But now, it’s just time. Seriously. It won’t happen unless I just freaking do it. So here it goes.

I haven’t written in this blog in about a year and a half. Not quite coincidentally, my last entry is when I’d just been hired at MarylandReporter.com. It was summer 2010, and I was raring to begin my second year of master’s studies at the University of Maryland’s iSchool.

I’m still working at MarylandReporter.com, but other things have changed. I dedicated much of the time that I could have been blogging to make MarylandReporter.com’s website and interface better. I did this through surveys, usability testing, an information architecture analysis, and a new CMS. (WordPress.org! I actually like Drupal better, but WordPress is easier to use.) Yes, the redesign paid off massively in terms of pageviews, bounces, unique visitors, and time spent on the site. And yes, I still write, edit and program for the site. I’m always looking for new ideas to make the site more popular, and I’m hoping that putting some of those ideas into practice during the General Assembly session pays off even more.

The site redesign was my thesis-equivalent project for my master’s degree, and I became an official MIM on May 19, 2011.

A week later, on May 28, 2011, I became an official Mrs., marrying my longtime love and partner, Tim. (I don’t use the Mrs., nor do I use his last name, but I suppose both are available to me if I were to desire them.) We had the biggest news geek wedding ever. Seriously. We were written up on Poynter.org in the column formerly known as Romenesko, as well as in The Atlantic and E&P. (Who needs a write up in bridal magazines?)

I spent the rest of 2011 working hard and running around like crazy. It was the guilty round of “making up for lost time” visits that I suppose you do when you return stateside after living far away for six years. We went to four other weddings, one in Ohio, one in Los Angeles, and two in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We visited family in Virginia, Ohio, and Florida. I went to Seattle for training from a foundation that gives my website money. (And I got to see my cousin Nichole, which made it worth the trip.) I went to Boston for the Online News Association conference. Tim and I went on a Caribbean cruise. I saw Cirque du Soleil in New York City for my birthday. We rang in 2012 visiting our friend Sarah in Atlantic City, and watched the first sunrise of the new year from the beach.

And now it’s a new year with new challenges, and new things to think and write about.

I found myself a new part-time job, which I am really excited about. I will be teaching introduction to writing and reporting at The George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. It is the very class that taught me the fundamentals of being a good journalist way back in the late ’90s, and I am privileged to have the opportunity to pass that torch on to the next generation. (I also think this wipes any karmic debt I have accrued by not giving money to the GW Alumni Association.)

The class will get me really thinking about journalism and what goes into it to make it valuable. I always do think about that a lot, but I feel like my perspective is sometimes jaded because of the state of the industry. It can be hard to forget that journalism is a true craft. And despite the fact that a lot of crap passes for journalism today, there is still amazing work being done. I hope to be able to teach my students to steer away from the crap and do the amazing work — or at least arm them with the skills they need to get an editor to agree to an enterprise piece instead of a pet feature.

And since I will be thinking more, a blog is a great place to reflect on my thoughts. So here I go. Let’s hope I don’t forget about it this time.

I was sitting in class today, and we were discussing blogs. More specifically, who blogs, why they blog, what kinds of blogs there are, etc. And it made me think of my poor neglected blog, and how I am just turning into someone who wants to blog more. But doesn’t.

Here I go trying to end the streak. Let’s see how successful I will be.

For starters, I have a job now! A real full-time job, where I have a real salary and real benefits. (Hooray for paid vacation, actual half-decent medical coverage, and dental insurance. There is something about having dental insurance that makes you look forward to needing dental work, you know?) I am the associate editor for a small nonprofit news website that covers Maryland state government. It’s an interesting new-media type of gig. I don’t have an office, and primarily work at home with my cell phone and laptop. I do have office space in the press room in the State House in Annapolis, but nobody’s spending a lot of time there nowadays (almost everyone in state government is up for election next month) — consequently I’m not either.

