shannon_a

We had our two final days in San Martin.

Yesterday, our big event was a trip up to the Dickens Fair in South San Francisco. Kimberly and I had actually wanted to go to the Dickens Fair in 2019, just before we moved to Kauai, but she ended up in need of surgery that year, and I was packing for the move, and it was a mess of a year, so we never made it. That made it terrific when my mom asked if we were interested in going (as one of her pickleball players could offer her discount tickets).

The Dickens Fair was a lot of fun. I hadn't really known what to expect, as it was five years ago that I really looked at the description of the Fair, but I hadn't expected it to be a little miniature London, more or less, with little shops along roads, all inside some of the smaller buildings behind the Cow Palace.

Most of the buildings (really, 15x15 or so stalls, but most of them were built out to look like buildings) were for craftsmen showing off the wares. We saw a lot of gorgeous things there. Some pottery stalls caught our eye almost immediately, and we had fun looking at owl pots and turtle pots and such. We also gawked at jewelry, musical instruments, Christmas ornaments, and other classical materials. There were also some stalls that were doing more interactive work. One of them (where my mom's friend who got us the tickets worked) was painting Christmas ornament. I would have done that to have a memento for our Christmas tree, except it was really jammed when we went by. There was also a fairy house making stand which looked pretty cool. (Both were of course full of kids, but I wouldn't have had any objection to taking part in a "kid" activity.)

There were also performances. We saw some sea chanties as we came in, and also watched a performance of the Ghost of Christmas Future scene from A Christmas Carol. They were both impacted negatively by the huge loudness of the crowds. In particular, we could only hear a few actors in the Dickens piece, and even they went in and out. Which is terrible, because they'd clearly put so much work into it! However, we also saw a neat band doing a great classic song (though they were just finishing up as they got there) and also another band doing dance numbers, with lots of classic dancing going on. That was actually the height of the performances for us. We watched the dancing for several songs before heading on.

Oh and finally there was food. We circled around a while and settled on Fish & Chips. My mom and Kimberly ordered fish & chips and I ordered shrimp & chips. Which perhaps was a mistake. The fish & chips were just handed off immediately but for the shrimp order (or for oyster or calamari), they handed you a ticket of a specific color (white, red, or yellow) and then every once in a while they'd bring out an order and shout "RED TICKET" (or whatever) and then as far as I could tell you had to fistfight the other customers to get the order. We all milled for a while, and watched the results of the first few fistfights, as the victors carried their seafood away in triumph and the bloodied losers crawled back to the scrum. Eventually one of the staff explained that we were supposed to be in another line waiting for our food and then the front people would take their food first. Almost sensible. So we started doing that, though at this point I wasn't going to let anyone lurk when they were supposed to be queueing, so I almost got into a fistfight forcing someone back into the line. That's why it was only _almost_ sensible: because of the total lack of documentation or UI. But I eventually got my shrimp and it was good.

We had some chocolate chip cookies too, and those were excellent.

As I've alluded throughout this, the Fair was *very* crowded. It's the biggest crowds I've been in since COVID struck. I did wear a mask throughout, as did Kimberly. Except while eating. Hopefully we managed to stay clear of sickness, but it was just a little unnerving.

(Total number of masks seen in the crush of thousands over the course of four hours or so: somewhere between a dozen and twenty, including our two.)

Other things done these last two days:

1) A bit of practice on the uke. He's Got the Whole World in His Hands and When the Saints Come Marching in. I'll probably practice on Kimberly's when I get home, and then a little birdie told me there might be a uke coming for Christmas.

2) Some more games. (Calico.)

3) We watched both parts of Dune (though we actually started that earlier in the trip than these last two days: it took us two sessions to watch each looooong movie). Bob is always happy to watch something with us in the evenings, and this time he suggested Dune, which was an excellent choice. I think I've read the book twice, and consider it a masterpiece. But the movie was a masterpiece too, really a high point for special effects and directing that felt totally in tune with the source material. Kimberly and I have added Dune to our read-aloud queue, but we first need to finish up _On Color_, _Norse Mythology_, and the _Magicians_ trilogy.

4) Finally, I helped Bob move around a bunch of furniture today, because starting tomorrow they are knocking out a wall in their house to combine their family room and living room into a great hall.

