Fruddled Gruntbugglies

Enthralling readers since 2005

Author: lpaulriddle

  • Taxes, painting and stuff

    It’s been a while since I wrote anything here, mainly because I have been swamped at work, getting ready for a presentation next week at Educause, my first foray into public speaking since, oh, 1995 or so. That was back in the days of transparencies, so it’s been a while. And I do have to say, there are much better tools around for preparing slides nowadays. But anyhow, it’s been pretty all-consuming writing up this presentation, and by the time I get home I haven’t been much in the mood to write anything else.

    Interesting tax-related development here in the People’s Republic of Maryland. It seems that the legislature has raised the personal exemption amount for 2008 a whopping 33%, from $2400 to $3200. This is the first time Maryland’s personal exemption amount has changed since 2002, when it rose from $2100 to $2400. Apparently this is the legislature’s way of providing relief to the “working families” they are always harping about. This is in contrast to the governor’s original plan that would have widened the lower-income tax brackets, and being a flat tax advocate, I think it’s a better idea, although it benefits fewer people. For a typical family of four (like us.. imagine that) this results in $3200 less taxable income in 2008 than in 2007. Maryland has also completely overhauled how they figure payroll withholding. For me, that resulted in about $27 less state tax being withheld from my paycheck. This seems like a lot. According to my handy spreadsheet, an exemption amount of $3200 would have resulted in $254 less in taxes owed in 2007. Extrapolating the $27 withholding difference out to 26 paychecks results in $702 less tax withheld in 2008, leaving me $448 in the hole. There must be something I’m missing here, or I’m going to have to tweak my withholding exemptions again.

    In other, less exciting news, we are finally getting ready to paint the master bedroom, several years after buying the paint. In preparation, I’m putting in a new phone jack. The original jack was one of those “woodwork warts” that was surface-mounted to the trim. I hate these, so I’m getting rid of them as we paint the rooms, in favor of flush-mounted wall jacks. This will be the first phone jack I’ve rewired, so I’m going to do it right and use twisted-pair cable with a Leviton “QuickPort” punch-down type jack. In the basement, I’ll install either a patch panel or a 66-type punch-down block (haven’t decided which yet) and splice it into the old quad-conductor cable that makes up the rest of the house’s phone wiring. Then as I replace jacks down the road, I’ll replace the quad with Cat-5. Doing this might improve our DSL speeds, too.

  • Back to the grind

    The holidaze are now in the rear-view mirror, I’m back at work, the kids are back in school, and we’re back to our normal, boring day-in day-out routine.  For me, unlike the previous two years, the break didn’t feel too long.  That may have been because it was only two weeks as opposed to 16-18 days in past years.  Or, it may be because this year’s break was punctuated by a nice, whole-house case of the stomach bug.  Mmm, fun…  pass the Immodium, please.

    Measured against past holiday breaks, this one was fairly productive, which I know is not saying much.  Got the tractor more-or-less winterized, the leaves more-or-less cleared, the house more-or-less grounded, and the master bathroom sink drain more-or-less fixed, and started prepping the master bedroom for painting.  All in all, not too bad.

    I cracked a bottle of homebrew on Christmas Eve, 8 days after bottling, and it was pretty good, although still in need of a bit more conditioning/carbonating.  It compared favorably to the 2007 Anchor “Special” Holiday Ale I drank around the same time.  I imagine by now it’ll be fully carbonated and really good.  Will probably try another bottle this weekend at some point.  Need to get my taste for beer back first 🙂
    Painting the master bedroom is the next big project on the docket.  There’s a bit more prep work to do (sanding, spackling, relocating a phone jack) but all in all, it’s about ready to paint.  Just need to come up with a good day to do it, and put it on the calendar.  Once that’s done there’s the laundry station.  These two should take us up to late winter or early spring, at which point we need to do something about the basement walk-out steps.

    All of which brings us to…  this weekend’s to-do list.  This weekend is kinda booked up, so this is an accordingly brief list:

    • Install new fill valve in toilet in kids’ bathroom (never got around to this over the break)
    • Sanding and other prep work in master bedroom
    • Retirement portfolio rebalancing & 2008 tax planning

  • Today in review

    Today marked the start of the 2-week Christmas break. I actually managed to get a few things done. First off, I came up with a temporary fix for the house’s grounding system, which faithful readers may recall was interrupted when we had our copper water main replaced with plastic. I realized that we had a copper line running underground from the well room to the old abandoned hand pump by the garage, so I bonded it to the copper water pipe just downstream of the pressure reducing valve. Not sure how good of a ground it is, but it’s definitely better than it was, and it buys me a little time to plan how to do it right.

