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Ahhh, how wonderful it is to have my tax stuff dropped off at the accountant’s office. I can’t say that my home office is completely cleaned up yet, but I filled three giant trash bags full of the shredded remains of unnecessary paperwork that had been accumulating for the past year. The shredder is now a permanent fixture next to the kitchen trash can, in the hope that we’ll shred unwanted mail daily, rather than let it pile up on the countertops.

I’m pretty good about doing spring cleaning and clear-outs. I am so merciless about getting rid of the clothes I haven’t worn in the past year that I’ve been known to get rid of garments and later wonder where they went. I certainly wish I hadn’t been so thorough about ridding my closet of my “thin clothes,” because they would really come in handy right now, even if they’re not exactly in style anymore.

Our big project for the house this spring is going to be a rearranging of our office/studio space. In 1978, the then-owners of our house decided to tack a two-car garage onto our small, 50s ranch house. Their stroke of genius was in putting a giant rec room above the garage. Unfortunately, nobody ever redecorated it after the inital go-round, so it’s a masterpiece of hideous 70s decor. Here’s a little rundown of the more impressive features:

• Dark brown, faux wood-grain ceiling tiles that give the impression that one is in the hold of a pirate ship.
• Dark brown, splintery-pine center beams and trim, including some bat-winged molding accenting the top of the mirror-backed, built-in glass shelving unit.
• A bar made of inlaid woods, with appliqued leaf-shaped wood designs on the front. There are no actual, useful bar accoutrements such as shelves or a sink, though.
• A dynamic flooring pattern that alternates sections of orange and brown shag carpeting with brown and black patterned linoleum.
• An open-grill wood stove that hogs space in the middle of the room and caused me to have to steam-clean the carpet three or four times to remove all the residual soot. Obviously, we don’t use the stove.

We haven’t put in a lot of effort trying to make any of this decor go away, but it’s definitely time to rearrange things to suit our lifestyle. My husband has his digital music studio along one wall. My desk is tucked into the bay window in the front of the room. The rest of the room is given over to far-too-visible storage, drum sets, and an entertainment center across from a loveseat that’s always piled with junk.

The room is so huge that we have more or less decided to just run with the 70s theme. A friend gave me a crudely-carved M*A*S*H symbol (hand making a peace sign, with women’s high-heeled legs). I have a lovely macrame wall hanging of a tree with dangling roots. The loveseat is bright red velvet to pick up the red in the wood stove. I bought a huge, tacky plastic plant to set next to the couch. The kitsch potential is there, as long as we tidy things up.

That’s definitely not going to take place this weekend, though. Chronic overscheduler that I am, I have every moment of the weekend booked already, and I need to read “Wuthering Heights” between now and 2 p.m. tomorrow for a “Classics Rewound” book club meeting. I guess that’s a sign that it’s time to head home. Until Monday…

Do you ever wonder who buys the organic brown eggs that cost three times as much as the plain white store-brand eggs? Well, that would be me.

I grew up on what my parents referred to as a “gentleman’s farm,” with cats, dogs, horses, peacocks and chickens. When the last of the elderly chickens finally died off, we were forced to begin buying eggs at the grocery store. It was then that I discovered that most grocery store eggs taste awful.

On the farm, you feed chickens corn so the yolks will be a rich, dark yellow. Most store eggs have pallid, flavorless yolks. Also, there’s something much more aesthetically appealing about an egg with a brown shell. Even more fun are araucana eggs, which have blue or green shells. My aunt raises araucanas and is always willing to send me home with several dozen eggs whenever I visit. Here’s hoping she brings some with her when we celebrate her birthday this weekend…

As long as I’ve been doing my own grocery shopping, I’ve bought brown eggs. Until recently, our local store offered a couple different brands of supposedly free-range chicken eggs. One brand looked like it was an offshoot of a larger poultry operation; the other was so down-home that cartons often included little slips of paper with notes about how the flock was doing. (I always thought that if I were an investigative reporter, I would do a story on the “cage free” egg industry to see if the chickens are really as well-treated as all that. How do we know? Are there really a bunch of conscientious chicken-whisperers out there, or is it all a big marketing ploy?)

Anyway, we’ve lately been limited to only one choice of brown egg at my usual store, and there’s nothing about them that says “small farm.” They come in clear plastic cartons (now that’s environmentally friendly!). The insides are pale and flavorless. They’ve been handled so throughly that each egg has a logo rubber-stamped on its tip. The labeling says they’re lower in cholesterol and higher in Omega-3 fatty acids than other eggs. Whatever. All I know is that they make an inferior omelet.

Now that the weather is getting nicer, I think it’s time I made more of a point of going to farmers’ markets for my eggs and veggies. It’s an extra stop, but I think it will be well worth it.

For the past three years I have been self-employed. If I am very, very lucky, this condition will end soon.

I should not be allowed to run a business unsupervised. I do not file things. Unless I’m under contract, I do not necessarily feel I must actually do work every single day. I cannot be trusted to receive a check and set aside a large chunk of it to pay estimated taxes.