My job is great, but there are a ton of things about it that I have had to get used to. One of them is the concept of an e-mail newsletter in the morning. For years, I’ve gotten e-mail newsletters that send me a bunch of links from stories I might be interested in. (I’ve probably read the one mediabistro puts together since Day 1.) Now, I get to have a hand in putting these together. And you know what? It’s hard work early in the morning. Working in a traditional paper newsroom, I would find myself toiling at my computer on a story sometimes until 2 a.m. — deadlines tend to be late. Nowadays, I’m starting my days by toiling away at the computer at 6:30 a.m. (or earlier) If you’ve ever worked in a newsroom, you know that this is a completely backwards way to schedule the day. I mean, I used to come in at 11 and leave at 9. Nowadays, I’ve been working for 4+ hours when 11 a.m. rolls around.

Another thing I’ve had to get used to is working at home. On its face, working at home sounds great. And on some levels, it is. I can pop in a workout DVD and exercise if nobody is calling me back. My lunches are usually better than crap McDonald’s food. There is no police scanner squawking at me. I can wear my pajamas. (Which I DO when I’m working at 6:30 a.m.) However, sometimes I feel like a prisoner in my own home — like I’m always at work. (Which, in essence, I am.) It’s rather secluded. And sometimes, I just want to talk to someone. (Today, I had the biggest desire to turn to someone and tell them about the interview I just did. And the only living thing that could hear me was my cat — who translates everything I ever say into, “Yes, I am going to feed you now.”) The Oatmeal has a comic about working at home that is too funny, but too true.

What else? I am still a full-time student, and still planning my wedding. This really makes me a masochist. Lots of people can’t handle working full time OR going to grad school OR planning a wedding. And I’m doing all three at once! My fiance has already started to miss me, since I’ve spent quite a long time on the planet BUSY lately.

And I must stop writing now, since I’ve gotta be up and working in 5.5 short hours. I’ll be rocking my pajamas, drinking coffee (a necessity at that hour), and probably stressed out about one thing or another — but that’s part of the beauty of the news biz!

Here’s what we want: a historic old plantation or mansion to rent where we can have the ceremony and reception at the same place. We’re estimating around 200 guests, and we want to do this on a Saturday evening/night. (Because nighttime weddings are just more fun!)

Oh yes, and we CANNOT get married until I have my master’s degree. Because what fun will the wedding be if I spent every spare second writing computer code? (Graduation, by the way, is May 20, 2011.)

In theory, spending time scouting out pretty locations to get married sounds like a great thing to do. And I suppose it could be fun if (a) you didn’t have to think about cost or guest list, and (b) any day/time you wanted to get married would magically be available. Since we DO have to worry about both (a) and (b), and since people have been scrambling for the same wedding dates we’re after since last year, it’s been more of a hassle.

We’ve personally visited seven sites together. (I visited one on my own.) I’ve corresponded with more than a dozen different properties. And I have spent time clicking around countless websites.

You would think that the web makes it easier to find out information about where to plan your wedding. Unfortunately, it really does not. It really doesn’t help much in any aspect. Here are a few of the reasons that most wedding venue sites — at least in the DC metro area — are not very helpful.

1) Cost. OK, if you’re getting married and you have a limited income, cost is important. The location of a venue is important, as is the capacity. Pictures of what it looks like are helpful. But how much does it cost? I can only think of maybe two venue sites that told me upfront. The rest ask visitors to call them or e-mail them to find out how much a rental is.

Honestly, how frustrating is that? There’s one site in particular that I fell in love with after seeing some amazing photos in bridal magazines. According to The Knot-DC, its cost was “$$” — “affordable.” But what does “$$” actually mean?

I spent about 30 minutes on the website and looking for photos of other couples who got married there. I looked for prices, but found none. I wrote them an e-mail, all excited to take a tour and book the place for my wedding.

And then the next day, I got a response to my e-mail. Rental costs weren’t so terrible, but in order to book for a Saturday night in the summer, you had to order the $100/plate dinner for each guest at the wedding from the in-house caterer. I was shocked. Even if I could afford that, I am not the type of woman who could justify spending $100 on a dinner for myself. Why would I spend that kind of money on wedding guests? Also, I can think of much better things to do with about $20,000.