    Next up was the master bathroom sink, which had been out of commission for a couple months. My original attempt at snaking the drain was a rush job and did not work out too well. This time I took my time and pulled out a big plug of hair. Then I put the drain back together and poured several big buckets of hot water down to try to clean things out a bit. Not sure why this drain in particular has so much clogging trouble. I think for starters, I’ll get a strainer for it to keep hair out of it. Then I may see about rerouting the A/C condensate drain, which currently runs into the drain via the attic vent.

    Also managed to bag up some leaves for yard waste pickup today. Leaf removal is running behind schedule due to inclement weather. At the rate I’m going, I may be putting leaves out all the way up to January 21, when the pickups end for the winter.

    To do for the rest of the week: finish winterizing the tractor, clean the humidifier, caulk the sill plate in the back part of the basement, replace the toilet fill valve in the kids’ bathroom, and work on getting the master bedroom ready for painting.

  • Beer bottled

    I managed to sneak a couple hours this afternoon and bottle the beer, in the hopes that it’ll be carbonated and ready to drink by Christmas Eve. That completes the batch, for better or for worse. Final gravity was around 1.020, so with an initial gravity of 1.070, that translates to about 7.5% alcohol by volume. Should be just the thing to prepare for the Church pageant. 🙂 Total bottle tally was: 21 × 22-ounce bottles and 12 × 12-ounce bottles, plus about 8 extra ounces which I dutifully consumed. It was quite good. Not sure what it is, but the beer always tastes better out of the bottle than out of the hydrometer flask.

    Lesson learned for today: I forgot that it’s harder to siphon out of a carboy than a plastic bucket. You can’t reach into the carboy and control the depth of the hose. I lost my suction a couple times because of the hose’s tendency to coil up, and my inability to hold it where I needed it. Next time I will use a racking cane, which should make it a lot easier.

  • Tax Time Again

    You know you’re a financial geek when you’re working on taxes a full 4 months before they’re due, and before the tax year in question has even ended. The People’s Republic of Maryland hasn’t even released its 2007 tax forms yet, so for now, I’m working on fed.

    This year, for the first time, I’m taking the true hard-core accounting geek route of using a spreadsheet to do our taxes. It really hasn’t been that hard, and it allows me to play out some “what-if” scenarios that would be hard to do with canned tax software. When it comes time to file, I’ll use TaxACT for federal and Maryland’s iFile for state, both of which are free. When all is said and done, I’ll have a set of spreadsheets I can use every year with only (hopefully) small modifications. The spreadsheets will also help me do more accurate tax planning throughout the year.

    Last year’s tax planning appears to have had the desired effect: It looks like we are going to owe money rather than getting a refund. I’ve set aside money to cover the taxes owed, and it’s been spending the year earning interest for us rather than Uncle Sam. We are actually going to owe a little bit more than what I had planned, because of Cathy’s extra income from child care. I think we’re still below the penalty threshold, but for 2008 I may want to increase my withholding just a tad.

    Last week, H&R Block sent me a TaxCut 2007 CD in the mail. They want $40 for the “premium” product that includes state, but no free e-file. Unfortunately, TaxCut is not nearly the deal it was up till a couple years ago, when I last used it. Back in the day, it cost $20-$25 and included free federal e-file. When the price jumped last year, I switched to TaxACT and was pretty happy with it. I did notice that Block is now giving away their DeductionPro software, so I grabbed a copy to help tally up all of our non-cash donations.  The software still works OK, but the UI is not as nice as it was in past years (in particular, I couldn’t find a feature to search for an item).  I guess you get what you pay for.  In any case, I do applaud them for making this available for free, as it does save me some work.

  • Fast Fermentation

    I racked the beer into my glass carboy this morning. Specific gravity was an amazingly low 1.025 (give or take a few thousandths), indicating that the beer is already almost finished fermenting. That was really fast, and it also may account for the lack of activity I noted in my post a couple days ago. However, I’m still not convinced that my bucket lid is airtight. I’m much more confident in the carboy, and the carboy is occasionally bubbling, but there’s definitely not much activity. At any rate, it looks like the beer will be ready to bottle before too long. My first good bottling opportunity is coming up in two weeks, on the weekend of the 22nd-23rd, when (by some miracle) we don’t seem to have anything else going on. Barring that, we’ll try to get it done the week after Christmas. With any luck, it’ll be carbonated and ready to drink around my birthday.

    Taste-wise.. the sample was nice and smooth with the spices (orange, cloves and cinnamon) dominating the flavor. Strong but not overpowering alcohol taste, with just enough hop flavor to balance things out. Definitely tastes like it’s almost done.