It’s that last item that gets me into trouble every year. You’d think that my thorough awareness of the consequences might have some effect on my actions, but you’d be oh, so wrong. Tomorrow I take my painstakingly excavated invoices, receipts, W-2s, 1099s and statements to the accountant and wait to hear this year’s bad news. I always creep in like a penitent: “Help me, CPA, for I have sinned. It has been more than a year since my last quarterly estimated tax payment.”

The accountant patiently goes through all the envelopes of tax reporting forms that I’ve handed over without even having opened them first. There’s inputting and adding and questions. Then the yearly bombshell – always more than the previous year and always enough to make me gasp involuntarily. The accountant will say, “Yes, a lot of that is fines and interest for not paying your quarterly estimated taxes.” Every year I think, “This year it’ll all be different. I’ll never let this happen to me again.” Go ahead, it’s okay to laugh.

It’s not all me, either. For the same period of time, my husband worked for an out-of-state company that did not deduct taxes for our state. Thus, our state tax bill has often been even higher than our federal tax bill. Grrr.

So after we hear the final staggering numbers, we scramble around for the money to pay the gigantic tax bills. Somehow it always materializes in time and we think, “Whew! Dodged that bullet. It’s a good thing we’re going to be so much more responsible this year!”

I now realize that the only solution to this problem is my becoming someone else’s employee. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. In the meantime, I’m definitely going to talk to my accountant tomorrow about sending in my first quarter 2004 estimated taxes. Really. No really….

For once, my husband and I managed to get our trash and recycling gathered and out to the curb the night before pickup day, which is a huge accomplishment for us. Sometimes we skip trash day altogether and are forced to contend with two or three huge, heavy trash cans the following week. I don’t recommend this practice in the summertime, although sometimes it still happens. We get one large-item pickup on the first Monday of the month, and I’ve managed to forget about it for about three months in a row. Thus, there’s a broken old cabinet from the basement that’s been parked on the back patio since January. I plan to put it out to the curb on the first Monday in April without fail. Really!

I worked a bazillion hours today, stopping only briefly at lunchtime to microwave a lovely plate of meatloaf, baked potato and green beans left over from last night’s dinner. I need to bring lunches like that more often – it really beats the alternatives in quality, cost and convenience.

I called the city this morning and informed them that they had mistaken my neighbor’s driveway for mine. They readily admitted that it was highly possible and promised to call me after they’d stopped by tomorrow to make sure.

Tonight we’re going to HomeTown Buffet for dinner. It was either that or stop by the store at 6:30 p.m. and think of something to cook. I’m quite a fan of HomeTown Buffet (and its predecessor in all its nearby locations, Old Country Buffet). Hubby and I have had Thanksgiving dinner there a couple of times when all our relatives had scattered to the four corners of the earth and left us in town by ourselves. HTB almost always has cherry cobbler available for dessert. That alone makes it a worthwhile place to frequent.

After dinner it’s finally time for me to dig in and find all my tax paperwork. I have to start tonight because I suspect that it’ll ooze into tomorrow night as well.

I also need to spend a little time picking up before our cleaning lady comes tomorrow. And no – picking up my junk is not part of her job, and she can’t be expected to clean if there’s stuff piled on every flat surface. We have her come by every other week and it’s the best investment I can imagine. She actually earns more per hour than I do right now, but I don’t care. I know myself well enough to know that there is no way in hell I would ever get around to cleaning our bathroom once per fiscal quarter, much less twice a month. Without her, we’d probably expire from some rampant super-bacteria within a month.

With that, I’m heading home. A little more food, a little caffeine, and I think I can keep this momentum going!

Ordinarily I wouldn’t post twice in one day, but I thought this was a good opportunity for a daily update and a few acknowledgements.

When I got my mail this morning, it contained a letter from the city, which is never good. My first thought was that they were going to make us do something expensive and destructive concerning our septic system. It turns out they’re demanding we maintain and upgrade our gravel driveway. Trouble is, we don’t have a gravel driveway, nor have we ever had one. In fact, we spent many thousands of dollars just last summer having a new concrete driveway and sidewalk put in. The city maintenance division was actively involved in said driveway project, as they provided the new drainpipe that runs under the head of the drive. Obviously the whole citation thing is an error on someone’s part, but it’s very frustrating that I won’t be able to call until Monday. I’m 99% sure they’ve accidentally identified our neighbor’s driveway as ours, but we’ll see what happens Monday.

On a completely different subject, I’d like to thank everyone who has stumbled across this site and added comments and/or linked to my blog. I keep a close eye on my referral stats (how could I not?!), and have found some very entertaining blogs that way. I’m adding many of them in the “Other Blogs I Like” list on the right. Special thanks to Mark Beck for the suggestion of echinacea supplements for my ongoing respiratory travails. I’ll give it a shot and see what happens.

Thanks also to my friends and family members who are using this blog to keep up with me. It’ll probably make me a much better listener when we get together, since I won’t have anything left to say about myself.

