I guess I had better write something.
It’s Tuesday morning. I’m lying in bed. My back hurts. Nerves are on fire. After living with this for so long, it’s hard to tell what’s pain and what’s burning and whatnot.
Anyway… Sunday…
Sunday was a heavy equipment day. I got all the dirt moved to where it’s going to go. It’s not all spread out, but it’s where it’s going to be.
That took a good little while.
I also mowed the whole area around the greenhouse that’s been my home/staging area for over two months now.
That took a while as well, especially when I managed to run over a huge ball of wire that I didn’t see that was dragged out from all the dirt while doing all the dirt work
That wire stopped the deck blades cold, and there was so much of it tangled in the blades and wrapped around crazy tightly that I had to remove the deck from the mower and spend a good long time cutting and unwinding and cutting and unwinding and cutting and cutting and cutting and pulling and pulling and… yeah… took a while.
But eventually, I got the whole area mowed.
I think I also spent some time cutting up and burning wood down by the creek.
I separated the trunk of the tree from the stump, and floated it down creek toward the dam. In years past, I would have tried to get that huge thing out of the creek myself. Nowadays… nope. My spine is just too messed up.
After a long, dirty, dusty day working on moving and spreading dirt, I took a bath in the creek. I think I actually took two baths during the day.
I also got pretty dehydrated, as I didn’t eat or drink properly during the day.
While I was in the creek, I spent some time weeding the water’s edge where weeds are still poking up out of the water after the water level changed. These weeds are the ones that are growing right on top of the rock shelf in very little soil. It’s almost more of just a big mat of roots than it is actual soil.
After spending all day doing all that, I again worked on the reasonable compensation thing… all night.
It has to be done. I needed to have it done by morning so that I could get the information over to my one accountant who does my payroll stuff, so she could amend 2023’s 4th quarter payroll and send me back all the updated documents, so I could get them over to my other accountant.
When all was said and done, I didn’t sleep Sunday night, not a wink. I spent the entire night sitting on my bed gathering data to try and help make that determination for reasonable compensation.
I went through every single work day in 2023 and estimated how many hours I spent working–using the stalking feature of Google maps to see where I was during each day.
Sometimes Maps is pretty messed up, and so you just have to guess because it pukes and doesn’t know what it’s doing, but for the most part, it’s really really helpful to be able to go back and see.
So all night, through sunrise, and into the day I worked and worked. I also needed to get some information from my friend Miguel about the car we sold and how much and when.
Funny, I think I’ve got these great records, but it’s just not there. Nothing in my email. Nothing in my text conversations. No mention in my journal entries, which is absolutely insane, especially since it was a lovely little windfall to have made a bunch of money on that car.
Crazy.
So I spent a good chunk of the morning at Miguel’s shop, showing up before he even opened to make sure that I was able to get a hold of him and get that information.
Unfortunately, and understandably, especially for a Monday morning, he was already slammed, running around trying to get everything going for the week after having been out of town for the weekend.
So I tried to lighten the load a little bit, diagnosing one of the cars for him. It was a quickie to diagnose, so not a whole lot of work.
Chatted with him about the info I needed, but he didn’t remember and couldn’t immediately find any records. Fortunately, Koven came by, so I asked her about it, and she was able to find the records that showed date of sale and price.
🥳
And then I remembered that Miguel is also one of my few friends who I actually communicate with fairly regularly on Facebook Messenger instead of just regular text message. I rarely use Facebook Messenger for anything other than buying and selling stuff, but for whatever reason, I communicate with Miguel more on messenger than on regular text, and when I looked back over my conversations with him on Messenger, I was able to find a photo he had taken of the breakdown of expenses and profit for that car.
🥳
I’m glad I found it because my memory thought I made $3,200 on that car, but I thought maybe it could have been as high as $3,600, so I was going to report $3,600, but after finding the breakdown, I relearned that it was $2,666 and change.
So, that’s almost an extra $1,000 reported and then overpaid taxes on, but I try and overestimate so that I’m not owing the government anything.
After getting all that taken care of at Miguel’s shop, I headed down to the office of the company that’s renting my dump trailer. I was hoping to catch them there and to get a check for the first two months that it’s been rented, as no one has responded to me.
But no one was in the offices.
Ugh.
I’m really not liking this. They’ve had my dump trailer for almost 3 months, and now my nephew doesn’t work for them anymore, but they still have my trailer, and haven’t paid anything.
I didn’t think about putting a tracker on it because my nephew was working for them, and he’s a super good guy.
Now he’s not with them anymore.
Ugh.
From there I headed over to my mom’s house, and wargamed through the last bits of reasonable compensation stuff, chatting with my accountant for about 20 minutes on the phone, and learning one more very important piece of information that I was able to use that made a big change to the compensation.
With all the research that I had done and all the numbers that I had run, I had come to a number that was about $22,000 more than what was on my W-2. 😅
But then my accountant let me know that in figuring reasonable compensation, the government doesn’t expect overtime to be counted, so any hours more than 2080 don’t need to be included in the compensation evaluation: You just have to make sure that whatever is reduced is reduced in proportion, so if you were paid x amount for x number of hours to do x-task, and then y amount for y number of hours to do y task, then you had to reduce The number of hours in each category in proportion to the whole.
