Taxed

It's been a very looooonnnnngggg week. Like five 13 hour Mondays all in a row. Waking between 4 and 5 everyday. At my desk by 7 at the absolute latest - earlier usually. At work one night until 8. Never home before 6ish. Mind boggling amounts of work to be done. Meetings. Lots of meetings. A stream of mind-numbing 'oh my gosh' moments. Like most of my weeks. I am exhausted and cannot wait for two days of sleeping in - which will probably mean I'll be up between 6 and 7, but that's GOOD. 2 more hours sleep per day would be a nice change.

I arrived home and J., B., and I went to a 'new' restaurant for dinner (H. was at a friends house). It was terrific Italian and we cannot believe we've lived here 7 years and never discovered this place. It was fantastic!

I tootled around on the Internet for awhile and then decided 'hey, I'd really better get productive in some way'. So I started working on our taxes. I'd done the 'bulk' of the process already but still have donations to finalize, double checking things and entering a couple other items.

J. and I have a 'system' regarding our charitable donations. We bag things up and J. 'inventories' them. He makes Excel spreadsheets with descriptions of items donated and the 'condition'. He includes the charity name, address and the date he inventoried the bags as well as the date he actually took the donation (which is, of course, the date we use). It's a pretty detailed list. Impressive. He takes the lead on this part of the tax process and I handle the majority of the rest. It works for us.

But every year, pretty much the weekend before they're due (we always owe and there's no rush to doing them before the 'deadline' when you're sending in a check) I realize that because he doesn't actually DO the deductions on the tax program we use, he has absolutely no idea how to describe and categorize the items we have donated.

Here are some examples.

He lists 'boys trousers'. Now, I don't think boys have worn 'trousers' since Hoover was in office (Hoover's on my mind because our current President's approval rating is said to be the lowest since Hoover was in office. I wasn't alive then. My husband wasn't either. So this is our first experience at having a President with historically low approval ratings. It pains us....I could go on and on but I won't)...OK, back to taxes. So J. lists 'boys trousers'. Turbo Tax doesn't have 'trousers'. It has 'boys pants - cargo' or 'boys pants - chino' or 'boys pants - corduroy', etc. The list is varied. No plain old 'boys trousers' . I know what the kids wear and therefore, I can 'guess' - but it would sure streamline the process if J. would use the TurboTax categories of classification instead of his own. I'm going to make him a 'master list' this year so we won't go through this next year.

OK, here's another awe-inspiring example: 'boys foreign corresp. vest'. I kid you not. My husband apparently writes for a clothing catalog? What was the name of that catalog Elaine worked for on Seinfeld? Yeah, like that one. I asked him to tell me what he meant - what exactly was that item we donated? It stumped even him - for a minute or two - and then he said 'oh, I remember - it was one of those cargo type vests with all the pockets, like Dan Rather would wear'. Oh...yeah...that makes it clear. Sure. Um, OK. I put it down as the only kind of 'vest' the program includes for boys - 'sweater vest'. It isn't, but that's OK. It was $3 of donation and that's fine with me.

Still have a page of 8 pt. font donations to decipher. I'll work on it some more tomorrow. We are whittling down what we owe little by little and will have it in the mail on Monday, I hope.