Taxes in July has now become taxes in August and September. The IRS reduced our refund and sent us a Notice CP24 in the mail. The refund delta maps perfectly to taxes withheld on closure of an IRA payable to the estate of Mrs. Dress Pockets’ father. I tried to call the IRS telephone number to gather more information and explain my case and got lost in the maze of circular menu options. Somehow I landed with someone in payments, transferred, waited 30+ minutes, and call dropped. I then remembered the Tax Act all-inclusive bundle I purchased included some audit defense through a third party. We shall see if the experts at Protection Plus can restore our IRS refund.
The kids with the exception of the 2 year old are now back in school. Time really flies once the school calendar and clock start ticking. I have started dabbling with computer technology again on a table in the basement. This includes a Raspberry Pi 1, 3 and 5 running Debian Linux. Lubuntu has replaced Windows 10 on an old and underpowered HP Stream PC 13 laptop. I even used a handy utility called Rufus to upgrade Mrs. Dress Pockets’ almost as old and underpowered laptop to Windows 11. It has become a game to see if I can run Windows 11 without online Microsoft accounts and uninstall the Microsoft Edge browser. I haven’t been proficient with Windows since Windows 95 and Windows 2000. When I lose interest in the game, I will install Lubuntu.
I have been recovering data on numerous old USB drives and SD cards. My next task may be to recover data I had backed up to HFS+ formatted sparsebundles on an old Drobo 2. The interwebs tell me Drobo the company has failed since I last powered up the 4 spinning Western Digital drives configured with BeyondRAID. Perhaps I will even fire up an IRC client or roll up my sleeves to volunteer in the Linux community again. It is more fun when you don’t have to trade your time for money.
