Shopping: food, drugs, music

Yesterday involved plenty of shopping: B&M (best puppy training pads), Home Bargains, Aldi, Sainsbury's, and a poke around the Cancer Research thrift store. I tend to like Sainbury's except for their pâtés. After visiting various shops, I don't usually get much else done that day.

Today, we made various-bean chili and found that some of the red kidney beans in water that we thought we had purchased were actually red kidney beans in chili sauce. It worked out fine, they hardly dominated with everything else anyway, though R. noted that this sauce appeared to be more sweet than spicy.

Also today, I inspected a super veg and seed mix I'd picked up on discount. It looks rather more gray in person, yum. Fortunately, rather than just eating it like a premade salad, it turns out that one pan-fries it in a little oil, that might perk it up a bit.

A Sainbury's success was finding phenylephrine tablets. They've been weirdly unavailable around here for a while, though the drug itself is plainly available because it still appears in sprays and in name-brand combination tablets. I tend to like my drugs separate and solid though.

In B&M they played David Bowie's Golden Years. Bowie recorded so much good stuff yet all one typically hears is Let's Dance, like with the Eurythmics where half the time it's Sweet Dreams which is all very well but not head-and-shoulders above all the rest. Anyhow, I realized that Golden Years reminded me a little of the Loose Tapestries' Can't Wait for Christmas, not that it seems much of a stretch to imagine that Noel Fielding might have heard plenty of Bowie.

US/UK tax and social security

Today, I finally got around to submitting my form CF83, Apply to pay voluntary National Insurance contributions for periods abroad; my application should be in quickly enough, I think one can pay six years previous. (National Insurance is like Social Security in the US.) There's a social security agreement between the US and UK, just as there is a taxation agreement, which affects how my pensions will go when I do retire. In the meantime, it can only help my UK pension to boost my contribution periods, and I ought to qualify to do so at level 2 rates, which are low enough to make it a no-brainer. Doing this kind of thing is one of the many things that it helps to know, as somebody who's moved between the two countries, but that nobody actually tells you. I should hear back in a month or so.

That got me back to thinking about my taxes. My US taxes are actually rather simpler since the pay cut I took with my current job. That's another interestingly detailed thing: for example, years ago (but no longer) I could have deducted my UK council tax from my US taxes as a foreign real estate tax. Over the years, along with my US form 1040, I've filed schedules 1, 2, 3, A, B, C, D, and plenty other forms too.

Anyhow, life should be simple enough for a while that my current algorithm for US tax filings is: exclude what I can with form 2555, Foreign Earned Income. (That calculation will be fun for this year, I get to figure in USD how much of my salary was earned on the work visit to Manhattan.) Then, for any remainder, see what I can claim on form 1116, Foreign Tax Credit, which ought to work well with Scottish income tax generally being higher than US. Anything further, I can try deducting, along with my mortgage interest, but at least for 2025 my standard deduction was higher anyway, and that's with filing singly because I don't want to drag my family into all this.