    Really happy with these results so far. I’m sure the starter culture contributed to the fast fermentation, so I’m going to try to do one for all of our future batches.

  • Fermenting away

    The beer is fermenting away. I was a little concerned at first because there was no visible activity (bubbling airlock) after more than 48 hours. This seemed a little odd given that I had gone to all the trouble of making a starter, etc. Tonight I popped the lid off the bucket, and the beer was quite obviously fermenting. It turned out that the fermenter was not completely airtight. There was a leak around the little grommet that seals the airlock to the bucket lid. I fixed the grommet and put the lid back on, and the airlock is now bubbling about once per second.

    All this reminds me why I’m not crazy about fermenting in plastic buckets. The lids are hard to seal and a pain to put on and take off, and you can’t observe the fermentation through the opaque plastic. If I decide to really get back into the homebrewing thing, I may need to break down and buy a 6.5 gallon glass carboy.

    This weekend (or whenever the primary fermentation activity has died down) I’ll rack the beer into the 5 gallon carboy for secondary fermentation. I’ve been letting the beer ferment in the boiler room where it’s around 70°, and I’m inclined to leave it there until I rack the beer. At that point I might move it somewhere slightly cooler, say 65°. White labs recommends a temperature range of 65°-70° for this strain of yeast, so it’s in the range either way.

  • Brewing Notes

    The brewing happened as planned today.  I had forgotten what a mess it makes.  No matter how neat you try to do it, the pot always finds a way to boil over and make a big, sticky mess on the stove.

    Straining the beer from the kettle to the fermenter is also a challenge.  I think it must be the hops that clog things up so fast.  We used a handy funnel with built-in strainer, and it took several iterations of:  pour beer into funnel until strainer clogs up, stir up gunk in funnel until funnel slowly drains, repeat.  It’s definitely a two-person job, although I must say it does a fine job of aerating the wort in the process.

    Starting gravity of this batch was roughly 1.070, which could be a pretty potent beer, depending on how completely all the stuff ferments out.  I think the starter culture was a good idea.

    Stay tuned.

  • Starter culture

    Did my starter culture yesterday (Friday) evening. I brought 1 quart of water to a boil and added ¼ cup Breiss “sparkling amber” dry malt extract, then boiled for 10 minutes. I then chilled the wort to around 78° and got my yeast out of the fridge. It was at that point that I realized I was supposed to let the yeast acclimate at room temperature for 3-6 hours before pitching. Oops. I transferred the wort to my 1 gallon jug and put the jug and the yeast vial in the boiler room, which is the warmest room of the house this time of year. I let the yeast acclimate for an hour and a half. By that time it was 11:30pm, so I went ahead and pitched. I figured what the heck, it’s just a starter culture, not 5 gallons of wort.

    The next morning there were signs of fermentation, with the airlock bubbling about once every 20 seconds or so. This continued into the afternoon. By evening it had slowed down quite a bit. Could be that it’s already burned through all the sugars… ¼ cup isn’t very much.

    At any rate, we’ll brew tomorrow afternoon and pitch it, and see how it goes.

    If this batch goes well, I’m thinking about possibly trying a lager.  The Sun Porch should be at a good temperature for lagering this winter.  I’ve never done a lager before, so it might be fun.  My recipe book has some extract-based recipes for German Dark and Black lager styles, which sound yummy.

  • Beer ingredients purchased

    Just got back from Maryland Homebrew, and I think we’ve got everything we need to brew. OK, we might need a bag of ice for cooling the wort. I will check on our ice situation tonight. As noted earlier, I’m straying a bit from the original recipe. Here’s my list of substitutions:

    • Substituted Cooper’s amber malt extract for Munton’s
    • Substituted Munton’s dark plain malt extract for Munton’s stout kit
    • Substituted White Labs 011 “European Ale” yeast for Wyeast #1007 German Ale yeast
    • Substituted Breiss amber dry malt extract for Munton’s light/amber

    The biggest change was using the plain dark extract in place of the stout kit. MDHB does not stock the Munton’s stout kit, but it presumably uses hopped malt extract. Hopefully the use of unhopped extract will not affect the balance of the finished product too much. We’ll find out.. that’s the fun of homebrewing. I may have skipped the stout kit even if it was in stock — the kits run $5 more than the plain extracts, and include extra yeast that I don’t need.

    Everything I read about the White Labs yeasts says that they work best with a starter culture, so I will prepare one tomorrow night. I’ve used the White Labs stuff at least once before (since MDHB stopped carrying Wyeast) and I believe I used a starter culture then, too.