Taxes in Bed

This bergenia sprouted several years ago all on its own, beneath the fence that separates our side return from Mrs. Kravitz's house. It's in a crack between her pavement and ours, and when we had that area repaved a couple of years ago I thought sure that would be it for the bergenia. But no, it came right back, and now it's blooming.

My major accomplishment yesterday was filing our US income taxes. It's mostly just a bookkeeping exercise, because our income gets excluded as foreign income anyway -- so we usually don't pay anything. We just have to tell Uncle Sam how much we make as US citizens, even though we're living abroad. (We also have to tell him about our bank accounts, which I suppose is meant to keep people from hiding money offshore. Of course, we do pay British taxes.)

I filled out the forms while lying in bed, a vision of indolence.

After I finally got up, I walked Olga, but she wasn't interested in going very far. I think she's still recovering after our outing with the Jolly Egg. (Which stayed in the shed yesterday.)

In the afternoon I finished "Fleishman is in Trouble," which sort of fell apart at the end, I thought. I really enjoyed about 3/4 of the book, but the tone seemed to shift as the focus went from Fleishman to the wife he was divorcing. The book set us up to see Fleishman as a sympathetic character and his wife as an irresponsible, angry antagonist, but then suddenly, when we see her perspective, we're meant to shift our sympathies (I think), and that seemed abrupt to me. I felt misled. Also, there were problems with the perspective. The story is told by a friend of Fleishman's, but she behaves in the beginning as a sort of omniscient narrator, privy to private exchanges between Fleishman and his wife or Fleishman and his boss, and only occasionally stepping in to refer to herself. I assume we're supposed to believe she knows all this stuff because Fleishman has related it to her, and at the end, as her perspective changes after talking to the wife, her own story becomes more central to the plot -- yet I wasn't prepared to care about her as much as I did about the Fleishmans.

I did like the writing and the language, though. The author, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, has a bright, energetic voice, just as she does in her journalism.

Anyway, I also brought our tender plants back inside, with temperatures expected to drop to 29º F (-1º C) tomorrow and snow possible (!) for the next few days. I don't think it will be much snow. Just enough to be annoying.

Dave arrived home last night shortly before 8 p.m. We had enough time to share some stories and take-away burritos from Chipotle before he collapsed into bed. The poor guy's internal clock must be a complete mess. Fortunately, I've never met anyone who can sleep as soundly or as long as Dave, so I suspect he will recover pretty quickly.