Average Jane vs. Herself and Other Obstacles

So I settled down to run my taxes through an online tax preparation program last night, thinking I might be able to just go ahead and get them finished and filed.

Uh, not so much. There was a form from the settlement of my grandparents’ estate that threw a wrench in the whole process. It wasn’t even the form that was the problem, it was two specific boxes on the form. Grrr.

With that dream shattered, it seemed best to just file for an extension and gather up my paperwork to mail to my accountant. I had a pretty good idea of my tax liability up to the point where the online program gave up on me, so I filled out the extension form and sealed it in an envelope. Some quick research showed that I didn’t need to file state extensions, so that was good.

Then I started looking through my giant bag o’ junk mail to make sure there weren’t any important forms or charity receipts there. I ran across a large manila envelope from my accountant that had never been opened. Uh oh.

It was chock-full of amended tax returns from 2006. I was supposed to send them to the Feds and two states along with checks, oh, about 51 weeks ago. I also owed my accountant $50 for preparing them.  The whole envelope had gotten lost and its existence had slipped my mind until then.

I glumly wrote out the checks and signed all the forms, knowing that sending them in now was going to trigger the countdown to getting bills from each government office for penalties and interest.

Then it was time to go to the post office and mail everything. I drove to the large, main post office for my area and went inside. Every postage vending machine they had was shut down. The do-it-yourself mail station was apparently out of supplies because it would only offer me $16 First Class shipping. Sigh.

I went to the other post office in my town. Same deal. Next I stopped at a 24-hour grocery store. They had stamps, but they didn’t sell them after 10 p.m. By this time, my inner longshoreman was fighting to take over my vocabulary. It was time to give up.

There was nothing else to do but to go Sonic and drown my sorrows in a giant vanilla cone.

Never again! I swear, never again…