A Cause for Pause

Dear Ones,

Forgive me for such a pitifully-poor post today.  No pretty pictures.  Just words. 

I'm pausing from my usual posting because I'm neck-deep in receipts, papers, files, year-end statements, and the general mountain of documentation required to file one's taxes.  An annual event for us all, I know...but that doesn't make it any funner. As Brother J said:  "I'd rather be having a root canal."

Because I once long, long ago...in a land far, far away called Mississippi...worked for the IRS (a great story for another time...:), I draw the chore of  "preparing taxes" every April for our somewhat complicated Fed. and NC joint returns (one sole proprietorship, two home offices, etc.), N/M/E's very simple return, and Missy M's fairly straight-forward filings (albeit with a different state return).  This used to require a couple of weeks of gathering, organizing, completing worksheets, calculating, and transferring the final figures to file the final forms.  Whew!  However, for the past ten years or so, I have used TurboTax...and couldn't be happier.  Happy as one can be at tax time, let's say.

Momma always said that Daddy would wait to start their taxes on his birthday (April 11th...yesterday, as it so happens) and work frantically through her birthday (April 14th) so he could finish by the deadline of April 15th.  Every year of their marriage.  Drove her crazy.  He would have loved this year, 'cause he would have had 3 more whole days to work with!

Me?  I understand that totally.  Since they usually had a balance to pay (probably because of Daddy's "extra" electrician jobs he did...or maybe because of the laundrimat...who knows?), he didn't want to have to deal with the bad news until the last minute...and he certainly wasn't going to write that check a minute earlier than he had to!  He was a do-it-yourself person, so he hated to turn it over to someone else to do...although there were years he did just that.  And, he always got a lot of energy and motivation when he was pushed by a deadline.  I'm so like him...in those, and so many more ways.

Anyway, it's the last minute.  We'll probably have to pay a balance, at least on our Federal taxes, although it appears that NC might just owe us again this year.  [It would be nice if we could just ask NC to pay the USA for us, wouldn't it?  Nah.  That's way too logical.]

Yesterday, being the date of what would have been Daddy's 88th birthday, I commemorated the occasion by getting the last TurboTax Home & Business software package at Office Depot and installing it while I was gathering the documentation.  By suppertime, I'd finished and e-filed both Mom's and Missy M's returns, and had started on the Business portion of ours.  A couple more days, and I should be ready to send it through cyberspace...hooray!!!

Before I get back to the taxes, though, I thought I'd report on Mom.  She had a good weekend while Brother J was here from Nashville. They took a drive around town and stopped to visit AW.  Of course, all that activity left Mom exhausted, but at least she got to see all the dogwoods in bloom in HPNC, which she just loved seeing.  We'll celebrate her 91st birthday quietly on Thursday, when I'll make her favorite:  strawberry cake.  We have two doctor visits scheduled for later on this week, so we are hoping that the weather cooperates.

OK...back to work.  Now, where did I file that receipt for printer ink cartridges from last June...?