Beginning Anew

It's been a week filled with comings and goings: a visit to the eye doctor, a late afternoon at the movies for Woman in Gold, meeting with out-of-town cousins for a supper visit, a day out for the  symphony and lunch, and a Sisters' gathering for brunch, not to mention overdue trips to the grocery store, library, bank, and Ikea food shop. The weather has been changeable, too; some days sun, alternating with cold and rain showers, but there was only one day of really unpleasant rain, and thankfully I could stay home for that. The other times that I was out and about driving to the various appointments and errands, I relished the view of spring flowers and the greening of lawns and foliage. The daffodils are gone now, replaced by tulips and multitudes of flowering trees in white and pink. The lawns have turned from blah to light yellow-green and now to a rich, deep green, and the trees separating our neighborhood from the little commercial area to the south have sprouted blades so the view is no longer as stark as it was during the winter. Soon we won't be able to tell that there is anything but forest between us and the main road. I walked that area on Saturday during a quick trip  to Walgreen's for the batteries I needed to get my mouse working again, and the weather was clear and fresh and sunny on the way out, though a few raindrops moved in by the time I had made my purchase. Today we drove west to our favorite superstore to get groceries and curtains for my office, deliberately taking the slower town road instead of the interstate so we could view the gardens along the way.

This afternoon we installed the curtains that I desperately need to shield my desk and computer from too much sun coming in through the venetian blinds on my south-facing window. Then I got energetic enough to put together a new floor lamp that I hope is going to encourage me to sit in an easy chair in my office to read, rather than relegating all my pleasure reading to the bedroom. I have been mindful since we moved in of the opportunity to reshape old habits, and I am attempting to define certain areas for certain types of reading. My reading is dependent on good light, and I now have several places in the house with good light, so I am reconsidering what I read where, both to foster the reading and to manage the clutter. I just might be able to keep the newspaper in the kitchen, I think,  or failing that, on the dining room table, instead of spread over the living room couch or my bedside stand. I'm trying hard not to bring magazines and recipes and cookbooks into my office at all, as they will only get lost there. And I'm trying to keep work-related paper only in the office, not just to reduce chances of losing them throughout the house, but to reduce the encroachment of work into other aspects of my life. I am not forbidding myself the pleasure of reading in bed entirely, though--that would be a real hardship and counter productive for the imagination. But I am trying to limit the objects on my night table to one book and one tablet at a time. That is going to take some discipline. But new environments can help to form new habits.

The Long Way Home

Last Sunday I was not in Cincinnati. I was winding up a trip to the annual conference of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP), an organization that I helped bring into being in 1987 in Milwaukee. It was the first conference save one that I had attended in a dozen years, due to my residence in Spain. It was welcoming and inspiring to meet with old friends and to make the acquaintance of new ones whom I had not met at all or whom I knew only through the electronic discussion list that the organization shares. AIIP is a small, intimate conference , and the personal associations and tradition are what have kept me a member and now brought me back to this face-to-face meeting after so many years.

It was a short visit, but a long trip out to Irvine, California by way of Dallas on Thursday a week ago. It was an even longer trip back, by way on Chicago, on Sunday last week. It was long enough that it extended into Monday. I had a perfect flight from Santa Ana's John Wayne airport in Orange County to Chicago's O'Hare. As soon as I landed in O'Hare I went to the gate for the connecting flight and discovered that we were delayed for an hour, waiting for an in-bound crew to arrive and get over to our gate. No problem, I thought.  I was scheduled to arrive in Dayton late and had arranged to meet my husband at an airport hotel for an overnight, so we didn't have to drive home at 11:00 PM. Since I now would be arriving at midnight, I was very glad that I had made that arrangement.

The crew arrived and we finally got on. Then we got off the plane again when they discovered a malfunctioning door to the baggage area. Then we got on again, and in due course an announcement came that we were delayed again, because the door they thought had been fixed really was not right. This time we were advised that we could get off if we wanted, or we could stay on if we wanted, while the repair was made. I stayed on. Some time later the fatal announcement came that the flight was cancelled. Off we got to stand in line to get hotel and meal vouchers, and then to find our way to the shuttle bus to the Hyatt Regency O'Hare. That was a hurdle itself, and when we got to the Hyatt, there was another line to check in, and of course the restaurant had closed for the night, so I had to settle for a cold salad from the convenience shop. Then we had to call the airline to confirm our passage on the 7:00 flight the next morning, and of course there were long delays in the telephone queue. When I finally hung up my clothes for the next day and climbed into bed--a fairly quick process since I had no luggage with me--I called the front desk to leave a wakeup call--and was greeted with "Good morning" before I even asked for a call just three and a half hours hence. When I checked out at 4:45 that morning, the front desk clerk asked me solicitously if I had enjoyed my nap.

The morning flight to Dayton went well--all forty-five minutes of it--but the new crew seemed blissfully unaware that it was transporting a plane full of friends-by-circumstance who had been through a very long evening and very short night together. I dragged myself through the day when I got home, but it took another two days before I really caught up on sleep. And only today did I put the receipts from my trip in order and locate the notes and cards and other papers I had gathered through the conference. It was a memorable trip, but worth it.

