Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Home, Sweet Home

I've often not been crazy about our house, but it always seems like a nice one after a trip, even a short one. We got back very late Monday night from Baton Rouge, then got up early the next morning to go to work. It was a short first night back in our own bed, but it was very nice indeed to be there.

Baton Rouge is growing and spreading like mad, while New Orleans looks smaller and far less a major city. Wonderful seafood in both places, though. And beer is overly available, which made me feel obligated to consume lots of it. My father-in-law, the retired English professor, seemed astonished, offended, and a rather angry that neither Leonore nor I has read James Joyce's Ulysses and - even worse - don't want or plan to do so. But I know that he's woefully unfamiliar with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his literary successors, so there.

I was wrong about the taxes. There was more to do than I had fooled myself into believing. Tonight, I finally finished entering everything into my spreadsheet. Tomorrow evening, I'll check all the formulas and then begin copying to the IRS forms. I noticed that one of those forms is available as a PDF form on the IRS site. I.e., it's a PDF file you can type numbers and text into and then print the result. I hope all of them are available in that format. That would help the final step immensely. In any case, I'd like to have it ready to go to the Post Office on Saturday morning. Then I'd actually be able to - gasp! - get back to writing.

6 comments:

Lahdeedah said...

We used to do our taxes April 14, too.

Then we gave up and now we just pay H&R block and get them done in February.

I don't trust them, but they can't be worse than me!

David said...

Aargh. Will I have to add word verification for posting? I hoped no spam would show up. Maybe this is a one-time event. And maybe the moon is made of green cheese.

David said...

lahdeedah,

Ours is messy because of my writing biz and Leonore's exercise biz and language tutoring biz. Oodles of receipts that I would have to gather together and label for a tax preparer, anyway.

And the cost of having someone else do it is hard to justify compared to the small amount of money those businesses bring in.

What I really need to do is keep up with the spreadsheeting on a regular basis. That would greatly ease the pain at the end of the year.

This year, I'm going to do just that! I'll keep the spreadsheet up to date on a monthly basis! No, a weekly basis! And the moon is made of green cheese!

Lahdeedah said...

Ooh and the cow DID jump over the moon and clouds are really fuzzy cozy balls of cotton.

Anonymous said...

And the federal tax code will finally be reduced to a manageable size, say down from 66 thousand pages to 22 thousand pages -- still mostly unfathomable of course.

And the rich will be made to pay their fair share of the tax burden rather than piling it on the ever-dwindling, evermore oppressed middle-class.

And I will write a bestseller that will make me eat these words and belly me up to the wealthy men’s bar for more tax breaks to shelter my untold millions off all those obscene royalties.

Hmm, sound’s pretty good. I think I’ll go finish my 1040EZ Form now, because it's the only one I really understand (or need). Then I'm off to start that fantasy novel that is sure to garner me an invitation to sit on BushCo’s board of directors.

Yup, I can smell the lard on the cook stove right now. Could you pass me the salt and pepper, please, George? My words taste so much better with the simplest of condiments, you know.

David said...

22,000 pages? Man, that's fantasy!