This was one of my birthday gifts. It is an Aerogarden, which is a hydroponic system for growing plants indoors. They’ve simplified everything from planting to feeding to timing the lights. In theory I could grow plants just as effectively using dirt and grow lights, but I haven’t actually done that. Ever. And when I have attempted to grow seedlings, the results were unimpressive. This little garden makes me happy, even though it has only been planted for two days and there is not a sprout to be seen. Soon there will be sprouts. I’m looking forward to that. Green things are a joy during the midwinter months.
Flu has arrived at Chez Tayler. It is not a particularly welcome visitor, but there is no denying that it is here when I’ve got two kids running fevers. Howard just hit fever territory this evening, so he’s on the way down. I’m taking lots of vitamin C and hoping that at least some of us will be able to use the tickets we have for tomorrow to go see the ice castle in Midway Utah. Twenty four hours will tell.
I spent most of the morning doing accounting. I have now finished Stage 1 taxes. That is the part of taxes where I behave like a responsible employer and issue both 1099s and W2s. I also file all the accompanying reports with both the federal government and the state of Utah. Stage 2 taxes have already begun. They are where I accumulate incoming 1099s and K1s to make sure I have all the info in hand for actually filing tax returns for both our business and our personal taxes. Stage 3 is when I hand everything over to my tax accountant and she works her magic to turn everything into returns. Stage three begins in early February, but will have to sit around twiddling its thumbs while Stage two dawdles along to completion. It always seems to take until the end of February to track down all the loose papers.
Another portion of my day went into figuring out how to set up the new storefront for our online store. Because we assembled our sales mechanisms back in 2007 when small-scale e-commerce was barely getting started, our solutions have been a bit…clunky. Particularly since in order to accomplish all the functions we had to add services. For a while we had separate software for our online store and point of sale. We had two different merchant accounts to go with both of those services. Then my postage program was also a separate account. None of my programs communicated well with each other. And each thing was billing separately. Its been messy for years, but at least it was messy that I understood how to make work. But there comes a time to completely scrap the old messy system for something complex but fully integrated. I’ll be spending much of this week hiking the learning curve that is necessary to setting things up. Then there will be oh-so-much data entry as I’ve already figured out that my old system will not export in a way that lets me import into the new system. Data entry is tedious, but the clean start is good.
This day also contained quite a lot of email, some grocery shopping, and too much browsing of social media.
Aerogardens are awesome. Mine is growing tomatoes right now. Not as good as what I get on my balcony in summer, but much better than what I find at the store. Makes this miserable virus- filled winter a bit more cheery.