Baseball, a fruit cup and an edit.....

Ah, my final morning in Hong Kong this trip.  A Sunday morning, psychologically relaxing me a bit more because there ain't no one doing anything outside this morning.....hell, at 10 am, they are still likely to be in bed - especially here in mid-levels.....

The Dodgers are ahead of the Cards 7-1 on the iMac - how pleasant it is to be able to watch a live game while typing away.   Yesterday afternoon, after Katherine and I went our post-lunch separate ways, I purchased 2 fruit cups from the local stand.....we're each having a fruit cup for breakfast.

I finished an edit of an article whose words flowed smoothly.......I start, tomorrow, on my TII article.

And tonight.....the final FinCEN 114s!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A long, long wait

There is a sushi bar on the third floor of IFC Mall.  It always has a wait - unless one goes around 3:30-4pm for lunch.......

We went at 7:30pm and had an 80 minute wait - I displayed a patience previously unheard of from me - but I had to wait - it was the least I could do after Katherine's learning FinCEN 114 input.   There are many who had duplicate efforts that were both subsequently accepted by the IRS.  There were a few triplications and quadruplications of filings also accepted.    While all under my name and I wonder if my name will come under scrutiny, I wonder more if they are even going to be looked at as this is such an error-prone, confusing (in parts) system in its first year of operation........and that is why I urged everyone to file to get it all on initial record (that will not be looked at).......because I have no doubt that they are going to change the system, next year, and ask for newly reported accounts in subsequent years whether this account was opened in the current year - to penalize future discoveries of prior omissions.......

Devious, true....but would you expect anything different from the guys who are running all of this??

FinCEN 114

I was promised the world and instead, I got a can of warm, smelly excrement!  And yet, I cannot truly place blame upon Lacerte Software Corporation, my tax software provider since 1992.   The have a system to which I am the exception falling so far out of the bell curve that no one could justify a permanent one person patch.

They tried.   And in the process of trying, in taking down my anti-viruses, in assigning a phantom EIN, they truly fucked up my system and I fear I will have to purge the hard disk drive of everything and starting over.....starting over with the back up I actually have!!!!!

And thus, we (primarily Katherine Lipsher, MBA, EA) became expert at doing the FinCEN - for each individual, in a painstakingly slow bout of torture......and along the way, became convinced that the new system they set up cannot possibly work because of so many areas for which numbers had to be filled out when in fact there are none.......and for which, after looking at the returns efiled by clients, there are going to be far more 'variations' in answers than the government possibly could imagine......and I wonder..............

Other than that, life is nice, albeit kind of hot and humid, here in Hong Kong......

The war that I lost.........

4+ days

Breakfasts

Lunches

Dinners

in-between meal snacks with reckless abandon

I ate my way through Hong Kong, this trip, wiping out any diet accomplishments of recent........true, the trip was a sucsessful business trip to Hong Kong but food wise, this was an unmitigated, f--king disaster!

Homeward bound today....and hopefully better diet control!!!

The war the Google lost.....

Yeah, gmail was my back-up email.  No more.  Shortly before the end of May, the absolutely horrendous connection problems of getting on gmail in China were, it appears, resolved:  now there is no chance in hell that one will get on at all!!

Because of the 25th anniversary of a 'non-event' in Beijing,  everything Google was jammed.   I can live without the Google search engine.  There are alternatives.  I find not accessing Google news an inconvenience....but I am ending my reliance upon gmail in China.  Yeah, I will keep the address and utilize all things tied to it but it is time to get a local email address in China as my back up.......

Such is life....