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Thanks. I'm looking at some little gym nearby that does a ten dollar month trial thing. That should get me through the next 30 days.

What really sucks is that when I finalized my divorce in August finally, after having been separated for five years, the judge decided that my ex and I should alternate years that we claim the kids on the taxes. Despite the fact that she hasn't paid me a dime in child support this whole time and still isn't paying it. The judge also decided that the taxes for 2013 should be my ex's turn to claim them. Since this happened at the end of August, I had already had my withholding set up planning on claiming four children on my taxes. Blows because now I owe the federal govt like $200 in taxes and the state $1200. Not sure why the judge wouldn't let me claim them this year. I changed my withholding immediately after the ruling too. Whatever. I guess from what everyone says, I should just be happy I was able to keep custody of the kids since I'm a male and all.

Bright side is that I should be getting a nice big fat bonus from work in a couple weeks.
 
I don't think a judge has the right to determine who gets to claim the kids on their taxes. The last I knew (when my wife and I went through this with her ex. And I'm in Michigan too) BUY LAW whoever supports them for most of the year is who should be claiming them on their taxes. The exception would be if you had shared custody where they lived with you for a week and then lived with her for a week... Wash, rinse, repeat for the entire year. Then you would alternate claiming them because you both support them for the same amount of time each year. There is also the issue that whoever files their taxes first can usually claim them and get away with it unless the other person spends a bunch of money to take them to court over it.

Why the hell is she still not paying child support?
 
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I actually had a year where she claimed them and I found out after I filed. I claimed them as well and even though she did it first, I was able to easily prove that I had custody so I got the refund. I may do that again this year, I have to double check my divorce judgement and see what is written in there specifically.

With the child support issue, we were both required to submit all our income information back in september. She never did, so they naturally just assumed she makes minimum wage and works full time. I don't understand why that's acceptable to just not provide information when you are ordered to do so by the court. I guess I should have just not sent anything and let them assume I make minimum wage too. I don't understand why the court system over there is being so easy on her. And even though the child support was set way back then, they haven't started taking it out of her paychecks or anything yet. I checked my case online and there are no arrearages built up yet either, so I guess the friend of the court over there just doesn't really seem to care about it.
 
Yes, the county I got married and divorced in is a little backward. Same place that got rid of a judge because they found out he was gay.
 
After some research, I found that the divorce court can't actually order who gets to claim the children. The only way the non custodial parent can claim them on their taxes is if the custodial parent signs an IRS form, which I did not. So it seems that legally, going by the tax laws, I am still entitled to claim all the children. So... that should help.
 
It's your ex who will have the problems if and when you get audited for both claiming. Not even my country and I know that much ;)
 
Totentanz said:
After some research, I found that the divorce court can't actually order who gets to claim the children. The only way the non custodial parent can claim them on their taxes is if the custodial parent signs an IRS form, which I did not. So it seems that legally, going by the tax laws, I am still entitled to claim all the children. So... that should help.
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Yep... Exactly as I thought!
 
In other news, I've started sending query letters out to some literary agents, so... hopefully someone is interested in my novel. Obviously being my first novel, I'll get paid almost nothing for it but I think I can sell quite a few books if I can get someone to publish it. Once I have something to put on my credentials, that will help with any future books I write. Which I have several I've started and would definitely finish if I knew there was a good reason to. My hope and dream is that some day, writing could be my main source of income but even if it just remains a hobby, it would be nice to actually have something in print.
 
I write mostly sci-fi. Not always, but mostly. My current one is sort of a realistic take on superheros, if the people with abilities like that were to emerge in the real world in the year 2010, what kind of impact would they have on the world, technology, politics, society at large, etc. I really suck at summarizing the story for the query letter and the 1-2 page synopsis that agents require. They want you to cram so much information into only 10 sentences or less for the query letters... huge pain in the ass.

However, the few editors who I've had read the story so far all thought it was great. So I'm going to keep plugging away, trying to hone my skills at writing a short synopsis and a good query letter. Here is the meat of the last query letter I wrote:

What if you woke up today to find you've developed superpowers? For Mark, it feels more like a curse than a gift...

Mark Green is a introverted nuclear scientist who is part of a fusion research project that fails. The experimental reactor explodes, causing people with superhuman abilities to begin appearing across the world. Mark, who has developed the ability to absorb enormous amounts of energy, wakes from the incident to find himself imprisoned by an unknown group. He meets Aimee, another superhuman – a Marvel – who possesses the ability to teleport and together, they escape.

They seek asylum with a Corporation called Arcadia that promises to help Marvels utilize their new powers toward the betterment of mankind. Mark battles a growing lack of control over his increasing powers while juggling the unfamiliarity of a budding romance with Aimee. Mark soon finds himself thrust into the spotlight after he saves thousands, preventing a nuclear meltdown by absorbing the radiation into himself.

