Author Archives: Alan V

Wedding’d!

Posted on by

So, uh. I guess I got married or something.

Yesterday was the first day in months that I wasn’t stressing out of my mind over something, and the first day in many days when I could actually relax and didn’t feel like I was neglecting something important to do. So yeah, weddings are srs bsnss, and are remarkably a lot of effort to put together. Tons of respect to everyone else that has gone through the process — I didn’t think I expected quite so many logistical things to follow and manage and deal with. (Also super props to the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, and specifically, Mike, who made the evening flow in ways we never would have been able to do and who was so instrumental in the entire process of figuring out times and setups.)

But yeah. The wedding itself was pretty much perfect, from our standpoint. (I hear from some people a couple of things didn’t go quite perfectly, like people not being let into the reception hall until after cocktails, and them forgetting to set out forks for the cake.) It was definitely not a typical wedding, but I think for the two of us, it was exactly what we wanted, and went off without any issues.

I somehow made it through my vows without completely breaking down and crying, and didn’t miss too many of my cues in the ceremony. So that was good. (Our officiant Marguerite from My Happy Day was also so, so good, and props to her for creating such a beautiful ceremony for us.)
I’m actually really glad we have a video of the ceremony, because I don’t actually remember much of it. It went by so fast, and I wasn’t really able to concentrate on things at the time. :)


Our centerpieces turned out quite well! It took until Friday morning to finish them up, but I think they were quite successful.


Escort cards! We spent Thursday night (during a huge downpour that left us stuck in Cyert for a bit) redrawing all of the icons to have more consistent line thicknesses. I think they all came out quite well in the end.


Games table! (Well, one part of one of three tables that had games on them.) We printed too many notepads, but the cards seemed to be popular. :)


Our photographers were so amazing to work with. Lori and Fred from FineLine were amazingly personable and friendly and easy to work with. I’m sure their photos came out awesomely as well (but it will be a few weeks yet until we see any of those).


We expected getting dressed to take like 15 minutes (how long can it take to put on a dress shirt, pants, tie, and vest?). Turns out I’m short, and my tie is long, and we had to re-tie it 5 times before it finally ended up a reasonable length with the front longer than the back. Patrick’s knowledge of tie-tieing and formalwear in general was incredibly useful. (Also yayyy Patrick! :D)


Chris! The holding room they had us in was so beautiful.


Once dinner started, we had a bit of a chance to breathe. And all we could think (and say to each other was) that “We made a thing happen. All these people are here because of us, and for us. Wat.” It’s incredible how many people made it out for us.


I really liked our (photo) guestbook.


Wedding bowling! :D :D

More photos and stuff will show up at some point once I’ve had a chance to start sorting them, and put the apartment back together a bit since it is currently full of boxes of wedding things.

Wedding… imminent

Posted on by

As followup to the last post, it turns out we don’t actually have bedbugs. Greg has not gotten any new bites, I have not gotten any new bites, and the inspector that came found no sign of bedbugs. That’s good news.
The IRS helplines are so flooded right now I haven’t been able to get through, so meh. Whatever. It’s not like any more damage can be done now anyway.

But life has been super busy with wedding things, but it’s all small details at this point.
Still on our TODO list are the escort cards, the wedding ceremony programmes, and finishing the centerpieces.

Our tables are not going to be numbered, but rather identified by their centerpiece (for example, an ITG Arrow or a camera). We’ve made the paper mache for all 17 tables at this point (consisting of 20 separate paper mache pieces). Many of them are fully painted already, also. It’s been a rather fun experience.



These paper mache pieces are going to rest on top of boxes covered with photos of people at that table. I think it will be awesome… or hopefully it will at least not suck, given how much of our lives (and weekends) these things have consumed.

I’m getting married in 4 days! Ahhhh!

When it rains, it pours

Posted on by

It has not been the greatest few weeks. In fact, it’s been a downright terrible two weeks, in many ways, with the exception of the rather awesome wedding.

The bedbug bites haven’t gone away yet, and in fact actually look a little angrier. But at least I haven’t gained any new ones since getting home.

It seems unlikely at this point that they will be faded by the time I have to get married. Fortunately there aren’t many on my hands, and I’ll be wearing long sleeves, but still. Argh blargh.
Time to look into makeup, maybe? Anyone know what kinds of concealer work well on arms for bug bites?

But on the other hand, Greg woke up on Friday with a couple of bites, and even more on Saturday. (His upper arm now looks a lot like mine.) Cue the freaking out that we missed something in our large sterilization campaign upon coming home. (It was a rather unhappy Saturday.) We spent most of the weekend cleaning the apartment for the inspector and trying in vain to find evidence of bedbugs.
Further research, however, shows that bedbug bites can take up to 14 days (!) to show up. So it’s entirely possible that we don’t actually have bedbugs, and all the bites are actually from the hotel in Florida. (This is supported by the fact that I have gotten no new bites since coming home, and he’d shown only two bites when we left Florida.)
We have an exterminator coming tomorrow to do an inspection to hopefully confirm the lack of bedbugs (or find evidence and put a plan in place). So that’s fun. But expensive. So yay for that.

