same. Nevermind the phalanx of tax accountants, lawyers, software companies, and more that would shrink but not without a fight.
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington
I'm so sorry puglogic. Thats hard.
Last edited by Float On; 4-15-13 at 11:08am.
Float On: My "Happy Place" is on my little kayak in the coves of Table Rock Lake.
I am sorry to hear that about the little pug.
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