Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I signed up to play some preservice music on the piano at church before the service on Sunday. Whenever I play in church, I always remember a story that I just realized isn’t on my blog. Time to share it with the world…

When I lived in Jersey, my church in King of Prussia had a very consistent organist named Eunice. She was there every Sunday and she was good. But then… she went on vacation. For two weeks! Somehow the search for a replacement organist came around to me. They were really scraping the bottom of the barrel because I only played the piano and had barely ever sat at an organ. I did write about this briefly before. Here’s a quote from that post:

I definitely offered my own rendition of a couple hymns. As one guy put it, “I leaned over to my wife and said, ‘Wow Eunice is really having a bad day.’ Then my wife told me that Eunice was on vacation.”

That post must have been after the first week. The second week was even worse. Pastor wanted to use a special settings on the organ for one verse of a hymn. He got it all set up and said “Just press this button to switch to the special setting in between verses.” Easy enough? I bumbled my way through the hymn, pressed the button in between verses, pressed the keys and …. NOTHING. There was no sound coming out of the organ and I had no clue why. The congregation awkwardly started singing a cappella. I rebooted the organ to try and reset it to the default settings. That worked but it made big clunking sounds as it turned off an back on.

Strangely enough, after those two weeks of mistakes, they never asked me again. In retrospect, I either should have declined the request, or I should have just sucked up my pride and played one finger. Playing an organ is a LOT different than a piano even if you ignore the pedals because there is no sustain pedal. That difference is no ingrained in my brain.

We recently had another bi-annual Survival Sunday. I feel compelled to do less checking for the spring one than the fall one since we generally lose power in the fall, but we did do a few key things like changing out our stored gas and removing food items that were near expiration.

We’re slowly refining the types of foods that we keep in the survival rations box. Here are a few of the considerations:

1. Canned items generally last longer. I don’t like to buy things unless they’re good for another 1-1.5 years. Otherwise we just keep replacing them over and over again.
2. Don’t go overboard. In all but the most extreme cases, you’ll still be able to access the normal food that’s in your house and I bet you can coast a long time just on that even if the power is out.
3. Stock up on water. A family of three will use ~1.5 gallons a day just for drinking. Our goal is to have enough on hand for 3-5 days. Our emergency rations are largely made up of water jugs!
4. Buy food that you’re willing to eat in a normal situation. We don’t like to toss the food so if it’s not going to last until the next Survival Sunday, we put it in the pantry and eat it.

Everybody has their own comfort level with this stuff so find your own and plan accordingly. I feel good about the extra level of backup we get from a few hours of work per year, but I also know that we are almost certainly never going to dig into these supplies for a real emergency.

Tyla and I are done with our taxes for 2016. This was our 11th year getting our taxes done by the same tax pro. I realized that I’ve never blogged about her so I figured I’d give her a plug this year.

We use H&R Block. I always feel inclined to defend that because we all know that many of the people at these tax preparation employees are not trained much better than you or I would be if we had a tax application on our computer. The very first year I moved here, I had a very complicated return so I decided to give H&R Block a try. Hearing that it was going to be complex, they scheduled me with their “best tax professional.” I would later find out that her name is Kelly Hall and she has not only been doing this for more than 25 years, but she also does a lot of the training in this part of the country.

Each year she happily plows through my mountain of paperwork in a one hour appointment. Along the way, she provides me with a wealth of suggestions of ways to save more money next year and tells me which kinds of records to keep to claim various deductions. Many of the years she even catches errors in the tax forms that I receive.

I walk out smiling because it only took one hour and because I’m confident that they were done right. I’m not leaving money on the table. There’s no way to prove this, but I’m sure that a lot of the money I pay in preparation fees is recovered by the additional ways she finds to save me money.

I also walk out thinking, “She made that look so easy. I should just use this as a model and do it myself next year.” And then inevitably there is some new complexity in my finances and I’m thankful to know that Kelly can take care of it for me.

The cost of tax preparation varies widely depending on the complexity of your taxes. Ours are fairly complex and we end up paying around $340. I have great respect for the many of you that I know do your own taxes. I’ve done my own before too and it makes me stress out too much for fear that I’m doing it wrong or missing large amounts of deductions. I’ve learned that paying the tax preparation bill is less painful than doing it myself. If your ratio works the other way then kudos to you!

If you want to try H&R Block for the first time, let me know. I have a referral coupon that will get us both some money.

P.S. Ok, since we’re talking about federal taxes, I also can’t resist urging you to make sure you understand how much money you actually paid in taxes. I’m not talking about the money the government might be returning to you, but the actual money that was withheld and kept by the government. If you know what you paid, at least you’ll be making more of an educated choice the next time you make a vote related to taxes. I would wager that 90% of our population has no idea how much they pay in income taxes.

