Home again, and more taxes

First off, watch this piece of genius.

Then read about these guys. There’s one picture with humans in it to give an idea of scale.

Today was better than yesterday, but not much. I again spent the morning with my laptop connected to a projector, with three system admins watching on the projector as I wrestled with building a cluster. It would have been better if two of them had made any pretense of having a reason to be there. At least the senior one was helpful and interactive.

Got home to a $2400 unpaid real estate tax bill. What? I thought that my mortgage was escrowing for this! Even better, had that been paid through 2004, it would have reduced my taxable income, resulting in a refund from the feds. Gah. Time to ask the H&R Block person if we can amend or something.

Edit

Called Wells Fargo this morning, and they’re taking care of the tax bill. Their position is that they were responsible for getting the taxes paid, and so they’re responsible for the late fees and interest. They’re paying the full amount due out of our escrow account to avoid further fees. When the time comes to rebalance the escrow account, they’ll adjust our monthly payment to make sure that we’re paying it off on time this year. Our monthly payments will increase (to what they should have been (had our &^$^$&%$ closing attorney done his $^$^%# job right), but I don’t need to front the money now.