The bottom line is that I wouldn’t have wasted my time and excitement if I had known how much this place cost to begin with. But that kind of information is seldom available — unless you use more old-fashioned types of communication.

2)Availability. When you’re getting married, you usually have a date range in mind for your wedding. From what I understand from most of my friends who have gotten married before me, the day that the church/reception venue is available is usually one of the major determining factors in coming up with a wedding date.

With this in mind, it would make sense for venues to have calendars displaying their availability on their websites. Or, at least tell you if there are/are not days of the week available.

However, I only came across two places that had those kinds of calendars. But it gets worse! I’ve been working a temp job the last two weeks, so I have been e-mailing venues for information on their availability. Most of them would only tell me their dates available in person or over the phone.

We took a tour of one place that we LOVED, only to find out after the tour that it was booked solid for summer 2011. (But 2012 has some openings, if you’re interested.) So, um, why did we waste our time? The venue was gorgeous, but if I can’t rent it, there’s really no point to my touring it.

3)Basic information. This should be a no-brainer. Any business should tell people their address and phone number somewhere on a recurring menu or border item. If you have a reception hall for rent, you should tell visitors to your website things like the capacity of the hall.

Does this happen? No. One place I looked at doesn’t list its street address anywhere on the website. (Though it did have written directions to get there.) I couldn’t even find the town where it was located on the website. I also often had to find “review” sites to find things like seating capacities.

4)Lack of organization. Wedding-themed websites like The Knot do a great job of taking their advertisers and pulling them together in a directory. However, there ARE places that don’t advertise in The Knot. How can you find those? Luck, and lots of unrelated searching.

One of our “finalist” spots is where my fiance’s friend got married about a year ago. The first I heard about it was when the soon-to-be-Mr. MIM handed me a napkin covered in writing from his brunch with his friend. This spot has a website, but it never came up in any of my searches.

I also came across many locations by trial and error — and stumbling upon other people’s “venue search” blog posts. Loudoun County, Va. did it right. They have a website dedicated to wedding and reception spots. (However, they would improve a lot more if they included links to different places’ websites) It would be nice if other places followed suit.

5)Photos. If someone is getting married, they would like to see photos of other peoples’ weddings at your venue. These photos show off how the location is used and cherished.

However, it’s shocking how many places have so few wedding pictures available. One venue’s “photo gallery” included smiling headshots of the bride and groom. Nice pictures, but they don’t show what the reception hall is trying to sell.

Making these sites more usable would be easy. It isn’t too hard to include rental prices on a webpage, and it also isn’t too hard to adjust those prices. Availability can be displayed through a calendar function — or manually typed in with the caveat that availability can change quickly. And the other things are just no-brainers.

Despite bad usability, we are pretty sure we know where and when we want to get married. But, unfortunately, we didn’t use our computers to find it or get more information.

My boyfriend fiance and I went to Colonial Williamsburg for Memorial Day. (You know, one of those comforting places where a ballpoint pen would have been considered hi-tech.) We had a romantic dinner — complete with chocolate cake for dessert that had the words “Will you marry me?” written on it.

I’ve been somewhat flying since then. (Actually, alternating between flying and making sure that my engagement ring is still on my finger. I haven’t worn a ring regularly since my high school class ring.) But I have done some of the things a wanna-be-techy-bride needs to do:

-Bought a domain name for the wedding site. It will be designed by ME and not on some template, thankyouverymuch. (Incidentally, I will not give that domain name out until I’ve got something on it — and I’m still at the “Yay! I’m getting married!” phase.)

-Realized I wanted to webcast my wedding. Now, figuring out how to do this, how to get it hosted, what kind of bandwidth I need…..

I haven’t done much research yet into planning and pulling things together, but I will. I’ve got time. The wedding will be after I graduate (I will not become Mrs. MIM), at a time that I can concentrate on vows — and not scripting.

