Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

heat and taxes

The landlord finally turned on the heat, so I woke up this morning with a cold. The dry heat dried up my nose and throat, and now I’m in the beginning stages of a bug. I fly on Friday, so this sucks. I’m going into full cold prevention mode – tons of vitamins, tons of juice, soup, zinc nasal spray every two hours, the whole deal. I also need to sleep as much as possible, but I’ve got a lot of crap to get done before I leave.

The IRS finally sent me a check for my 2000 taxes. I refiled these recently, and after a lot of runaround, I shook about $300 dollars out of them. This is great, especially right before a trip, but considering they got me for about $1400 earlier, I won’t be singing the praises of the treasury department any time soon.

I spent most of the weekend picking at this book of short stories, which really needs a name. It’s at about 40,000 words, so I’m slowly making progress. It’s strange to be writing about 1994 like it was ancient history, but it’s nice because I kept a journal then and I can check a few of my facts. Unfortunately, I’m finding that my old journals are not that well-written. Instead of spending time writing about what was happening in the present, I went on a lot about how I wanted to get the hell out of Bloomington.

I think I’m too out of it to write. I just looked at a packet of crackers and could have sworn they said “online crackers”, when they actually said “saltine crackers”.