Siblings Day

I had never heard of Siblings Day until this past Tuesday, when a notice appeared in my inbox reminding me of the upcoming Scandinavian Scribblers meeting and suggesting siblings as a writing prompt. When I finally got around to investigating the origin of Siblings Day I found out that it is a fledgling holiday--fairly new and unofficial. According to the Facebook page of the Siblings Day Foundation, it was established in 1997 as a day for sisters and brothers to reflect on the special bond they share.

Well, the day (Friday, April 10) passed without any communication from my siblings to me or from me to my siblings. I guess they hadn't heard about it either--Siblings Day certainly hasn't made it yet into the Hallmark store or the Sunday advertising supplements or even as a Google doodle. I'll have to ask my three sisters about Siblings Day when I see them next week at our regular monthly Sisters+ brunch.

Because whether I recognize the day or not, my sisters are the reason I came to Cincinnati when we moved back to the U.S. this past year. We are four girls in my family, and have been now for sixty years. Although we grew up close we all went our separate ways very soon after graduating from high school. Only one of us remained in Cincinnati; one went to Chicago and then Indiana, another to Wisconsin; I spent most of my adult life in New England, with a longish side trip to Spain. Now we have all reassembled here in Cincinnati, and we are reestablishing and reveling in that special bond we have as siblings. We each live separately according to the style and habits and circumstances we developed on our own throughout our adult lives,  but we are also getting to know each other again, this time as adults. It is a wonderful treasure, and one I know that we all value.

Taxing Times

This weekend I spent as I have done in the corresponding weekend for the past twelve years in Spain: I worked online to file my U.S. income taxes. No matter when we start to gather and sort through the papers and files--and we started several weeks ago this year--it seems as though they never get finished until the last weekend before the filing deadline.

Online filing in Spain was not an alternative--it was the only way to get taxes in on time. Now I can't think of any other way to file my taxes, so when I saw in the Ohio instructions that as first-year residents we were not allowed to use the Ohio tax filing website to submit our forms, I was flummoxed.

I solved the issue by using the same TaxFreeUSA software that I had been using for years to file the federal return. That service apparently is permitted to file online for first-year residents, as I have just received an email saying that our Ohio return, filed online this afternoon, has been accepted. It wasn't easy wrangling the software, though. Because we have only lived in Ohio since July, we had to file as partial year residents. No problem, except that we also had to enter the other state that we had lived in for the first half of the year. That's the other state, not the other country. España does not appear in the list of states.

We got through that hassle only with the assistance of an email to the Help desk, but we did get through it. I don't really understand the flow of the Ohio forms, so I relied on the software for guidance through the laborious data manipulations. In addition to the problem of partial year residence, there are the issues of business and retirement income sources. I hope the software is right, because when all the additions and subtractions and divisions had been done, we owed surprisingly little tax for our first six months here, and I felt that Ohio had welcomed us with open arms. I imagine I will have a different feeling next year.

Federal and state out of the way, I turned my attention to a new tax jurisdiction for me: my local municipal taxes. This turned out to be the surprise of a lifetime. I had already visited the tax office in late summer and paid in advance the amount that the official there estimated might be a logical amount that I would owe for the year. Well, paying was a lot easier than figuring out the forms! Again, the problem was in the partial year resident calculation formulas. After two attempts in two days, I gave up, and I'll drop in at the tax office some time between tomorrow and Wednesday to get the form filled out correctly, and also pay the first installment of estimated taxes for the business for next year.

I can now look back fondly to the time when I only had to fill out one income tax form--the federal. Now I have three! But except for some tips on new items for record-keeping, I will put the forms out of my mind for another 50 weeks, when the whole process should be easier, although probably more expensive.

April Flowers

We have had our share of April showers this week. Thursday and Friday were two long days of intermittent rain, hail, and wind, broken occasionally by short, unpredictable periods of surprising sunlight. The good news is, we have not had to wait until May for flowers.

Glorious daffodils sprouted suddenly almost everywhere I looked this week: along fences, around streetlights, in front of driveway marker stones, and then, most surprisingly of all, across the street at the end of our driveway, behind a fence in the treed barrier between our condo development and the strip mall parking lot to the south. We fell in love with that area the first time that we saw the house, but that was last September, when the area was lush with green, from low brush to high broadleaved trees, and you never would guess that there was a commercial development so close. During the winter, and since we moved in, the trees have been bare of leaves, and while that opens the sky to light and a view, I am also looking forward to the natural green curtain. So when we were returning from a short walk to the drugstore on Saturday afternoon, I was astonished to see a few clumps of green hidden behind the wooden fence, almost down the embankment to the tiny stream separating the two properties. Then I saw that the green clumps were supporting stems of paperwhite daffodils, all standing proudly and facing south, away from view.

How odd to plant the daffodils on the other side of the fence, I thought, and then I wondered whether there had been a fence there when they were planted, and who had put in the bulbs. Was it our next door neighbor whom we have chatted with from time to time, who is one of the original owners in this almost 30-year-old community, or was it the lady who had lived in our house, the third owner and now dead for somewhat over a year? I like to think the latter, and I hope she had at least one season to enjoy the fruits of her labor before passing. I give thanks and acknowledge that she could never have imagined how much joy they would bring to this new owner, recently moved from Spain, where she had not seen daffodils growing naturally in soil for more than ten years.