Spoke Too Soon

My elation yesterday was premature when I thought the expected worst case scenario had not occurred and the IRA, oops Freudian slip, IRS had not continued to deduct monthly payments for my 2010 taxes following their taking the balance owed out of my 2011 refund.
 

Photo of facade of IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C., courtesy of FotoSearch.


They did, in fact, help themselves to the March monthly payment as well.

Maybe I'm paying for these lovely flowers...

 Photo by John Elswick, AP, on USA Today on-line 1/9/12
 
I called H&R Block today and they told me I could come to their office tomorrow and they would pay for the call if I wanted to try calling again.  I'm going to drive to Boulder and do so even if both the H&R Block representative and I think it won't do any good and I'll just have to wait until it dawns on someone at the IRS that they have wrongly deducted the payment and refund it...or not.

Photo of IRS headquarters sign, Washington, D.C., courtesy of Los Angeles Times/Business/Money & Company, on-line 4/12/11

I suppose now the worst case scenario will be if they continue taking it out month after month despite the fact that it appears in their computers that they have discontinued doing so.  Hmm.  I wonder if I can contact my bank and stop it from that end?  I don't give up easily.  Are you effective at taking on the bureaucracy?  Teddee

Well, That Was Disappointing

What a crazy day.  The weather NOAA had predicted for yesterday never transpired so I elected to stay at the cabin last night rather than take a room at the Golden Buff Lodge in Boulder, which I considered to insure I would make my appointment at the senior center to have my taxes done by the AARP volunteer service. 

Got up this morning at 7 a.m.  Lifted the curtain.  No snow overnight, no wind.  Great.  I made the right decision.  Forty-five minutes later it is snowing so hard I can't see across the road.  It keeps on snowing.  I decide I'm going to have to cancel my appointment.  I try to call the West Side Senior Center and keep getting rerouted to the East Side Senior Center.  After three attempts, I give up and the snow stops.  Must be meant to be. 

By this time, the water, which has been heating on the wood stove, is almost warm enough to wash in so I clean up, shampoo, decide what to wear, get dressed, get bundled up and head to the car.  The wind is starting to pick up. 

I get to Boulder an hour early, so make a quick trip to the bank and then circle back to the senior center.  I'm asked to complete a form with some basic information for the tax preparer and after about a 20-minute wait, during which I read, I'm called in.  The tax preparer assigned to do my taxes verifies that I've started a little editing business and informs me that filing a Schedule C is not within the purview of the AARP volunteers. 

She's apologetic and spends quite a bit of time trying to get the contact information for a possible alternative, Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA), which operates out of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado in Boulder, but cautions that they also may not be able to help me if I'm filing a Schedule C. 

Since I'm combining this appointment with laundry, I decide to go ahead and do laundry and call the School of Business tomorrow and find out if they can assist m, gratis, or if I'm going to have to bite the bullet and pay to have a tax service prepare my return.  I'd do it myself, but last year, having lived in Arizona for the first four months of the previous year, I had to prepare my Arizona return myself--the Colorado AARP volunteer could not do this either--and got a different result each of five times I did the calculations, picked one, paid it in two payments and decided I was never going to even attempt preparing any tax return ever again.

When I finish doing laundry, I stop to get some cat food for the foxes, and from the supermarket parking lot I look toward the mountains and see this right over Eldora...

Yep, those are clouds. Do they contain snow or just wind?  Do I really want to drive up the canyon into this?  Well, I do it and it's all clear until I get right to the outskirts of Nederland where it is windy with blowing snow, but when I get to the cabin, it's perfectly quiet.  However, there's no visible walkway.  It has totally drifted in and the snow is almost up to my knees.  It's about 15F degrees outside and 32F degrees inside the cabin.  I'd left some coffee unfinished in my rush this morning and it wasn't frozen, but was so cold it hurt my teeth. 

I was glad I came home, though.  Both foxes came to eat at the same time this evening.  And, of course, my camera succumbed before I could get a good photo of the two of them together, but I did get one good shot of one of them.

A wonderful ending to a crazy day.  How was yours?  Teddee

Camp Pucker

All the members of my immediate family can find things so hilariously funny that we get, as we say, "hysterical."  If you do not know us, or from a distance, you might think we were, in fact, crying.  Our faces contort uncontrollably.  Our laughter sounds like sobs.  We gasp for breath.  We cry real tears.  In a group, we feed into each other's "hysteria," laughing because the other person is laughing and because he or she is having so much trouble explaining what's funny without getting even more hysterical.  But a group, I've found, isn't essential to this phenomenon. 

I was working on my income taxes today in preparation for an appointment with a tax preparer on Tuesday.  Volunteer tax preparers, trained by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), prepare tax returns free through the senior centers in Boulder and other Colorado towns.  I don't know if this service is offered nationwide, but I used the service for the first time last year on the recommendation of my friend Paula and found it very helpful...and easy on the budget.

I have been doing a bit of freelance editing, so thought I'd better go prepared with a list of possible business-related deductions.  I was looking, in particular, for printer paper and printer ink expenditures and knew many of these would be scattered throughout purchases of org milk, grnd trky, salmon flts and acid reducr I had made at Walmart.  [Note to self:  Have these business-related items rung up separately from now on].  I'm very short of work space in this one-room cabin, so was finding it difficult to sort through all these receipts I was balancing on one knee without having them fall on the floor and was getting increasingly frustrated with the entire operation.

About this time I spotted an item on one receipt that caught my attention:  Camp Pucker.  Camp Pucker?  What in the heck had I purchased that would appear on a receipt as Camp Pucker?  I could feel my thoughts careening around my brain in search of the answer like the steel ball in a pinball machine.  Then, the ball shot off laterally and all I could think of was the unfortunate child whose parents had just signed him up for Camp Pucker.  Waay worse than Outward Bound!  I started giggling, then laughing, then guffawing, then crying and couldn't quit.  I'd just get my tears wiped and my nose blown and I'd think about it again and off I'd go.

I finally figured out it was a camp shirt made of today's version of seersucker I bought right before I went to visit my brother in Tacoma last July.

Life can be a lot of fun by yourself in a 200+-square-foot cabin in the Rocky Mountains.

What made you laugh today?  Teddee