Overheated

Not me. It's below zero wind chills here, so I'm not the overheated one. I just spent some quality time with my shredder, and it decided now is a good time for a break.

It's that time of year! Time to dig out the old boot box full of statements and receipts so I can get ready to do our taxes.

Woo Hoo.

Actually, I *sort of* look forward to it. But it's only because we're the kind of people financial planners can't stand - we set ourselves up for a refund each year. (Some blah-blah-blah about keeping that $20 a month for yourself and invest it and get interest instead of loaning it to the government tax-free. I get it. It's just that if I had an extra $20 a month, chances are it would disappear faster than a snowball in July.) The part about finding out about what our refund will amount to is what I look forward to. And since I've been doing our household taxes for years and years and years, I'm not terribly intimidated by it. The very first year we had our house and got to itemize our taxes, I did them by myself, then we took our stuff in to an accountant and paid him $50 to do them. I wanted to compare. (Basically, it boiled down to finding out if I could follow the directions.) How did I compare to a professional accountant? We matched. I was so proud of myself. Just gimme my accounting degree now.

The past few years, I've done our taxes online. The one part about doing them online that really burns me is that I have to type in the full name and address of our employers. I think I should be able to type in our employers' tax ID numbers and the info should pop up for me.

Hmmm.... What other part do I not like about doing them online.... Nothing! Seriously. It's quite easy. And I do the freebie ones. (Call me frugal, not cheap!) Unfortunately, I have to type the info in twice for that - once for the IRS, and once for my state. The online programs that do the federal forms for free will charge you a fee to file your state forms. Screw that! I won't pay them $15 to do something I can do myself. Now if it were plumbing, that's another story. I can't always do that myself. So I will pay a plumber when I need to.

Going through the boot box is like excavating an archaeological site. It's layered chronologically with the newest stuff at the top and the older things at the bottom. I find things I forgot happened over the past year - for example, it was only in July that we got to dump the sorry ass old cell phone service (rhymes with Sing-you-ler) and sign up with one that has given us ZERO problems (the awesome one rhymes with You-ess-Sell-you-ler). Frodo just got his braces this past August. (Seems like longer.) And it was just 11 months ago that we had the new shingles put on our house.

After tackling this pile of shredding, my next project will be to clear off "The Thing". I've mentioned "The Thing" before. In fact, it was really cold the last time I mentioned it, which coincidentally was probably the last time I cleaned it off too.