I thought that maybe my mind was getting more scattered because I’m getting older. I mean, my 20s are fading into the background, and it’s almost been 10 years since I’ve been old enough to (legally) drink alcohol.

But then I read this article by Nicholas Carr in this month’s Wired. Eureka! I’m not getting old and scatterbrained! The Internet is making me scatterbrained!

You know, I’m not sure if this makes me feel much better.

I’ve known about some of the pitfalls of information online for quite a while. (Every semester, I fill many thick binders with printouts of class readings. I just can’t absorb things I read off of a screen.) After I read this article, I’ve been looking at all of my own behavior, both online and off. As I type this, I’ve got seven tabs open on my browser, plus Flock’s handy little RSS feed updater on the left of my screen. (I can’t keep Flock’s photo/video window at the top open without jeopardizing my sanity, however.) All of this stimulation, all of this access, and all my random thoughts make it difficult for me to do anything directly.

This morning, for example, I logged on to the Internet. I had a few e-mails to send, and I wanted to type up some cover letters for jobs I am applying for. My sweetheart and I are going away for Memorial Day, so I wanted to shut off the computer early and hit the road.

Except I’m still here. This is a sketchy outline of my day in front of the computer so far.

1) Go to e-mail inbox
2) Decide I should make a pot of coffee
3) Go back to e-mail inbox
4) Read mediabistro newsfeed, click on links
5) Start typing one of the e-mails I need to type
6) Mid-type, open another browser window to find the job posting that I want to apply for.
7) Go back to e-mail typing.
8) Talk to my sweetie about the lack of usability at USAjobs.gov.
9) Decide it’s time to catch up on reading the comics online, which I hadn’t done for two weeks.
10) Return to the e-mail I had started more than an hour ago
11) Decide to check Facebook and see what my friends are up to.
12) Finish and send my (3 paragraph!) e-mail.

And so on. It’s exhausting. I feel like a bee, flying around erratically, trying to do a million things, and being distracted by other big and bright flowers I perhaps hadn’t noticed before.

Three hours later, I still haven’t sent all of the four e-mails I wanted to write. I haven’t written any cover letters. And no, I haven’t packed for my weekend away. (But I can tell you that we’re going to have hot and humid weather there.)

And, I realize, I can’t even remember what it was that I set out to do online in the first place today. If you have some inkling, please let me know. It’s obviously time for me to turn off the computer.

Although I knew rudimentary HTML, I decided to take the easier way out and design the site on Dreamweaver. Despite the “easy” software, it took me a little while to do. (If you’ve developed a site, you know what I’m talking about.) The biggest time suck, however, was tracking down links to the stories that I wrote at my last job. The newspaper website’s search system is the kind of information retrieval system you would meet in your nightmares. It doesn’t always find what you’re looking for — for rather arbitrary reasons — and the way that search results are sorted is a mess.

I spent days getting everything together and creating links to all of the stories I wanted to highlight on my site. I didn’t just include links, however. I also transformed each story into a .pdf file, just in case something screwy happened to the newspaper’s website.

I also designed my site to be an information repository for the Virgin Islands Constitutional Convention. The convention does not really have a website, and information on the proposed constitution is kind of hard to come by (yet very important to access). I’d given out my URL to a couple people who asked me to find articles for them.

About a month ago — just as I got buried in schoolwork — two things happened. The newspaper I used to work at did its first comprehensive website redesign in at least seven years. And, after the redesign, none of the links to stories on my website worked. Crap.

I actually got an e-mail from a random person two days after it happened. She was a Virgin Islands resident, trying to read my Constitutional Convention articles. Her e-mail informed me that all my links were broken. (sigh. But at least someone’s interested.) I responded that I would fix the links as soon as I was no longer busy with schoolwork, and to please try the .pdfs in the meantime.

Tonight, I got my chance to repair the dead links. And I needed to do it tonight for two major reasons.  First, the U.S. Senate had a committee hearing today on the Virgin Islands Constitutional Convention, meaning that senators and their staffs — as well as people at home in the Virgin Islands — may be interested in reading more about the convention. Second, and more importantly, I’m starting to apply for jobs. I just have the feeling that a personal website full of dead links will not help me get a position as a web developer.

