Category: Blogging

I wonder if it says something about my writing that the less I write the more readers I seem to attract.

I’ve hit record numbers in the last few weeks, over 7000 visitors in January, and the first time I’ve had over 300 hits in a day, not to mention over 1,800 visitors in a single week.

Maybe if I quit writing entirely for the next few weeks I could double my readership.

Of course, looking at some of the recent searches makes me wonder exactly who is reading this page, and how many readers find their way here purely accidentally.

One suspects that high school teachers and college professors are going to have to do a better job of helping students to learn how to effectively search. I wonder if students even know how to use quotes, rather than +’s to narrow their search down.

It sometimes seems that the only ones who know how to do that are the programs that are looking for plagiarism, and some of them even seem unable to distinguish the quoting of an author’s passage from directly borrowing another writer’s ideas.

I sometimes expect that the sheer number of words in my site makes it more likely to receive hits. Given enough random words, you can find any combination of words can’t you? Does Google examine the quality of the writing, or does it just look for random combination of words?

I’m having trouble reading my usual amount of poetry because life keeps getting in the way.

I spent this weekend in Tacoma attending Gavin’s third birthday party. I failed to get any digital photos, though because I taped most of the party with my Canon digital camera. iMovie has made it so easy to edit home movies that I’ve once again been inspired to start taking home movies. It’s hard to run two cameras at once, so I limited myself to the digital movie camera.

Leslie and I spent most of Sunday at her daughter’s house, where she helped her daughter to make a quilt. Unfortunately I had forgotten to pack my poetry book as intended, so I didn’t get a chance to finish Bei Dao’s poems this weekend as I had intended.

Monday I’ll probably end up working ten hours or more since people who know they have refunds coming will swamp the office for the next few weeks. While that makes it difficult to keep up my web page, it’s really a good thing because I get paid by commission, and I need to make as much money as possible if I’m going to take the trip I’m planning to Scotland.

We really haven’t decided what trip to take, but we’re seriously looking at an REI trip .

After I got throat cancer last year, I decided it was time to do those things that I most wanted to do before it was too late. I’ve done some of them already, but I’ve always wanted to take a trip to northern Scotland, and this looks as good as any other trip I’ve seen.

Working at a tax agency at times makes me feel like I am “K” in Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle.

Most of my confusion and frustration in dealing with taxes stems from my obviously naïve assumption that the government is trying to help those who need and deserve help. Of course as an INTP I keep trying to find some logical structure behind the tax system. The only logical explanation is that two parties who had very different goals wrote the code.

For every person I find who seems to be helped by the system, I find another two who get little or no help because they don’t “fit the rules.” For instance, there was a young man who was raising his son alone while working a job and going to school who got a nice return that would help him continue schooling. The EIC helped him raise his child, the Education credit gave him a chance to improve his life, and the childcare helped him provide a good place for his child while he was working and going to school.

However, a young woman I was helping turned out not to be eligible for the child care she needed in order to work because she lived with her sister who paid most of the bills for the house they lived in. Because she wasn’t considered “head of household” she could not claim the childcare credit. Why should you have to live by yourself in order to claim childcare? Because her sister allowed her to share a house, was the sister also expected to take care of the client’s daughter for free, even though she had to work herself to pay for the house?

Another young woman who had been separated from her husband for three years but did not have a formal divorce was living with her mother. Because the mother was considered the “head of household” the daughter could not claim childcare or even the EIC because if you’re not head of household, you must file as Married Filing Separate, and cannot claim the EIC even though you could claim if you were single. Now this rule does makes sense because it prevents some married couples from filing as Married, Filing Separate in order to qualify for the EIC. But that didn’t make me feel any better when I told the woman that she wouldn’t be eligible for these programs.

I have to force myself to remember that I took this job to make money, not to help people. Still, it’s hard to break old habits. After all, I spent thirty years as teacher trying to help students make a better life for themselves.

Does this work any better than previous editions?