The title of this blog has been temporarily overridden by tax season

We are simple folks. Our taxes are fairly straightforward. I work for the government and Daddy-O is a self-employed Landscape Contractor with no full-time employees. Fortunately for our marriage, we pay someone else to do the actual preparing and filing of said taxes. Unfortunately for me the collection and organization of aforementioned tax docs is left to me.

Please tell me I'm not the only one in this boat lost in the fog on a Sea of Hell. Oh, the personal tax papers are a piece of cake. I keep them in reasonable order all year. But the business taxes. Oh ho ho. Now that is another story entirely!

Daddy-O is not the most organized man in the world. He is very proud of himself for keeping a file of each and every receipt this year. Yeah for him! Of course, he didn't bother to keep any of his credit card statements.

We keep our finances separate. (That is our recipe for a happy marriage.) So he became uber defensive when I had to go through his checkbook registers. Hello??? Separate does not equal Secret. What is it about taxes that bring out the worst in people?

I'm not even done yet (our tax appointment is Thursday. Ack!) and I'm pretty disgusted with the numbers I'm seeing. I can tell you without getting into exact figures that we spent roughly the same amount of money for Blue Cross/Blue Shield PPO premiums (self & family), gasoline for Daddy-O's landscape business and copays for prescriptions and doctors visits. And the three amounts combined were more than my salary my first year working for the Government.

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Here is a picture of B a the Scitechatorium. He's getting electrocuted by a Van de Graff generator. It was really neat and it made his new mullet stand up all over the place. Interestingly enough, Nana said when she was a girl she got to be the class volunteer for the same experiment. Only in her class she touched the ball and another student touched her, another touched that student, etc, etc... all around the room. As the electrical charge passed through each one to the other their hair stood on end. Pretty soon the whole class's hair was standing straight up!

I love this picture of D. He's talking to his Nana on the phone. I kept trying to take the phone from him but he wouldn't let me. I can't get over how old he looks. And mature. And like a guy. Look at that body language. Add 12 or 13 years and it will be a girl he's talking to on the other end of that phone. Just like his daddy.


Speaking of his Daddy... D is still trying to work out which is the working end of a lawnmower. Is the love of motorized objects inherently male? He can't see the levers and wheels and blades and such. He only had to hear the motor once to fall in love. It must be some sort of testosterone poisoning.