Particularly so because OMG WEDDING THINGS is happening. There seems to be a pretty infinite list of last-minute things to do and the fact that I’m getting married in less than two weeks is finally sinking in. Super stressed out in general about that and trying to get everything done.
Fortunately, all the big things are done, so regardless of how much we drop the ball in the upcoming weeks, there’s still going to be a wedding. So that’s comforting at least.
(I kind of want to do a breakdown of all wedding costs once they’re finalized, but it looks like we’re going to be between $22k and $23k overall. Which is way over our initial estimate, but rather in line with our revised expectations. It’s been really weird spending money like this, and it isn’t something I want to get in the habit of doing, but hell if it hasn’t been really freeing to just be able to throw cash around on wedding-related things.)

I read an article today about how criminals were signing up accounts on the IRS website for people, downloading previous years’ tax returns, filing fake 2014 tax returns, and pocketing the improper refunds. So I went to sign up on the website… only to be told that the account already exists. So it seems very likely that I have been identity thieved, and I’ll have to contact the IRS tomorrow.
I would just freeze my credit, but then that would interfere with mortgage applications in the event that we actually do find a house to buy. Argh.
(If you want to sign up an account for yourself for protection, go to http://www.irs.gov/, click the “Get Transcript of Your Tax Records” link under “Tools”, and click the “Get Transcript ONLINE” button.)

Hopefully tomorrow brings good bedbug news and IRS resolutions. But I’m not counting on it. :\

Florida, wedding, bedbugs (D: D: D:)

Posted on by

We just got back from Florida from Mark and Zoë’s wedding. The wedding was really nice, and it was awesome to see everyone again.
(Photos from that will be up at photos at some point.)

But the awesomeness was rather eclipsed by the finding that our hotel (and our bed) had bed bugs. The first night I didn’t get too many bites, and found them the next day and assumed they were from random flying things since we’d been outside most of the day. The second night I guess they all found that I existed, and all of this happened:

(My forearm is about as bad, and my other arm is only slightly less unhappy. Also my feet are super sad.)
Mostly confirmed with bloodsplatters in the sheets and bug poop in the mattress edges.

So instead of coming home and being able to relax and get ready for work tomorrow, we’ve spent the past 4.5 hours sorting through things, running clothing through the washer and dryer, running other heatable things through the dryer, and manually inspecting everything else (like cameras, lenses, laptops). Also, amusingly, my wallet and iPad case are currently in the freezer. (Apparently sustained cold for a few months will kill everything too.)

If anyone has suggestions on what to do about the backpacks, that’d be useful. Right now our plan is to run one through the dryer and put the other (that has gel straps) into a sealed plastic bag for a year along with our dress shoes.

Houses, taxes

Posted on by

We had some interesting house adventures last week. I was about to get on a plane from Phoenix to San Francisco when we found a house that we wanted to make an offer on. Cue frantic mortgage approving and docusigning of a bunch of stuff before the flight, followed by more frantic phone calls (after midnight Pittsburgh time) after I landed, followed by more signing.
The house was popular and had 5 offers on it, so the next day was more phone conversations about various contingencies and whether we should relax some of them. and raising the offer. The house was listed at $415k and we ended up making an offer of $425k on it.
The contingency our agent was advocating changing was a $10k reduction in the appraisal (so it would only need to appraise for $415k). In the end, we decided that probably wasn’t a good thing to do (we didn’t like the house so much that we would pay $425k for a house only worth $415k), but we did allow for the first $1k of repairs from the inspection to be covered by us.
We ended up not getting the house in the end, which was just as well. We heard from our agent that the house had sold for $435k with a waived appraisal contingency, and it had only appraised for $411k. So that’s hilarious, and I feel bad for the people whose agent told them to drop the appraisal.

I’ve also finished up my taxes. It seems they get more complicated every year… my federal and state taxes this year are a 100-page PDF (including all supplemental forms and estimated tax payment forms). The thing that particularly annoyed me this year was a change (apparently mandated by the IRS?) on how brokerages reported the cost basis for ESPP sales.
When you gain stock through an ESPP purchase, you get a discount on the purchase of the stock. When you sell the stock, this discounted amount is reported as income on your W-2, while the remainder of the gains (or loss) are taxed normally as capital gains.
The change this year is that the cost basis on your 1099-B (and reported to the IRS) is the discounted price. Which means that, unless you manually correct your reported cost basis, you’ll be paying tax twice on that discount (once as income, included in your W-2, and once as part of capital gains taxes). There’s a good article about it here.

In any event, I guess I understand my taxes well enough to make a statement like this now:

The cost basis reported on your eTrade 1099-B form (and reported to the IRS) is wrong. You must do a manual adjustment (column g) with reason “B” (column f) on your 8949, or you’ll be double-taxed on the ESPP discount amount (included as ordinary income in your W-2, and also included as capital gains on your 1099-B).

which is both hilarious and rather depressing. Taxes should not be this difficult. :\
(I guess the IRS figured I’d had enough time to master the art of reporting my RSU vestings, so they threw a new thing at me.)

If anyone is using Turbo Tax, you have to correct this manually via the “Add more Details” checkbox under each stock sale. Select “I need to add or fix info about this sale”, choose “The form 1099-B shows an incorrect cost basis”, and enter the adjusted cost basis. Also double check that the 8949 form was generated with correct values in columns f and g (“B” and the adjustment amount) before filing the return.

This post has been too much text. Have a panorama.