$3900 from my pocket to…whose?

Friday, February 20, 2009 at 2:01 pm (Hack for Hire, Writing by Ear)
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I was fearful of doing our taxes this year. I was fortunate enough to have a good year last year, largely due to one client. (The same client for which I am still working off part of that income and that now has a moratorium on hiring external writers and a 70-day payment policy on any work it does approve.)

I spent all day this past Sunday filling out the “tax organizer” our accountant uses to prepare our returns. Today, I got the word from him: We owe $3900. This on the same day I read this article in the WSJ and almost burst a brain vein.

So, you might say, Well, if you earned it, you have to pay on it.

It’s not like I haven’t been paying my taxes all year.

Every quarter, I sat at my desk, wrote the check, and sent the federal government an average of $1300, based on last year’s income, which is how you do it when you’re self-employed. I wrote two more checks to the state government and the local government. So, yes, I’ve already paid $5200 in federal taxes just for myself, not counting what Mike “contributed” through direct withholding on his paycheck.

I worked hard. I had my best year ever (after almost 10 years of self-employment). And now I get to pay for that success.

And you know, we didn’t squander the money. The vast majority of it went right to our ongoing house projects.

Yes, my fellow Americans, we are working hard to improve the modest, fixer-upper home we bought almost 4 years ago.

We didn’t buy a brand new $400,000 house we couldn’t afford. (We didn’t even buy a $175,000 house we couldn’t afford.)

We put about 6% of our income into our 401(k)/SEP-IRAs (and we all know how well that turned out).

I pay for my own health insurance. (Mike’s employer had been paying for his health insurance. But we just found out that his insurer is no longer offering small-group coverage. So now we have to find a new policy for him, and possibly pay more for that, too.)

We drive older cars so we don’t have car payments.

We pay off our credit cards every month.

We shop mostly at Wal-Mart, with an occasional foray to Sam’s Club.

We eat out more than we should, mostly at the bar down the street (it’s cheap, and it feels good to support a local business).

We use coupons a lot.

We gave a few hundred dollars to various charities, and donated items to Goodwill.

All in all, we are responsible citizens.

We seem to be in the minority.

I have one question:

Just which one of our bought-more-house-than-they-can-afford, not-working-and-on-welfare, decided-to-have-8-more-babies, lived-the-high-life-on-credit-cards-they-couldn’t-pay-off, “I-won’t-have-to-worry-about-putting-gas-in-my-car, I-won’t-have-to- worry-about-paying-my-mortgage” fellow citizens (or illegal aliens) should I make the check out to?

If, by the mere force of numbers, a majority should
deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right,
it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution.
                                               ~ Abraham Lincoln

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The cat has gingivitis

Friday, February 20, 2009 at 11:19 am (Writing by Ear)
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Julius had his annual checkup yesterday. Seems his oral hygiene has been lacking — evidently not good for a barely three-year-old.

It occurred to me that it might have something to do with all the bulimic behavior, though the vet had no suggestions for a cure: “Some cats just have sensitive stomachs and throwing up once or twice a week is not that unusual.”

Great.

Why do I feel guilty, anyway? I can lead him to the toothbrush, but the rest is up to him…


Maybe, just maybe, I can get him to eat these.

Actually, C.C. (the bad breath king) better eat some too. He’s already had his teeth cleaned once, which involves putting him under first — not fun, and we don’t want to do it again.

Two cats with bad gums? What are we doing wrong?

At least there’s been no talk of braces.

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence,
indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.
                                               ~ Joseph Conrad

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Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo

Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 11:07 am (Smile Lines)
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I read a new term last night for those nose-to-mouth deep wrinkles that I euphemistically like to call “smile lines.”

“Marionette lines.”

That stopped me cold. Geez. Those are some baaaaadasssss lines.

Then it led me to The Sound of Music and the puppet show and looking up the lyrics.

You can actually download The Lonely Goatherd as a ringtone — how fun is that? If I had a phone sophisticated enough to let you download ringtones, I might just have to do that. Maybe I’d smile the once-a month my cell phone rings instead of thinking, “Oh sh–.” (My mother cannot keep it straight that my one sister wants to be called exclusively on her cell phone and I never want called on my cell phone, which is always in my purse and has a ringer I can’t hear even on its loudest setting. So she’ll call it, leave a message, and I won’t know for days. Or until the middle of the night when I hear a brief vibrating, buzzing sound every minute or so and figure out it’s coming from my purse. Plus she hasn’t figured out that voicemail is not the same as an answering machine. So she’ll say “Hello, this is mother…..[pause]….are you there? Then wait for a while to see if I pick up. Then leave her message.)

(I just checked my phone now, in my purse, and of course it’s dead.)

But anyway, back to those lines… I’ve just started attacking mine recently with two different types of spackle. Even at drugstore (Wal-Mart) prices, I cringed to buy them. So I’ll be using every drop, effective or not. And I figure it may take a few years to work my way through the various options on the market to see if anything really makes me feel like I”m keeping my face from imploding.

Oh, and neither of these products has sunscreen. So I’m apparently supposed to spread more goo on my face on top of those. (People can actually do that without causing major eruptions?) I had good skin until my 20s, then it all went horribly wrong. A little sunburn is about the only thing that makes it look good.

In the “How Obsessive Are You About Your Skin?” quiz that was the source of the “marionette lines” line, I turned out to be a low-to-medium-maintenance kind of gal. What I really need is high-maintenance funds — I’d be at Dr. Rey’s office so fast asking…”What can you inject here, plane off there, and reconstruct in this general area (neck up)?”

But no, I”m kidding. If I had that kind of money I’d be hard-pressed to spend it that way. Not when there’s a front porch that needs rebuilding and an attic to revamp and a garage roof gone bad, and on and on. “Cottage Industry” will always trump “Smile Lines.”

It’s just how I’m strung.

Your wrinkles either show that you’re nasty, cranky,
and senile, or that you’re always smiling.
                                                  ~ Carlos Santana

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