Luckily for me, the links were much easier to repair than they were to initially find. I also used the opportunity to do some sitewide updates and add the most recent stories I wrote on constitutional hearings in DC.

And now the really hard part: Actually finding a job.

Here’s a brief synopsis of my life since I last posted. I worked full-time for about two weeks. Then I took an exam, did two PHP scripting assignments, wrote a paper AND went to a wedding in Ohio. Came back, stopped the job. Spent about 100 hours doing more PHP scripting for another project. Wrote another short paper. Did two 30 page papers, three oral presentations, and yet another lengthy PHP scripting project. (I’m guessing I logged about 200 hours on PHP projects alone. If I were getting paid at a programmer’s rate, I’d be rich. Now, I’m stopping myself when I’m trying to type a question mark or exclamation point, wondering if it will indeed screw up the code.)

Lots of work, and not much time to play. Or think. Or spend time with my boyfriend. Or grocery shop. Or see the sun. Or insert activity I might want to do here.

I’m not sure how I did this semester gradewise, but I know I’m done. And the last scripting project was far from perfect when I turned it in, but…. Let me explain using a metaphor. I felt like I had just completed a long drive without ever stopping for gas. And it was a good thing that my destination was where it was, because my car probably would have sputtered and died about 10 yards later.

Seriously, I learned quite a lot. I think with some more practice and building off of what I learned, I could probably get a low-level job as a database admin now. Not bad for someone who only wanted to learn PHP so she could know how best to order contractors around and dream up more realistic business plans. (Don’t worry — I’m not giving up my notebook and Rolodex to be a DBA.) I know the ways that different search engines and site specific searches find documents. I did an indepth project on search engine optimization, so I know the ins and outs of SEO.  I learned about Internet copyright issues, online data security, and the perils and issues associated with private information in the digital age.

And now, I’m trying to get my momentum back for the rest of everything. It’s really strange to not have homework anymore or anything I have to do for school.

Seriously, the first two nights after the day-long scripting marathon, all of my dreams were filled with finding grandiose mistakes in our PHP scripting. (Incidentally, these dreams were about things that didn’t even correspond with scripting. I vividly remember being upset in my dream that we had forgotten to properly write a long list of numbers forward and backward. In this nightmare PHP, it meant something. In real-life PHP, it doesn’t.) I also had dreams about finding fatal errors in a research paper that I was editing — in my dreams, it was the SEO research paper. (But what journalist hasn’t dreamed about making ghastly errors in her copy?) (Oh, and if any of my group members are reading this, there shouldn’t have been any big mistakes. I did edit it correctly, thankyouverymuch.)

Finally, four days and an invigorating trip to SpaWorld later, I think I’ve been able to get my head out of computer code and back onto my shoulders.

But although school is out, my technological journey continues! I’m taking a Drupal class, which started in person and is continuing online. I’m looking for a journalism job where I’ll utilize technology (preferrably a web editor/designer/planner type job. Let me know if you’ve got openings!). I’ve got my website to fix (a redesign of my old paper’s website left me with a ton of dead links), another website or two to design over the summer, and blogs to write. I’ve got freelancing to do, computer software to learn, and adventures to have. And since I don’t have to pull all-nighters where I work on scripting anymore, I will be blogging it all out.

(And don’t worry, those of you who want to know every detail of my last semester. I’m sure that many of the more salient details will come slipping out.)

I also spent some time reporting on a Congressional hearing about the proposed Virgin Islands Constitution for the paper I used to work for. There was positively nothing technological about that. Being in the DC area, I went to the Hill and physically sat in the hearing to cover it. (Which is much better than covering a webcast.) I typed my stories and e-mailed them to the newsroom, same as I would do if working from St. Croix.

But today, I get back into the technology realm and go back to school, which makes me a bit nervous. I’ve spent the last week steeped in that which I know — writing, reporting and editing. Now, I’m wading into the uncharted swamp of technology again.

