I was pretty tired when the alarm went off at six twenty this morning. But I got up and got right to work. Luckily today, like yesterday, was a really slow day and I was able to keep up with things just fine. Unfortunately I had to wake dad up early as he sleeps in the basement where I work so he was not able to get any extra rest even though he is going to be driving all day today.
Dad spent the morning packing while I worked for the office. Dominica got right up and got to work on her classes. She started Perl programming yesterday and dad said that she seemed to really be having a good time learning it. This morning was another class in Perl programming and she was up early and working on it before nine!
We all tried to go out to breakfast at ten thirty but I spent a bit of the morning on a conference call. We finally snuck away at eleven in the hopes that dad could be on the road home before noon but no sooner did we all drive out to Pastel’s then I was paged back to the house to get back onto the conference call!
So I drove back as quickly as I could and was on the phone for a full hour. Then I drove back, now after noon, and ate my lunch rather than breakfast while dad and Dominica (and Liesl) waited for me. What a pain.
So dad didn’t get on the road until almost one. Then it was back to work for me.
Dominica took the entire afternoon and worked on our taxes. What a pain. It must have been three or four hours of filling out paperwork and hunting down papers that we need. In the end we have just about everything except for some claims that we need to come up with yet and some paperwork that has to be printed out from online or something like that. All of this and it is just the paperwork to prepare to send to the CPA!
I am really disgusted by the difficulty in paying taxes in the US. I’m not really upset about the amount of taxes that we pay. Yes, I think that it is too high but I can live with it. But I definitely think that paying taxes should be simple. Very, very simple. There should be no surprises, no gotchas, just a simple means of honestly paying your taxes. As someone who isn’t trying to not pay his taxes I am really offended that the government makes it pretty much impossible for me to know if I am paying what I am supposed to even when I use a CPA. There is no way for me to be sure that I am not doing something wrong. It just isn’t possible. The government doesn’t even set a clear guideline to determine in what state I live let alone how much I owe!
The one really awful thing is that we are absolutely sure that we paid our taxes ahead this year (sending in pre-payment forms during the year) but we are unable to locate any documentation of this. There appears to be no cancelled checks on my bank account. So we don’t really know what happened. Did they get “lost” in the mail like so many things did in Newark? Did the IRS just not cash them? Did I lose them between writing them and the mailbox? I have no way to know. It is really awful. So now we have no idea what is going to happen or how you deal with this situation.
At very least the initial tax paperwork has been filled out and things can move forward. I find the burden and stress of doing taxes to be crippling. I just can’t get anything done because it is so stressful.
After work we had dinner and watched the final episode of Grace and Favour and then I stayed home with Oreo while Dominica and Liesl went to Stop and Shop to get groceries. Dominica had to go tonight because we have ten percent off coupons that expire if we do not use them promptly. So she stocked up.
Liesl loves going grocery shopping. Dominica wears her in a Moby wrap and Liesl is wide awake checking out all of the stuff going on in the grocery store. She especially loves looking at the vegetables.