Of taxes and whatnot

I filed my taxes this evening, like the good American citizen that I am. I have an automatic 60 day extension because I work abroad. I'd just like to say, that my second year living in Taiwan and filing taxes in the US was immensely easier than the first year. While my co-workers and roomates were struggling through their tax forms and W-2s and waiting out their 300-some odd day physical presence in Taiwan test to exempt their foreign income for the past month, I waited until the last day before it had to be postmarked and then merrily finished clicking my way through Turbo Tax and had my forms all printed out and complete within half and hour. Wheee...
There are a few advantages to not being a newbie, after all.


I also finished preparing a package to send to my brother and his fiance Megan. Tomorrow I get to have a fun post office adventure. I say it like this, because the last time I had to go to the post office was to Fed Ex my Very Important Scholarship application, and the man behind the counter didn't know what "USA" stood for on my envelope. After a lot of phone calls and confused looks, he finally showed me and pointed and shrugged so I told him in Chinese. And then he was like "OOOHHH I know." He just didn't know the English letters. Which is weird, because everybody else does. I think if you are hired to work at the post office, you ought to know what "USA" stands for. So this time, just to be sure, I wrote it in Chinese characters right under the address to make sure it at least went to the right country. The time before that incident, I wanted to mail something to Suriname, South America. And I was with a Taiwanese friend, which was fortunate because he caught it right before in went into the bin. And they had stickered it to "South Africa". Augh!
A few weeks ago we had a day off from work for Dragon Boat Festival, so my roomates and I went to check out this tiny alley not too far away, where a man had decided to make his little neighborhood beautiful so he painted all the walls of the houses, the walls of the alley, and the street. It was colorful to say the least:







He had literally painted every inch of wall and street. This is actually somebody's house wall. And there were tourists everywhere. I would be a little creepied out if so many people were pointed cameras at my wall. We could actually see people inside through the windows, watching Tv. Weird.









My roomates and I pose for a picture, while a friendly English speaking dude takes our photo. This place is called "Colorful Alley" in English, and for good reason.






My friends have a little one year old girl. They bought this I suppose to educate her in such things as nature, deer, and forest life. Little did they know that instead of learning about mild sweet little Bambi the baby deer, she would see BAMB! Bambi's wild rock n' roll cousin.


As my friend Jacob, her father, said when I asked him if I could take a photo of his movie BAMB!
"Where'd "i" go?"
You would otherwise never be able to tell this isn't an authentic Disney copy of Bambi.

As I was walking home, actually from my friend's house where I took the awesome photo of BAMB! the movie,
I passed the corner 7-11 and this is what I saw.



I was only able to snap this photo before his owner came out.











Dogs may rule scooters on the street, but my cat sure rules at my house.
He somehow heard the song "The BIBLE, yes that's the book for me, I stand alone on the Word of God, the BIBLE!"


However, being too lazy to actually stand anywhere, he decided to adapt it to "I sit alone on the Word of God....and you'd better not get anywhere near it either or I'll bite you!! When I say alone, I mean it."



I'm sure this is what he would say if he could.



Anyway, that's all! It's almost July, which means.. lots of time on Sharon's hands! yay. So hopefully more blog posts to come.