So if you worked for 100 hours, and 10 hours was spent doing a $15 an hour job and 30 hours were spent doing a $50 an hour job, then When you reduced the hours that were over and above the 2080, then you reduce them proportionally. 10% of the additional hours gets reduced out of the $15 an hour job, and 30% of the hours get reduced out of the $50 an hour job, etc.
So after getting that piece of information, I started writing in formulas in my Google sheet to automate all the numbers and come up with the final number.
Unfortunately, when I ran through the data, plugging in the formulas that I had written, I just couldn’t make it make sense.
The formulas were correct. The data that was coming out was correct, but when I looked at the results, I was like, there’s no way that that’s right.
So with zero sleep in my brain, and an already much less functional brain than I had in my twenties, I fought with and fought with and fought with the abstract concepts, but I couldn’t ever get them to work in my brain. Right formulas, wrong expected outcomes.
My mom tried to help, but I eventually just called my brother Richard. He’s just a straight-up genius, not to mention he has a gazillion other qualities that just put me to shame.
Gratefully, and unsurprisingly, he was able to help me see where I was off. We went through my formulas, and they were all correct. I had just fixated on one of the results that didn’t make any sense and it didn’t make any sense because I was applying it incorrectly to the whole of the task at hand, so I was getting bogged down in one area thinking something wasn’t right, because my mind couldn’t grasp what it needed to grasp in order to understand what was going on.
Right formulas, wrong expected outcomes, meant total mind block on my end, but we got it.
It’s been really hard. I’d like to blame it just on no sleep at all last night, and maybe that was part of it, but I also know that since my twenties my ability to do abstract thinking like I used to do when I was a teenager is just gone. My brain used to be so quick. I used to be able to grasp and churn through things lightning quickly, like Richard. But something happened in my twenties, I don’t know what it is, and since my twenties, I’ve lived in brain fog.
I’m sure I’ve probably mentioned it before but I remember, when I started working for my brother Jared, I remember recognizing that my ability to do abstract, complex thinking was diminishing. I noticed that I could do it in the mornings, but then I was toast pretty much the rest of the day.
I used to be good all day.
Nowadays, I think the brain fog is pretty much permanent. It’s a rare day indeed when my clarity and quickness of mind comes back and my brain races around its old speed.
It does happen, but it is exceptionally rare nowadays.
Anyway, I got the numbers finalized, and my lovely mother fed me some food, and I dropped off the tarp that we’ll be using to cover Happy (what my mom named the Z3) while we’re gone.
I’ve tried to find an affordable computer for ET, but I’ve had zero luck. I loathe the idea of spending nearly $700 for a computer on a van that’s rusting out and has an atrocious rolled/brushed on paint… coating.
But you can’t just bypass a computer or buy a cheap aftermarket one or do some kind of Jimmy rigging. You have to have a computer, or the vehicle doesn’t work at all.
What to do, what to do… ugh.
I left my mom’s around 5:00 or so in the hopes of getting to Rover before it had completely cooked in the sun. Gratefully, when I got there, it hadn’t cooked yet. I drove it to the other side of the field and parked it in the shade, and then I went down and hung out at the creek for a while, cutting up some wood and burning it in the burn barrel and just hanging out with my legs in the creek looking stuff up, keeping an eye out for the hungry mosquitoes that began coming by regularly.
From there, I retired to Rover for the night, looking up junk yards and phone numbers to call in the morning in a last-ditch effort to find a computer for ET.
I found that the company that sells remanufactured computers online upped the already massive price from $611 plus tax to $642 plus tax. But I found a place online where they were still listing it for $611. Not until you clicked the link was it $642, but the link to get you there says $611.
So I got in touch with customer service and since I had bought a computer from them before, they were willing to change it back to the previous price.
They gave me an invoiced link with the previous price, good for 24 hours.
So I’m going to talk about it with my mom, and I guess we’ll get it figured out.
I’m not ready for this trip.
So much more I wanted to get done.
But whatever.
In other news, I think I’m starting to lean away from staying in Arkansas. The humidity just kills me, and I want to be able to sit out in nature without having to fend off ticks and chiggers.
I haven’t fully made that decision, but I’m tired of being covered in bug bites and not being able to really enjoy nature because I’m having to take all these precautions and always be concerned about ticks and the tick diseases that are so prevalent here.
I guess we’ll see.
What else… My commitments have fallen off a cliff. Well, I’m still doing well with the vegan thing and swearing. I’ve got swearing down to pretty much zero except the occasional unintentional flyer, maybe once a day now. I don’t think I’ve sworn at all for the last couple days, not even flyers.
So that’s something.
But I couldn’t manage to stay away from my phone screen. Movies, YouTube stuff… In the emotional state that I’m in, I need to be able to check out and just mindlessly consume as a break from the overwhelm in the brain.
As was suggested to me, trying to keep all the commitments I made all at once, probably wasn’t a good idea.
I need to take my walk about. I need to be able to get away from all the pressures of this business and the hill and all my stuff.
I hope this little road trip will be good, but it’s not going to be my walk about, I don’t think. I’m going to be leaving a bunch of stressors here on the hill. Putting it off… again.
That’s what I was hoping to avoid.
But maybe it’ll be good for me. Maybe the time away, despite knowing that I’m going to be coming back to the same mountain of stuff that needs to be done… Maybe just the time away will help.
We can hope.
But right now I have to figure out how we’re even getting out on this trip, as ET is a no-go without a computer.
I’m tired and stressed out. So much to do still.
~ stephen
Lift the World 