Missing Everything

I missed that Friday the 13th was on a Friday in February.

I also missed that Friday the 13th was on a Friday in March.

And I missed that yesterday was π Day out to four decimals places, something that only happens once a century.

(Not sure what font this thing is using, but that's the crappiest looking letter pi I've ever seen.)

But I filed a lot of tax returns!!!

I've gone from crazy-insane-holy-crap-why-don't-they-stop-coming-in busy to just being steady at Ye Ol' Tax Booth. I think we've already beat the number of tax returns we did all last tax season and we're only about halfway through. Because "only" four or five people a day are sitting down to have their taxes done, I've been focusing on our "mail-in" clients; people who do contract work all over the country (mostly welders, pipe fitters and IT guys) and can't come into the office. I crank out half dozen or so of those on a typical day between walk-ins. Things will likely stay "slow" until the end of March or first week of April, then all the procrastinators will come flooding through the door in a full-blown panic because Holy Crap!!! April 15th is on April 15th this year!! WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME!!! And they will of course be missing some vital piece of paperwork that will prevent us from getting their taxes done on time. And it will be all my fault. Or the IRS's fault. Or Obama's fault. 'Cause ya know, we NEVER had to file taxes before that Filthy Muslim became president!

Ahem.

Yea, it's been one of those tax seasons.

Debbie is still kickin' it to the curb in the cruise business. And dealing with lunatics. The other day, she spent 20 minutes repeating to some lady, "Ma'am, if you didn't purchase the travel protection insurance, you can't make a claim under the travel protection insurance." I kid you not, she must have said the exact same thing to this crazy person 50 times. I finally had to snap on my headphones and crank some Sleeveless Meeks and the Right to Bare Arms so I wouldn't grab Debbie's head set and start screaming at Crazy Lady to go do something anatomically impossible to herself.

In between all the work craziness, I've made a couple big steps in my personal tax preparation abilities. As of yesterday afternoon, I can now accept credit cards. I had bought a Kindle Fire a while back and Amazon now has one of those cool swipey thingies that plugs into the headphone jack. It's all set up and ready to go as soon as the physical swipey thingy shows up today or tomorrow. I'm also now set up with a bank so I can take my tax prep fee out of the clients refund, just like the big kids. That won't be "live" until Monday as I had to fax them some signatures yesterday. But it's getting there. I've already done twice the returns I did last year and may actually make money at it. What a concept.

[Update: Before I could hit the Publish button, I received notification that my signature form has been received and I am as of now live for banking products. Woot!]

[Update to the Update: My cool swipey thingy just arrived and I was able to charge myself $1.00!! Woot!! Woot!!]

And that is pretty much our life at this point.

Over the last month, I had accumulated all sorts of political and economic articles that I was going to post comments on, but I got tired of having 20 tabs open in Chrome reminding me that I hadn't posted anything here is weeks, and closed them all down. And it turns out that Wolf Richter pretty much summed it all up earlier this month:

The price of oil did today what it has been doing for a while: it waits for a trigger and plunges. As I’m writing this, West Texas Intermediate is down 4.4%, trading at $44.99 a barrel, less than a measly buck away from this oil bust’s January low. It’s down over 20% from the peak of the most recent sucker rally.

US oil drillers have been responding by slashing capital expenditures, including drilling, in a deceptively brutal manner. In the latest week, drillers idled 56 rigs that were classified as drilling for oil, according to Baker Hughes. Only 866 rigs were still active, down 46.2% from October, when they’d peaked at 1,609. In the 22 weeks since, drillers have taken out 743 rigs, the most dizzying cliff dive in the data series, and probably in history....

You’d think this sort of plunge in drilling activity would curtail production. Eventually it might. But for now, the industry has focused on efficiencies, improved drilling technologies, and the most productive plays. Drillers are trying to raise production but with less money so that they can meet their debt payments. Thousands of wells have been drilled recently but haven’t been completed and aren’t yet producing. This is the “fracklog,” a phenomenon that has been dogging natural gas for years.

So US oil production hit another record of 9.366 million barrels per day for the week ended March 6, according to the Energy Information Administration’s latest estimate.

In other words, expect low gas prices to continue for a while. If you work in fracking or anything related to it, expect a pink slip. And then we have all that fracking debt and derivatives piled up in everyone's pension funds....

Enjoy the Ides of March.