Collegium brainstorming

So clearly it's time to start thinking of a class to teach at West Kingdom Collegium in late April. I'm already involved in one proposal for a panel-discussion sort of thing on strategizing compromises in fabric choice for historic costuming. But I'd like to do something else on my own. I can't fall back on my usual "what new thing have I learned lately?" And my mind always goes blank trying to remember what people have said they'd like me to teach (either repeaters or new classes). I suppose I could do one of the shorter slide-show classes that I put together for the Vallejo Music Theater lectures last fall. The one on problems and sources in researching medieval Welsh costume has some more broadly applicable methodological themes. But I always get stuck trying to think what people might like me to reprise from older material. It's sort of like being at a bardic circle or filksing and have someone say, "Sing something!" If I don't have any new material, it's all pretty much the same to me and I have no clue what people might want to hear if I don't get a more specific request.

Today To-do

First step in Getting The Taxes Done is accomplished -- I've crunched up the 2008 expenses in order to have them conveniently available for inserting in the forms. (Actually, the first step was buying the 2008 copy of Turbo Tax.) Now to excavate all the relevant tax-related statements from the pile of non-urgent mail on the dining room table.

A taxing day

Well, I didn't quite manage to finish the taxes completely, since I discovered that I don't seem to have received the official 1098 for my mortgage. (Got the 1098 from the same institution for my equity-line loan.) I guess it's possible that I received it and it's somewhere in the unexcavated part of the dining room table. At any rate, I'll nag Wells Fargo about it tomorrow. I have the numbers roughed in from the monthly statements, but if I'm saying "X appears on the 1098" then I want to be certain it's true. At any rate, I have some notion what my refunds will be, which is nice. (And yet one more nice thing about Turbo Tax is that if my roughed-in numbers aren't quite correct, the changes will be propagated automatically. Yay.) I don't know why this process is so mentally exhausting. Maybe it's all the ancillary activities, like making sure the year's receipts and statements are all organized and filed. And doing the 5-year archiving of the various document folders. (You know, all those old utility statements, bank statements, etc. etc. that one keeps forever.) And running around tracking down random numbers that I forgot I was going to need. And deciding how the odd random deductible expenses should get categorized. And ... yeah, mentally exhausting.