Even though I’ve quit complaining about my health so much, unfortunately that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten any better. I’m still coughing and coughing, and my head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton. Since it would be nothing short of embarrassing to die of pneumonia in the 21st century, I think I’m finally going to go to the doctor next week. I tried to make an appointment yesterday, but the first time I called, the office’s computer system was down. The second time I called, the office was closed for lunch. If I don’t last the weekend, my survivors can blame them.

I really didn’t want to go through another round of antibiotics this winter. In November and December I had respiratory infections twice, so it seemed like a good idea to try to create my own antibodies this time. That was a good plan for the first three weeks of this go-round; not so much as it’s stretching into a month.

Another incentive for restoring my health is the amount of stuff I need to accomplish in the next week. Here’s a brief rundown, in no particular order:

• Dig out my tax paperwork for a Wednesday afternoon appointment with my accountant
• Replace all the brake pads on my car
• Cook meals to take to a friend and to a local Ronald McDonald House
• Clean up my hideously messy house
• Finally take down the @#$% Christmas lights outside
• Put in 40 hours at work
• Attend a board meeting
• Help out with a children’s activity at a local women’s shelter

I’m sure there’s more, but you can see the pattern: I’m too busy to be sick for a month! This isn’t even a particularly busy week – it’s really pretty typical. If you add in the time I need to set aside to hang out with my husband and the cats, watch the few TV shows I still bother to TiVo, and maybe sleep for a while every day…well, I’m going to have to look into cloning myself to get it all accomplished.

As I drove through downtown before lunch today, I saw a bearded man walking down the sidewalk holding a long stick over his head with both hands. After I drove past, he began shouting at the driver of the car behind me and shaking the stick at him. Why, I don’t know. To me it was just another reminder that the occasional little electrical misfires in my brain could be much, much worse. With that kind of perspective, I don’t feel quite so bad about having to go back into the house two or three times every day before I finally have everything I need to drive away.

I’ll soon be paying for my inattention in another way, though – I got my first speeding ticket of the season. 48 in a 35 mph zone. My last one was for going 38 in a 25 mph zone, so you can see the pattern here. I blame the fact that my radar detector is out of service until I get better suction cups to hold it to the windshield. Yes, I know I shouldn’t speed, blah, blah, blah, but I just do. My car is turbo-charged, okay? To quote Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.” (Wow, two movie quotes in two blog entries. I must be overdue for some cinematic entertainment.)

I remember a time when getting pulled over seemed like the most terrifying thing that could happen. It should still be hideously traumatic, considering that I have no idea where I’m going to come up with the money to pay this fine, whatever amount it ends up being. However, I no longer get that sick rush of adrenalin when I see the flashing lights. It’s more of a, “Well, you got me,” feeling of resignation.

I’d been hoping to take my car out to our local racetrack for a drivers’ education weekend this spring or summer. I think high-speed track performance training would get a lot of the “need for speed” out of my system. Unfortunately, my transmission is in a bad way and I can’t subject the car to any excessive strain. Since it’s very important that my transmission remain functional until I can afford to replace it, tracking and autocrossing are out of the question for now. Sigh.

So that’s my tale of semi-woe for today. I can’t expect any sympathy because it’s completely my fault, but to dredge up another quote, this time from Joe Walsh, “I can’t complain but sometimes I still do.” I’d say that about sums it up!

I have no grasp of fashion whatsoever. Every time I manage to put together an attractive outfit, it’s either through the guidance of someone else or completely by accident. It’s almost impossible for me to actually believe that there are people who can look at someone and identify the brands and/or designers of their clothing and shoes.

Part of the problem for me right now is that I recently lost about 30 pounds and I’ve been really, really broke. Thus, what should have been a fun opportunity to buy some new clothes has turned into a static closet full of old shirts that are too wide at the bottom and too short to wear with my cute, new low-rise jeans.

Today I really blew it, though. For some reason I decided to wear a gigantic t-shirt from 10 years ago, back when I was thin the first time around but wasted it by covering up with XXL shirts. I can report that this trend is definitely OVER. I felt like an old lady trying to dress like a 8-year-old skateboarder, especially when I ended up going out to lunch with people from my office. The final verdict: comfortable – yes, publicly acceptable – no.

If I had enough money (and keep in mind, I’m cheap even when I’m not in debt), I might be able to wean myself away from Target and Marshall’s. Thanks to a gift card, I discovered BCBG a couple of years ago and I would love some more of their stuff. I doubt I’d ever make the leap with purses and shoes, though. When Hannibal Lecter taunted Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs about “your good bag and your cheap shoes,” it just made me think about how both my purse and shoes are cheap.

The only nice accessories I have are watches. My husband collects them and passes some very nice ones my way. I’m especially fond of the vintage men’s watches, but I also like the really huge watches that are fashionable among male action stars these days. Unfortunately, the world of watch aficionados is a relatively small one, so it’s seldom that anyone notices or comments on any watch I’m wearing.

Ah well, luckily I don’t care what people think. One of my friends once quoted from an article she’d read about things you learn as you get older. My favorite item: “No one is looking at you.” I believe that’s almost always true.