I was reading for my class tonight, which is on copyright, privacy and security online. As is pretty common in this program, we don’t have a textbook for this class, and instead read several scholarly articles about different topics we are discussing. Today’s class will be on website privacy policies and how people respond to them.

As I was reading, I kept glancing at the publication year of some of these articles. I tend to do that quite a bit. Some of today’s articles date back as far as 2004, but I’ve read articles for other classes that were written in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I always get the same question creeping up in my mind: Given the age of these articles, how relevant are they to technology today?

2001 was the year I got my undergraduate degree. The only way to make most websites was by coding. AOL was the dominant internet service provider. Many homes still used dialup, and cable broadband was finally becoming widely offered. (I didn’t get cable broadband until 2002 because it wasn’t available where I lived. As a disclaimer, however, I lived in a rural small town.) The iPod had just been released and was revolutionizing the music downloading world. (A world where I used Napster and Kazaa — neither of which exist in the same form today.) Video was not ubiquitous on the web. Access to Slate.com and NYTimes.com were both subscription based.

In 2004, I was waaay out of the technological loop on an island in the Caribbean. But it’s kind of where I feel my technological knowledge trailed off, and the point from which I’m trying to catch up to today. Gmail had just come into the picture, AOL was still a big ISP, and people were just starting to get into social networking en masse through MySpace.

My point is that  much has changed in recent years. And while it is still perfectly valid that — to use an example from today’s reading — people are concerned about privacy online, have privacy policies in general evolved much in the last six years? I’m not sure if there’s been much legislative action regarding privacy policies, but I do know I’ve seen a lot more of them in the last few years.

In a class last semester, we read the most horribly outdated set of articles about online information economics. Using early 2000s optimism and simplicity, they talked about how “information intermediaries” can make information distribution profitable. From where I sit, I can tell you that the issue is much more complicated than that. And my main contribution to the discussion that day was reiterating that these articles do not address the realities of today, where newspapers are closing their doors and firing content providers. Where startup companies are cheapening the value of content in order to make the larger profit for selling it. Where content is rapidly losing its value, despite the sanguine predictions from a decade ago.

I understand that in technology, everything is moving at light speed, and most tech articles that are published are already outdated by the time they gets to the printing press/web. And I do not envy professors who need to locate articles that demonstrate concepts and are still relevant today.

But I can’t help but wonder what has happened since the articles I’m reading were published. (Which my professors tend to do a great job of explaining.)

For example, math. Last week, I worked on a homework assignment for one of my classes. There was some pretty simple math involved, but it was the kind of math that looked complicated. We’re talking fractions over fractions with things squared.

The professor wanted us to do all of our homework in a digital format, so I typed it out on Microsoft Word. She also suggested in an e-mail that it would be a good idea to show my work.

I used pencil and paper to actually do the math and space things out the way they should be done. Unfortunately, everything just got typed into Word. I really hope she can understand mathematical expressions that represent themselves like: 3/4 + 2/3 * 2/3 / 4/5.  (This is not a real portion of my homework, but it’s what it looks like. And I’m not sure what she thought; I haven’t received a grade yet.)

Another thing that is done best with pencil and paper is editing. I’ve done tons of editing on screen, and it usually involves lots of highlighting, different colors and lots of ~~~offset notes.~~~ It’s so much easier to actually show what is wrong (or what you are questioning) if you can write it on paper.

(On an unrelated note, I am much better at comprehending and retaining information when I’ve got it on paper.)

Today, I started a month-long freelance editing job. Basically, I will be reading papers all day and using proofreading symbols and sticky notes to mark up documents for grammatical, stylistic and formatting errors. There isn’t even a computer at the desk I will be working at.

Doing anything (ethical and legal) and getting paid for it is wonderful, but it is nice to receive reaffirmation that there are jobs out there that don’t necessitate an expert’s knowledge of PHP. (though I’m still working on that!)  And no matter how technology evolves, it cannot replace human skill and intelligence.

And I become mesmerized by my taxes.

