Fuckin’ Taxes, pt 2.

No, wait. Not $1500.  I got another 1099-INT today.

Make that $2000.

Motherfucker.

My new mantra, being repeated in my head all day to try to keep from losing it completely:

"The universe is working for me, not against me.
The universe is working for me, not against me.
The universe is working for me, not against me."

I know there is a reason for all of this; I can’t wait to see what it is.

Golden Horseshoes, etc.

Well, this entry was all about recounting the wonderful things in my life, and how I make fun of my sister and her golden horseshoe, but I’ve been pretty lucky, too, and how I probably need to just relax.  It also listed — with bullets! — the things I am most anxious about, the things I am most thankful for, and the possible solutions to that angst. In the midst, no, actually, near the end of this entry, I closed the lid of my iBook and went to do dishes and make dinner.  And while I did that, Dave decided to check his email.

I had six tabs open, people, including two google searches, and he used my TypePad tab to check his mail.  And while Typepad is amazing and I love it, it does not have the capability to undo stupid-ass things like not saving a draft before one’s husband verifies that no, no one had emailed him today.  Clicking back doesn’t fix anything.

And here I am.

Continue reading

Fuckin’ Taxes.

Ah. A hahahahaha HAHAHA HA! Right. Uh, ixnay on the arcay.

With the new decision to start looking at cars, to make some inquiries at the dealership that Dave does work for, to work on our savings goals, etc, we decided to do our taxes to see what our refund would be like this year. And by refund, I mean "money that we are assured to receive, because we bought a house this year and everyone raves about the tax benfits of buying a house, so Yippee! Direct deposit that bad boy!"

Except, according to TaxACT, the direct deposit isn’t really an option so much, unless we’d like to dirdep THEM some money. Because, for the first time ever, we fucking OWE taxes.  Ironically enough, we owe about exactly what we had decided to earmark for a down payment on a car. I’ve plugged everything in, and actually, just this second I’m realizing that I probably don’t have everything yet, because I should probably be getting another 1099 (interest paid out) for the last of my savings bonds that I cashed in when we bought the house. So, yeah, FUCK. We probably owe more.

Dave and I made the same amount of money, within 500 bucks, and our withholdings were about as similar, so it’s not like there’s some big, obvious "oh, one of our W4s was messed up huh?"  I’ve figured in mortgage interest, points, even the educator expense credit. Everything. And we still owe to the feds and the state.  So, not only am I NOT getting a car, our window fund is going (Har Har) out the window to pay for the taxes. Fuckity Fuck Fuck.

On the other hand, one of TaxACT’s features compares your return to national averages, and it said, improbably (?), that our AGI was in the top 20% , nationally.  Kind of humbling, and sort of mystifying, and makes me wonder about how much that I see people having as objects of wealth are really indicative of wealth itself.  And, we’re lucky that we have the money to pay the bill, it won’t put us into financial ruin, we have a house and at least one reliable car, and no credit card debt, etc etc, so there is always a bright side, right?

However, if the universe wants to drop a Ford Focus station wagon in my driveway, that would be cool, too.

Car Dilemma

For most of this month, I have driven Dave’s car to school.  We’ve had some big snow, and some deep freeze, and my car is just not cutting it anymore.  He emailed me yesterday to say "By the way, I don’t plan on driving your car next winter, too."

My car is a 95 Ford Escort, LX, baby, and it’s been paid for for over three years.  It has 135,000 miles on it, and has driven me across the country and back, and all over New England and the southwest. It has been rear ended, sideswiped, backed into , and rear ended again.  The driver’s side seat belt stopped working in Boulder, Colorado, in 2000.  The brake light has been on, permanently, for just as long, it seems.  The gas door doesn’t close anymore, and the back doors are hard to open and close, probably from a twist in the frame, is my guess.  The heat doesn’t work anymore, well, it does, but only from the panel vents which is the worst place for heat to come out of in the winter.  (Dave doesn’t even turn on the heat when he drives the car.)  Exhaust fumes leak into the passenger area, now, and the check engine light comes on sometimes, and the washer fluid may or may not spray onto the windshield when you ask it to.  It’s a dying machine, it is.

We have planned on not getting a second car; I hate my job, I want a baby, I want to stay home at least part time, and we could probably swing being a single car household if I don’t go back to work.  However, I’m still not pregnant, and at this point, I might just do one more classroom year because of the benefits I would reap from that.  (If I were to magically get knocked up this cycle, I would be due in November, and I could do 2+ months of teaching and then decide what to do, because in my third year, I would get tenure.) And, I might not get pregnant for awhile, and I’m thinking that maybe I should just live life and do what I need to do now, and hope that a baby becomes a reality at some point.

So, I had seen a car online at a small dealership in the town I teach in.  Dave and I started talking about it, and we went out to look, and it ended up looking MUCH smaller in person than it did online, so that one’s out of the picture.  But now we’re thnking that maybe we should just suck it up and get a newer car for me, with the worst case scenario being that we have to unload it in a year or so.  Dave does work for several of the big dealerships, and is well-liked by the CEO of the one we like the most (and where I got my current car, nine years ago) and is also a Ford dealer, and I’m back to wanting a Focus wagon. I think.

Fuck, though, car payments are such a bitch. And insurance and all of that.  But my current car is worth less than 1k, and it would cost as much as that to fix all that’s wrong with it, and as my parents have said "That car doesn’t owe you anything."  It really doesn’t, and the plan has been to drive it into the ground, and I’m starting to feel like the ground is rising to meet the car really quickly at this point.

