Freelancer's Office

My little Canon Powershot A70 was a very nice little camera, but it finally gave up the ghost and I have been left for almost a year now without a camera to take pictures with. After working my fingers off last month to get ahead on the finances I went down to Wal Mart to buy a new camera.

This is the first time I have ever purchased a camera brand new off the store shelf, so I was fairly excited to be owning a brand new camera.  I was browsing along and spied the red markdown sticker for a Polaroid camera in the case, nearly invisible behind the bottom of the sliding door. $49 for a camera that had sold for $129. It was the display model, but Wal Mart tended to be good from my past experience in selling good working display models so I was not scared by that.

Getting my little camera home I was disappointed to discover that it would not power on. Assuming the batteries that had come with it might have something wrong with them I went and got my fully charged NiNH batteries that I use with my Wii remote. The batteries did not work. Camera did not power on. Major disappointment. I even called Wal Mart to find out what my options were since it had been the last camera like that, if it fails to work could I use it toward price of a different camera and how long I had to bring it back in.

As I was dejectedly looking at what had quickly come to be a very well loved little pink camera even before I had got to use it, I somehow got it to turn on. No idea what I did, just kept fiddling with the batteries and holding the power button down until *gasp!* it came on! I knew from my Canon A70 that the power button has to be held for a few seconds before the cameras will power on.

After a few hours of the camera seeming to work great, it stopped working great. Okay, I made it work once, I could make it work again. Once more to fiddling and once more it started working after a bit. This would come to be a reoccurring theme with the camera. Work for a while, then I would have to figure out how to make it power on again. Frustrating. Very frustrating.

I decided to do some research and discovered quite a few complaints identical to mine at the reviews page on Overstock.com, where it seems to be a very common issue with this camera, with all of the solutions seeming to be the same as my fumbled discovery – fiddle with the batteries and the camera will eventually power back on properly. There are enough positive reviews on the camera that I assume that aside from the apparent flaw in the battery connection the camera is at least a decent camera.

I am now on a search for if there is a way to fix the problem with the apparently faulty battery door connection.

Probably the first question you have thought is “Do I have to file taxes?”, so, let’s see what the IRS has to say about that…

Earnings: Were you self employed with earnings more than $400.00?

If so, then chances are that yes, you will need to file taxes as being self-employed.

The next obvious question is what the IRS considers “self employed” to mean, they have an easy answer to that here, which invariably lead me over to the self employment tax section.

For those of us that are self-employed, we must pay SE tax and file Schedule SE (Form 1040) if our net earnings from self-employment were $400 or more for 2009. Check this page for more information on the self-employment tax.

I already know that I will be filing taxes this year, even if I don’t yet know what my full earnings were, so I’ll leave you to sort out if you need to file and I will move on to the next step in this walk along on filing taxes when self-employed.

I went looking for something on taxes for home based businesses and do you know what I discovered? It costs over $60 for even the most basic and cheapest software I have been able to find.

In the words of Dolly Parton, it’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.

So, for those of us who just wish we could say we work 9-5 and know that running a business is more like a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week job, I am going to be sharing what I sort out here as I work on my own small business taxes.

All posts will be gathered under the “taxes” category.

Have you ever had one of those days where before the day even starts you are already ready to scream and throw something at the wall? Yeah, me too. I tell you, there are days when all I want to do is pack up and escape to some nice white sand beach somewhere.

Working at home and working as a full-time caregiver are not easy. The exhaustion seeps into my bones sometimes and I just can not focus. I get so exhausted, with my energy so low down there, and I know that I need to escape and recharge before I burn out. Unfortunately daydreaming about it is often the only option.

So, I daydream about things like a nice romantic cancun vacation for one. About a chance to get away from it all and pamper myself for a little while without worrying about anything else. I know I can’t, I can’t even find the time to relax in the tub at home for a long soak, but it is nice to daydream.

The destinations are usually much like the resorts of the Karisma Hotels, in particular the pamper of the all adult El Dorado Royale Resort on the Riviera Maya. A mile of unspoiled beach in over 400 acres of tropical rain forest, who could ask for more? Well, okay, maybe since it is a daydream it would be nice to include things such as their beachside spa treatments, milk baths and aromatic massages. Maybe daydream of sleeping in those four-poster beds draped with flowing white gauze. Stepping out of the room and into a winding artificial river that leads to a swim-up bar – toss in a cute single guy that would spend the rest of my trip flirting with me and I am so there! Even without a cute guy though… Relaxation and luxury. Just my kind of daydream destination.

I had an issue the other night where I think using Windows Live Writer might have caused a serious issue on one of my blogs. I caught it fairly fast and restored things to how they should have been, but it leaves me uneasy about using the Windows Live Writer program for posting to blogs.

What happened is I went to one of my blogs and just by accident noticed that the title of the post did not match the title of the URL. Somehow I had posted a new post over top of a post that had already been made on the blog. This might not seem like too serious of an issue, until you take into consideration that I use my sites to keep track of what happens in a daily journal (sometimes a bit cryptic, but they tell a big story to those that know what to look for), and I earn income through sponsors. People that pay me a set price for an advertising link from my blog to their website. It was a sponsored post that had got overwritten. Eeeek!

That is not a good SNAFU, so now I am working with Windows Live Writer with an uneasy feeling that the program too easily might replace important posts about my life as a caregiver or sponsored posts. Anyone know of a plugin that lets me turn off any overwriting of posts that are already on the blog?