We were going to visit my sister on the way up to Berkeley, but thanksgiving-crud has descended on the household, so it was straight up to Berkeley instead (other than a drive-by stop to drop a present on the doorstep and just wave at my sister from the car).

But that meant we got a quick drive up to Berkeley (thanks mom!).

Last year I avoided Air B&Bs because of mediocre experiences in Germany (and in Berkeley the previous year), and we also wanted to make sure Kimberly had some place accessible because her knee was very bad. This year the prices had shifted around again and I decided an Air B&B made more sense. I always find us somewhere pretty close to BART, and this year that was Rockridge BART. The place had been deeply discounted, I think because they were a relatively new listing looking for ratings. It's gorgeous. Beautiful furniture. Thoughtful amenities like charging platforms (discs) for mobile phones. Really nicely remodeled. Bright lighting in all the rooms. We paid about $200 a night and I'd bet it's $300 a night next year. But if not it's definitely on my would-stay-again list, at least based on what it looks like when we arrived. It's probably the nicest Air B&B I've ever stayed at, though I just barely remember a pretty nice Air B&B we were at in Waikiki for just a night after Kimberly's foot surgery a few years ago.

When we got up to Berkeley, we had dinner scheduled with N., the officiant for our wedding. We had great Chinese food of a sort we really don't get in Hawaii (including mu shu, which is definitely missing from most or all Kauaian Chinese restaurants). And a few hours of great conversation with an old friends. (She'd led a writing group that both Kimberly and I had participated in, which was why we asked her to officiate.) So, a good start to the visit up North.

We'll be in Berkeley for 4 more nights and I have things scheduled every night, but the days are mostly free. I want to see Wicked when I'm out here, because it's not even showing on Kauai! The one theater on the island, which just shows one show at a time, had some movie I'd never heard of scheduled last week, then Gladiator 2 this week, then Moana 2 after that. But here I can just walk a mile and see Wicked. I'd like to hike in the hills. And I'd like to wander around Golden Gate Park. If I manage all of that, that'll probably be my three free days, Tuesday to Thursday. But we'll see!

Since we've moved to Kauai, we've been hitting any number of milestones as we settle into life here on the island. Once of our big milestones occurred in 2020, when we sold our house in Berkeley, about a month after planned due to the oncoming pandemic.

Our expectation at that point was that we would spend much of the year doing some affordable work on our new house in Hawaii, particularly getting our solar power in and the downstairs fully functional with our offices and a library, and then we'd pay taxes in 2021, and then we'd do the last bit of work on our house, primarily getting a retaining wall built in the back so that I stop trying to break an ankle on the hellish hillside that makes up most of our back yard.

The taxes were an important milestone to put in the middle there because they would tell us how much of the money from the house sale was truly ours. I had a guess at what our tax liability was (and it turned out to be a little low only because I didn't get into sync with paying estimated and excise taxes in 2020), but there was enough room for surprise that I didn't want to do the big expenditures, like that retaining wall, before we'd settled with Uncle Sam to add his share of our capital gains to the community good.

And then COVID really locked us down in ways that I hadn't expected, so that even when we could start socializing with other people again (like contractors!) I didn't really want to because no one was passing the doors of our house except me, Kimberly, my Dad, and Mary. Oh, we did the solar power, because that wasn't really an option: we wanted to make sure we got the tax break on a year that we had high tax liabilities, else we might not get to use it all. But the idea of bookshelves mostly got put on hold until December, and then after some failed attempts to get builders out, we ended up starting some reflooring instead. Which is another story.

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So, taxes.

I've done my taxes on my own for decades. I well remember in the '90s filling out my 1099s, Schedule Bs, and Schedule Cs by hand, printing in all the numbers and toting it up. In more recent years, I used TurboTax.

But for 2020, I knew that I needed to hand them off to someone else, because of the complexity of that house sale.

Oh, I had not guessed how much time it would take to do that though. Usually, I sit down with TurboTax and my folder of tax documents and in an evening of 4-5 hours can get the whole thing done.