Did I say mesmerized? I honestly meant frustrated.

Taxes have never been a picnic for me. I have complicated things to deal with like stocks, rental property, and interest on mortgage deductions. Let’s add on top of that the fact that I’m currently getting my master’s degree — which means I also have to complete the FAFSA.

The tax fun continues this year. I moved from the U.S. Virgin Islands to Maryland, meaning I have to file three sets of tax forms. (And wait for three different refunds somehow divided up between them. Which drives me crazy, since I’m actually expecting a big refund this year.)

Ever since I first did my taxes as an undergraduate, I’ve used TurboTax to put things together. It’s an incredible service, and really beats going to an accountant to get your taxes done. Or doing what my boyfriend did our first year in the Virgin Islands, which was staying up all night on April 14 with a calculator and a pencil — and ending up figuring your taxes wrong.

If you’ve never used TurboTax — or any other tax prep software, for that matter — I highly recommend it. The program walks you through each category of the tax form, tells you what to enter where, and makes sure you don’t miss any deductions. At the end, it lets you print out your tax forms and also will  let you e-file them with the government for a faster refund.

This would rock, except for one thing: I spent the first part of this year in the Virgin Islands. Taxes in the Virgin Islands are a huge mess, thanks to tax dodgers and the VI’s failure to automate its government.

The Virgin Islands uses the IRS tax code to the letter — meaning that residents fill out the same 1040s that everyone else in the United States slaves over. Not a penny actually goes to the IRS, however. It’s all kept in the Virgin Islands. (Likewise, the VI misses out on several federal government programs, like SCHIP. But taxation without representation it is not.)

In efforts to spur economic development, the Virgin Islands came up with a sweeping tax incentive program in the early 2000s. Through this program, businesses can get huge tax benefits for locating themselves in the VI, hiring VI residents, and donating substantial resources to the community. However, like most things during the last decade of capitalism gone wild, many businesses used the tax incentive programs as  a tax haven. Some stateside businesses made their “primary business addresses” VI hotel rooms or empty offices, paid some local “employees” and made charitable donations, all while actually running their business in Connecticut or California.

The federal government got wind of this and cracked down on abuses. The program cleaned up for the most part, but the feds’ move trickles down to impact people like me who lived and worked in the VI for part of the year, then lived and worked elsewhere in the US.

Basically, I have to file taxes both with the IRS and Virgin Islands, fill out a special tax form, and wait for both sides to figure out who owes me what. Awesome.

It gets much more exciting as I consider exactly who I’m dealing with. The Virgin Islands government is at least 15 years behind the rest of the country when it comes to technology and government automation. To this end, there were many stories I reported on over the last couple of years that baffled me. To the VI government, new technology included radar speed guns, a government-wide ERP system, and a 911 system that can trace numbers and record calls. Right now, to get information about getting a driver’s license or registering a car in the Virgin Islands, you have to call the Motor Vehicle Bureau; it has no website. Additionally, most of the records the government uses are primarily paper-based.

With that introduction, I’m sure you’re not surprised when I say that you can’t e-file your taxes in the Virgin Islands.  In fact, most people turn their taxes in personally. When you’re dealing with lots of paper, things can more easily get lost. If you personally take your taxes to the Internal Revenue Bureau, they will stamp a copy as “Received” — which is pretty much your only defense if they lose your paperwork and try to claim that you never filed taxes.

This year, I can’t take my taxes in personally, so I face the scary prospect of  potentially having my taxes “lost.” I have to wait for an unknown refund amount from three different parties. (Who do I complain to if I get shorted? Who knows.) And I have to do a special form, which (of course) is not supported by TurboTax. The instructions are written in government bureaucrat-ese, meaning that they can be understood, but they’re not written as clearly as they should be.

So far, I’ve done everything TurboTax could help me with. (I needed the information on my 1040 for the FAFSA, which I have happily filed.) I’m kind of afraid for the next steps and for the waiting to begin. I just can’t wait until next year, when I don’t have to deal with this crazy tax situation again.