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Reads like C++.

I started making up the Roman curses. It's so much easier. Bastard? Bastardus! Thus, Caligula becomes Little Bastardus. As Kdot said, Latin makes everything sounds cool: bacon - porcus flavius. Don't tell him, but I actually looked it up, thinking it might be real.

Kdot probably has more spreadsheets to track your books than I do for my own. My spreadsheet has weird sh*t in it, though. One sheet is a table dedicated to calculating global population decline caused by Dr. Ess. That's how I found out it's virtually impossible to wipe out most of the human race, even with 85% sterility due to the vaccine. It is cool to see the weird population swings across 100 years.

You go girl! (I'm speaking to Lady Kay, of course.)

Ke wan eats Ke ajo for Ke breakfast.

Thank goodness I have my handy dandy decoder ring to figure out what you're trying to say...

Cross-border issues can be a nightmare. I used Turbotax for years and it was very easy. However, it never warned me that additional forms are required for "US persons" with foreign bank accounts. After 15 years of not filing the necessary forms, I discovered the penalties for not submitting them for years could have wiped me out financially. Had to hire a cross-border tax lawyer and redo just six years of returns. Then came even more forms for the same damn Canadian retirement accounts. New penalties vary from a minimum of $10K to 50% of the value of each foreign account.

For tax year 2016, I'll have to do an "exit" tax return, a resident tax return (for 27 days), a non-resident return (for the rest of 2016), and a Canadian tax return. Canada now demands the same disclosure of foreign bank accounts, which will include all my U.S. accounts. Because of US retirement and pension plans, I also believe I have the privilege of having to do a tax return for both countries for the rest of my life.

Make sure you do your online FATCA filing on time. That's the most important. Virtually the same information is required on form 8938, which you submit with your tax return. If you have foreign accounts (even if they're retirement accounts), you may also have to pay income tax on yearly gains in those accounts. I got away without it because of our tax treaty with the U.S., but your mileage may vary.

Goodness, you're alive!

The lead plumbing hard at work.

Children, high stress job, 4 (5?) books in progress at once, and she still found time to review bomb me. Now in I'm down to just one straggler among my regular readers. So far, my to-do list doesn't allow me to resume writing for probably another month.

Made a simple phone call today to update Canada Pension Plan about my new address. Turns out, my social insurance number was flagged as dormant even though the morons have been depositing payments into my checking account for five years. Naturally, I now have to go somewhere "physical" to prove to them that I'm still alive and in Canada. They don't do it online. So a change of address becomes a two hour event, assuming there isn't a whole room packed with Canadian sheep in line in front of me.

Add to that a multi-week event changing my address with U.S. Social Security. Called a bureaucrat, proved who I was, only to be told that changing my address over the phone would lead to a termination of benefits. WTF? So I paid $100 roundtrip cab care to the U.S. Consulate only to be told they don't handle Social Security services in Calgary. Dumbass suggested I travel to the U.S. and visit a Social Security office in person. Having heard that I might lose my benefits, I started researching online, only to find out there is no clear answer. So I shelled out $300 for a phone consultation with a lawyer who was nice enough to tell me I didn't need her services. She referred me to an expert site and gave me a refund. The expert site didn't respond for over two weeks and several attempts, so I went back to the lawyer. She did a bunch of research to my questions and came up with "you're probably ok." A day later, the expert site responded with the same information. This dragged on for six weeks and $400 just to make an address change. I can't wait to file form 8022 with the IRS to give them my new address, too.

I won't even discuss the saga of my 8-month-old awesome Epson printer starting to blur the output. I'll save that saga until I know how it ends.

Nite all.