Today's blog is brought to you by the letters FU & IRS

I successfully finished high school.
That should be all it takes to be able to do taxes each year.

That was my battle-cry as I launched into this year's tax season. And seeing as how I have roughly 8 years of post-high school education and have been working in a high-tech industry in the 15 years since high school, I also decided that I should be able to just do the paper version easily enough. Why should I spend the $45 on some dumb tax program when the paper version is free? So I picked up the papers down at the Post Office, and sure enough, a cursory review of the paper forms made it perfectly clear that I can't even fake my way through that nightmare.

I was hoping for a "welcome to Tax Hell; please start by writing your name on line 1", but instead, it seemed to jump straight into deferred interet free annuities from 1098-INT with divested sheltered bracket yields. I read that line and immediately got a nosebleed. Upon further review, I didn't see the place to check off "$13.75 per paycheck left after mortgage and minimum payments on credit cards", nor did I see the "once rolled loose change and returned soda cans to avoid bouncing the mortgage payment" option, so I elected to bring the paper forms directly to my Vermont Castings filing cabinet, where I securely store all my important documents in a humidity-free 451° environment.

Step two was to swallow my pride and buy TurboTax. Rather than run down to the store and pick it up, I decided to downlad it. I tried first at Circuit City or Best Buy, where it turns out you have to pay extra for the priveledge of not getting a CD or shiny box... umm, no. I'd expect a discount for the virtual purchase, but no, they try to get a "convenience fee". In my mind, if online porn is cheaper than a real life Spitzer concubine, then downloaded software should also be cheaper than packaged software. Anyway, I bought it direct from TurboTax with no download fee, and I was ready to rock, assuming of course that "ready to rock" means "ready to spend a frustrating several hours in a mayhem of missing paperwork, boggling directions, and totally inadequate software".

Long story short is this: Wifey is a teacher, and CT teachers contribute to a private/state retirement plan instead of Social Security; TurboTax, however, doesn't like this plan, and would prefer that I just send an extra $3,000 off to the IRS.

Short story short is this: I cursed a lot and then quit.

I'm still undecided as to how to proceed... I don't see why I should need to spend $200 at H&R Block after spending the $45 and many hours doing it myself. I'm currently of the opinion that if they want my money so bad, they should come and take it from my cold dead hands, but I think that might result in me becoming someone's bitch in a federal lockup, or even worse, getting audited. Speaking of prison...

After that tax nightware, it was off to the dog pound to pick up FatHead Houdini 1 and Fathead Houdini 2 who dug under the fence again yesterday and got carted off to the big house in the back of of a black and white. That copper car had the SCMODS apparently (State & County Municipal Offending Dog System). After bailing them out, I walked them for a while, and then kept them in since I haven't yet fixed the hole in the fence. Sure enough, within 10 minutes of being home, they had peed a small pond-worth, dumped a 3-pound pile that stunk up the house instantly, and puked all over an Oriental rug. As I was cleaning the three excementory joys, one of them went into the office and bumped something off the desk, which caused a small avalance, thereby disrupting the Karmic balance and knocking a large framed photo off the shelf., which shattered all over the floor.

All in all, it was not an excellent way to spend a hookey day off from work.

On the upside, when I become old and cranky, I can grumpily tell young'uns about how when I was their age, I had to walk barefoot across broken glass in order to do my taxes each year. So I got that going for me, which is nice.