Red red white red red! Also, vigilance sure is the watchword.

This week was heisenbug's and my 27th anniversary. In binary this is pleasingly symmetrical, 11011, or as we like to say it:



So that's pretty great, and we went out and had the prix fixe menu at Tallula to celebrate.

The rest of life? Well, tracking down weirdness keeps leading in unexpected directions.

• Trying to do taxes (which means digging tax forms up from all the websites ever), I noticed that I had some random Zillian stock sitting around from almost a year ago, vested just before I quit. Weird and unintended. Will sell at the end of March.


• Also in the name of taxes, I looked at my dividend income and figured out why my dividend payments all through 2025 had been lower than I expected based on 2024. Answer: one investment account has been flipped to "pay out the dividends" and the other is still on "reinvest dividends".


• The really annoying one was insurance though. I was looking into a problem with my own umbrella insurance. But by enlisting fucking chatbots, I finally figured out that my insurance on the mixed-use mixed-ownership house at Blue-Green Street was wrong! In fact it was not the right kind at all anymore and didn't cover the use we've been putting the place to for more than three years now. So uh, shit! That's a massive chink in my armor, and my squirrel's armor, too. I spent a bunch of time on the phone with Liberty Mutual, and now we all have the right kind of insurance. But it was a huge "yikes" moment to realize that the onus is on us little people to inform the companies about changes we make to a house, or even to how a house is used (like renting out part of it). If you don't, and you get a claim filed against you for something that wasn't covered, they can turn down your claim for "misrepresentation". What a nice thing for the town to have potentially told us when we were getting our ADU approved in 2023, huh? You would think. Yes. You Would Really Think.

So I'm again really sick of Financial Chores and how easy it is to mess up, but my investigative instincts are also fired up because wherever I turn over a rock, I seem to find something to fix that I wasn't even looking for. So now I'm working to better understand the monthly cash flows of my new life -- three little income streams are harder to track than one big one, but I think I can get it down to a monthly checklist.

Athletic stuff has also not been great. Coming back from the rhinovirus is one thing, and single digit temperatures mean that stretching just hurts. We had some great hand-to-hand last week, but today they were gone again, the little jerks.

To end on some fun notes -- I did a cyr wheel taster class with apfelsingail, and the rolling of the wheel felt kind of delightful even though I'm not going to pursue it for now. I'm doing okay on Flash Fiction February so far. And I also watched a squirrel (the real kind) steal half a corn cob from my neighbor's porch before hauling it all the way up my tree and in through the front door of her squirrel nesting box! I guess we're not the only ones who go for takeout when it's cold.