Morning thoughts

Projects are doing ok. Now that I've closed of the Law Office of Wesley YS Chang site I can concentrate on the 2 other main ones I have before my vacation next month. The law site had a minor trip up the other day where everyone could see the site but the office themselves....I thought, "Oh my god what did I do?". Turns out it was their internal network and not my issue. Whew!

Tiki's Grill & Bar is coming along...I feel some momentum now and I'm hoping that can pull together by the end of next week. It's a pretty far out design and like all of my projects, I'm trying to push my limits a bit further on this one to see how it turns out. It's not the design so much that's unusual about this site, but I'm really being super nitpicky about the details of the content. Almost every piece of text I'm taking time to make sure it looks perfect.

I'm really starting to get the hang of CSS stylesheets more and more in my designs. For those not in the field, CSS is just another one of those trendy ways of programming websites these days that's getting a lot of attention as the "only way" to program future websites. I used it a lot in the law site, but it's taken a little step further for Tiki. It still won't be 100% CSS because there's a whole lot of graphic involved and I've still yet to learn how to separate that content from the text data itself. I'm more involved in weaving the CSS into my traditional code.

I have a Pacific Fitness Alliance site to start to get together before vacation as well. Whew! Busy!

I saw my accountant yesterday. Or at least another gentleman in my CPAs office to help me with my Quickbooks. There's nothing "Quick" about quickbooks...this guy once even taught classes in Quickbooks and he stumbled here and there in the tutorial. But he's helping to train me how to use it better and I hope soon it will be more 2nd nature to use it as a tool for my business.

I'm finding my CPA is conservative when it comes to business writeoffs. They are reluctant to let me document things that might be questionable when it comes to taxes...which is good and bad I suppose. Oh! Don't get me wrong, I don't want to cheat the system, but little things have been scrutinized.

Take, for instance, they saw one receipt I had documented as "Coffee for business" on my ledger. It was something like $2.50. They told me that's a grey area that would most likely be something the IRS would consider as personal purchases rather then business. Other things like lunches and stuff they said if I had a non-client with me in any of those meetings, it would be better off not listing these as writeoffs.

That's pretty conservative as opposed to the accountant my programming buddy has where he's been encouraged to write just about anything off as a business expense (e.g. clothing, video games, cable TV, etc.) The good thing for him is that he can get away with it and get more back during taxes...I guess my only consolation is that a conservative accountant will prevent me from getting in future audit trouble. I don't know if I should be wishing my buddy gets audited to feel better? hmmmmmmmmmmmm...... nah, that's cruel hehe.

My girls coming soon. She already picked up her tickets. Picked up all her gifts she got for my parents and my friends...how sweet of her. While having her come visit is one of my most anticipated events coming up soon, I have a part of me that fears having her come because there can always be a chance it wouldn't work out and that would be an end to all this euphoria we're both having now. Real or imagined euphoria. Well, nothing I can do about that, she's proven she loves me and I can only have faith in that so far.

I know it's better we spend time together and finding out if it works, rather then having 2 souls trapping themselves into a relationship that's make-pretend..... well..... I feel inside that this has a good chance of working out. So far I think I have a good amount of healthy hope about this, while keeping realistic about the possibilities.

Well, better get to working......