Almost five years ago, I purchased a Weber Genesis E330. It’s an expensive grill and it was one of the best purchases I’ve made. Cheap grills work fine and I’m thankful for the ones I had before this Genesis, but their optimum lifetime is only a year or two and then it’s just frustrating. I’ve used this Genesis heavily for 5 straight years and it works almost as well as the day I put it together in any weather conditions.

This year I decided it was time to replace a couple parts so I called Weber to order some new burners. In less then 2.5 minutes, the representative was sending me 4 new burners for free because I had just squeaked in under the 5 year warranty for those parts. She even through in a new locking wheel for free.

I love this company! This grill is going to easily last me another decade or two. If you’re in the market for a grill, consider a Genesis. Yes, it’s a big initial investment, but over it’s lifetime, you’ll save money and you will enjoy grilling every time you fire it up.

Every week I listen to a podcast called Cordkillers. As the name implies, they cover all kinds of stories related to getting your TV over the internet. I’ve made it on to the show a couple times with letters that I’ve written. The most recent was episode 155 (link directly to my email) and they seemed to enjoy discussing my comment. They had been talking in a previous episode how the Netflix market was saturated and anyone who had ever thought about getting Netflix already had it. I wrote in to mention that we’re happy with Amazon Prime Video and YouTube.

And then the day after they posted that episode… I resubscribed to the Netflix streaming package. I picked it up every once in a while to watch shows and then drop it when we go a month without watching it. It’s so nice to be able to add and drop services on a whim in this new world. It’s so much easier than adding and dropping cable!

So you’ve never been to one, but you’re “butcher curious”. Here are some recommendations for you. If you’re in the same area as me, go visit Golden Steer Choice Meets, and if you’re not, just walk in and introduce yourself. They’ll probably be happy to help you out.

I’ve blogged about my Golden Steer Favorites before, but my list has changed a bit since then. Here are the top three things I recommend that you buy:

1. Maui beef ribs – Thin strips of meat marinated in their maui sauce. Grill for a couple minute or two on each side and enjoy.
2. Chicken bacon ranch burgers – These are preformed delicious patties.
3. Boneless rib eyes – This was the winner of our blind taste test of steaks. You can’t go wrong with this choice.

They regularly have new items to try out too. Our latest purchase included a few prime rib burgers. They were pricey but supposedly fantastic. We are still waiting to test them out ourselves.

The bottom line is that your local butcher knows their meat and they would love to share that delicious knowledge with you.

One of the afternoons over my Christmas break, I heard a truck idling in the cul-de-sac for 10 minutes or so. That’s usually some kind of delivery truck so I hollered down to Tyla and Elijah that they might want to check it out since Elijah likes that kind of thing.

Elijah ran to the front bay window and could see part of the truck. “Mommy? Why is that truck smoking?” Huh!? Tyla took him outside and saw a recycling truck parked there. It was indeed smoking and a nervous driver was walking around with a fire extinguisher. Tyla said, “Is everything ok?” “Uh… yeah… yeah… everything’s ok.”

It wasn’t.

A few minutes later, our little street was full of firetrucks. They unrolled the hoses and hooked up to the fire hydrant on our street. (Neighbors claimed it’s the first time that hydrant has been used in the 26 years since it was put in.)

The fire was somewhere in the recycling that the truck had picked up. The firemen quickly determined that they would have a hard time putting it out inside the truck. Also, it was a natural gas truck and they were nervous about some of the piping that runs over the bed of the truck. So how do you solve that problem? “DUMP THE LOAD!”

As the driver was dumping it, you could see flames coming out. The firemen dove in with rakes and the water hoses and had the fire out in a matter of minutes.

That whole process probably didn’t take more than 10 minutes. Then it was cleanup mode. The firemen rolled up all their hoses and handed out hats to the kids that had gathered around. Elijah was nervous but loved seeing all the fire trucks so close by.

After the firemen left, they had to leave the pile in place for the inspector. Tyla chatted with him briefly and learned that the root cause was someone who had thrown hot fireplace ashes in the recycling. Smart.

After the inspector was done, a dumpster got dropped off. Then a cleanup crew showed up with a Bobcat and a backpack blower to load everything into the dumpster. The dumpster got picked up and eventually a street cleaner came for the final pass.

I was really impressed with how Waste Management handled the whole thing. I’m sure this isn’t the first time it has happened, but they did a great job. They had someone on site managing the cleanup until the pile was gone and the contractors they used did a good job of cleaning up the street and our yard (about 5% of the garbage ended up in our planter area and yard.) We still pick up some small pieces of trash in the yard every now and then but overall, I’m amazed at how good it looks and little they damaged our yard.