But this time, I had my folder of tax documents, plus three voluminous folders of stuff related to the house, plus my documents on Bitcoin sales since that's how some of my clients pay. Plus I needed to digitize everything for my accountants. I ended up producing a 167-page packet for my accountants. My brain has not retained how long it took, the horror, the horror, but I think it was around 2 full days of work (e.g., 16 hours).

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From there it seemed like it was going to go easily, since the only immediate question we got back was what date we'd moved to Hawaii.

And then the accountants got deep into the house sale. I'd always known this would be a complex issue since there was some transfer of value between my Dad and Mary and Kimberly and me. But the big surprise was that there'd been a 1031 exchange as part of the purchase, which meant we had to dig back to a condo that Mary had bought in ... 1980.

Yikes. There was some stress there as I wondered if we were going to have to pay the full value of that condo as capital gains, but we eventually found enough records and Kimberly and I signed, and the taxes went out somewhere at the start of May.

Whew. Milestone complete?

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Nope. A few day later my accountants let me know they'd made a mistake.

They'd set up a 401k for my new Designers & Dragons LLC, which lets me save more money than I could with an IRA. Which is super-cool. I set up the LLC mainly to make sure our assets are secure and separate from my writing, but getting to do a 401k too is great, and helps pay out some of the cost of maintaining that LLC.

Except my accountants had thought it could be fully funded after the end of the year, which is how IRAs work, but it turned out they could only do investment, not profit sharing, or something like that, at least for the year the 401k was created. So they'd told the government more of my income was exempt than was allowable.

No problem. They fixed everything up and sent me a new amended return, whose only major flaw was that it had to be filed by hand to two of the people (Hawaii and the Feds, I think).

So I paid our original tax bill about a week before the delayed deadline of May 17, and then delayed the amended returns as long as possible to try and minimize any confusion.

So on May 17, during a trip into Lihue for a doctor's appointment for Kimberly, I stepped over to the Lihue Post Office, which was pretty much in the same shopping center, and sent off my final two tax returns (and their checks).

Whew! Milestone complete?

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Not yet.

Hawaii has been a pain in the ass.

First, they lost the payment I made them on April 15. They were the only state in the Union not to delay taxes this year. So I had to send them our best guess at our bill, when we got our (automatic) extension, a month before the filed our final returns

AND THEY LOST IT.

Second, they were refusing to credit the tax payments we'd made to California.

You see, states have been getting increasingly greedy about taxes in recent years. Over in California I definitely saw it, with their ridiculous threats of use tax for things bought on the Internet and their attempts to grab income tax that was in any way related to the state (even if neither the corporation nor the contractor was there).

And so one of the increasing threats has been double-taxation from two different states. And indeed both California and Hawaii wanted taxes for our sale of the house.

States have mostly been making agreements with each other about this, but the Feds finally cut the legs out from under them by outlawing double taxation in 2016 or so.

So, we get situations like this where Hawaii really wants to tax the income I earned in California, but they have to credit all the tax I already paid to California, which effectively means that I pay the higher tax rate of the two states. Which is fine. In this case, they're both similarly high, with Hawaii just barely edging California out for income tax at least (dunno on capital gains).

But they are required by law to do that credit. And they were refusing.

We don't know 100% what happened.

We just know that they entirely refused the tax credit on the first income tax return, and then they noted the lack of the right form in the amended return. (It indeed wasn't there, but it was in the original, and I presume our accountants it wasn't necessarily to include again.)

Fortunately my accountants have been helpful and are directly talking with Hawaii and at least for the moment aren't charging us extra. They sent in the full documents again to a special contact they got (who told them that Hawaii was really picky when the credits were high enough, as ours were), and we're hoping it'll be dealt with.

And meanwhile Hawaii has found the money they lost.

But, not technically done yet. Sigh.

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Still, I'm counting this milestone as basically done. We should have paid everything we needed to. And if somehow Hawaii were able to violate Federal Law and make us double-pay our California earnings, it's a known amount.

So, onward. I've told Kimberly I'm ready for a retaining wall, mainly because our backyard has become increasingly difficult to clean up in recent months because our neighbor on the downhill side stopped dealing with her yard about six months ago, and now I have buffalo grass taller than me that i have to work beside as I mow that side of the world. If we can get a retaining wall right up alongside that property line, that becomes no longer my problem.