But disturbing facts about Marvels begin to surface, such as an inability to reproduce, mental instabilities, and strange physical side-effects called “oddities.” Aimee soon discovers that Arcadia has a hidden agenda to control all Marvels and tries to warn Mark. Mark is forced into hiding when Arcadia has Aimee assassinated and frames him for the murder. As his abilities continue to grow stronger and more erratic, Mark must discover the truth about what happened to her - and ultimately the truth about Arcadia, before it is too late.

Complete at 97,000 words, MARVEL is a scifi novel set in the modern day that examines the impact superpowered humans would have on the real world.

MARVEL is my first novel.
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Got a few fish biting the hook for my novel, we'll see what transpires. My girlfriend is going to college and should be done in a year or so. The job she wants to go in for pays around 90,000 a year on average, so I'm assuming she'll start out significantly below that but we made a deal. I will stay at home with the kids so she can work on her career. That will give me time to pursue my other writing stuff and maybe get back into serious lifting, and if I make some money on the side with my writing, then great.

I got the tax thing sorted out. It will be a good month before I get the money but the ex is going to be in trouble with the IRS. I have another week of real tight finances before I'm back ahead again. Good thing is I earned a large bonus at work that will be paid out next week Friday, so after that... things should be back to normal more or less.

In the interim, I bought a cheap $8 30 day pass to the local Snap Fitness. Holy crap but is this place not for the serious lifter. They have a trap bar for deads but only enough plates to do just over 300, so there is almost no point in even doing deads there. There is one rack, so that's decent but pretty much anything I would do in a rack I need more weight than that for. The rest is machines. They charge the same for monthly memberships as the gym I was going to before, so obviously I'm going back to that gym once my finances are in order.

Not lifting is hard on my body. My joints, especially my shoulders, seem to require moving around heavy stuff and I'm not really feeling that great lately with my lack of activity. I've kept active with walking a lot and doing floor exercises but pushups and etc are so absurdly easy that it feels like I'm not even doing anything. I had my kids sit on my back the other day to try to make it more challenging. I cannot wait to get back into heavy lifting... Down to 218 lbs as well. I can see a six pack through the hair. I don't know if it is the lack of lifting or the being lean but I'm a grumpy ass motherfucker lately. Which seems to be working well for me at work because I'm getting really good results but I'm tired of being pissed off all the time. I think a solid bulking cycle is in order once I'm back to the real gym and have the money to load up on food.
 
Putting together the program I'm going to start in probably two weeks. I will be doing 12s for three weeks, 8s for three weeks, clustering to 30 reps per upper muscle group and 60 total reps per lower muscle group. Then I will three weeks of strength focused training by ramping up the loads until I end up doing 3x3 for everything. During those last three weeks, I will use 12 RM loads after the heavy work to get total volume up to 30 reps per mg upper/60 per lower. For the 12s, I'm going to just randomly start out at a fairly conservative load for everything and judge over the first week where I'm at. I do have old 1 RM or 5 RM figures for most of the lifts, so I will use those as a guide as well. I'm fairly good at feeling this stuff out. The second cycle, of course, will use tested 3 RMs extrapolated to calculated 12 and 8 RMs to build from.

These are the lifts I will be using:

Upper A:
Flat Bench
Military Press
Seated Row
Pulldown
Close Grip Bench

Upper B:
Incline Bench
Rack Pulls
Seated Press
Assisted/Weighted Chins
BB Curls

Lower A:
Back Squat
Leg Ext
Leg Curl
Seated Calves
Machine Curl

Lower B:
Leg Press
Leg Ext
Leg Curl
Standing Calves
Seated Dips

And of course I will be increasing calories. I'm sure life will get in the way of consistently training but I want to do four days a week throughout.
 
I think basing your rep count on Wernbom's meta is crazy ;)

SLDL over leg curls, surely?

Military for each Upper Day, I think. Seated Press is an adequate alternative when Military isn't viable, but I think it's pretty avg. if you have the option of both.

Will be interesting to track your results, good luck :)
 
I would prefer SLDL/RDL but it's easier to get to the leg curl machine on a regular basis at my gym. Only reason for that.

I know I can handle that kind of volume, so I'm interested to see what happens. Over the course of my lifting years, I can see that I've primarily focused on strength for the most part, even while doing HST so it will be interesting to see what happens when I focus on optimal conditions for growth instead.
 
Rejoining my old gym next week. I found out some exciting news. There was an MMA training place next door but the gym bought it and made it part of their gym, moved the monolift and other stuff in there and filled it up with other powerlifting goodies. The space where the monolift and etc previously stood will be filled in with new equipment geared towards bodybuilders. So I'm definitely going back there.

Still plan to do the Wernbom inspired routine. It should be fun to see what happens with it. It might not be totally representative of the general lifting population's reaction to a routine like that, since I don't necessarily represent the average lifter that well. But it will be fun nonetheless.
 
That's great news. Glad you got a good gym. I also plan on doing a Wernbom based HST cycle, which I like to call HST 2.0 for fun.
 
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