I think I may have to bite the bullet and suck up a car payment. Fuck. I hate car payments. 

Music Meme

jstrizzy tagged me with this, which might be the saddest meme for me to do, ever.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer 

    One. I am so not kidding.  Etta James, "At Last," which was our wedding song, and the only reason it’s on here is because I needed it for a grad school project.

2. The last CD you bought
   
1200 Curfews by the Indigo Girls, and it was the first time I’d purchased a CD in YEARS. Seriously.

3. The last song you listened to before reading this message
    That Nickelback song about the blow job. It was on the radio, and led to Dave ranting about the lack of good American metal music, about how In Flames won a Swedish Grammy for best albums because "the Swedes know where it’s at" and how "New Metal is just a bunch of punks whining about how their parents don’t love them or their girlfriend broke up with them. Waaaahhh." Heh.

4. Name 5 songs you listen to often or that mean a lot to you
    "At Last," Etta James — wedding song, you know.
    "Dead Man’s Hill" — Indigo Girls, makes me cry every time I listen to it, because it reminds me of my dead friend JT for so many reasons.
    "Perfect Day" — Lou Reed, makes me cry because it was played at Aton’s funeral, and I wrote that whole essay around the lyrics.
    "Wild World" — Cat Stevens, & "Wish You Were Here" — Pink Floyd, both equally meaningful in the "Screw you, Death" tour of ’99-’00.  Again, can make me cry if I really listen to the lyrics.
    "Epic" — Faith No More, an anthem of adolescence, that when I hear it randomly on the radio now, I hear it as a sign of ‘everything will be okay.’  I cannot hear it and not remember walking around the old mill town with Amy, barefoot, in the middle of the night, just wishing desperately that we were grown up, or at least old enough to drive.

5. Who will you pass this stick to (3 people) and why?
AgentLulu, because she is a Rawk Goddess
jnstarla, because she needs to be distracted from package tracking
molly, because I want to force an entry out of her.

Amy made me two CDs, and in taking Dave’s car to work, I’ve been able to listen to them and enjoy them.  But I really don’t listen to much music beyond the college radion station.  I don’t have an mp3 player, I don’t have an internal CD burner, I don’t have much need to listen to music, I guess.  I used to work in the music department, for YEARS, I did, and I was always hearing new stuff and loving it.  I have tons of CDs from those years, most of them promos, but I just don’t get much new music exposure these days. 

Jumbled

The hockey game was great, Maine won, and my tickets were in the same section as Ray Bourque’s, and that is how I learned who Ray Bourque was.  (His son plays for BU.)  The low for yesterday was -29, BEFORE wind chill, and while it has warmed up, it’s still damn cold.

Also, the most major way that 9/11 has affected me (someone who didn’t lose anyone, and honestly can’t fathom such an event because I live in, you know, Maine.) is that whenever the networks run a "breaking news!" cut-in, I tense up.  However, what constitutes news I need to know, NOW, has turned into the People magazine Special Report, because honestly? That Johnny Carson died, or that Martha Stewart was convicted, is information that can fucking wait until the 6:30 broadcast. Seriously.  There should be some law; if it’s not going to affect the general public, then it’s not that newsworthy.  Deaths of public figures like elected officials or royalty, go ahead, break in and let us know. But Johnny Carson? Did we really need to interrupt the regular schedule for that?

I had nightmares about my job last night, that my old principal was setting me up to quit or be fired, but he was working on orders from my mother’s old superintendent from about 15 years ago.  It really exacerbates the anxiety I’m feeling about my job right now. Thank god the school year is half over.  I so cannot do this for another year, it is SUCKING right now.  I don’t want to elaborate, but just know that it SUCKS ASS.

I just want to get pregnant, thank you, and do grad school, or have a nice little library job, or answer phones somewhere where the people calling are nice and not assholes. 

It’s nice and snowy and all that’s missing for the coze-factor is cookies (I’m out of eggs, dammit) and a baby wearing something adorably fuzzy.  Sigh.

War-shuffling

I’ve been working with one of my old clients this week to troubleshoot a Norton AntiVirus problem; basically, it stopped working (but not due to a virus) and uninstalling and reinstalling failed halfway through the reinstall, and googling the problem led to "yeah, and symantec’s ‘fixes’ don’t work."  Well, fuck.  Instead, I set him up with AVG, the free antivirus stuff we used at the library, and he was satisfied.  However, I had taken my laptop with the Symantec fix instructions opened in Firefox to his building, and realized right away that they have an open, and strong, wireless network.  I showed my client, who had been mulling about signing up for DSL, and he got excited.

So, today, I picked him up a wireless adapter at Staples and installed it while he told me all about his 1942 furnace, and how he rigged it up to a British thermostat to set the interior temp to 38 degrees, so that when he went to FLorida in the winter, he didn’t have to pay so much to heat his house.  There was also a story about finding a pipe at Chop-Chop’s ("I still don’t know what his real name was, everyone called him ‘Chop-Chop’") house, buried in the back yard, and a whole bunch about photography, with the added prop of him unearthing a portrait of him and his wife that my Dad die back in the late 70s. It’s a small state.

Anyway, he was very excited to be stealing internet from his building. "I pay $1850 a month! I don’t need to ask permission!"  It is the super-luxe retirement village in town, and what the hell? If they don’t lock down the network, expect people to use it.  And, of course, I totally undercharged him for labor.  I spent probably 5 hours over 3 days with him, and charged him 50 bucks, but he added in an extra ten "for gas."  I’m sure the Geek Squad charges a lot more, but whatever, I also got a free York Pepperming Patty and the opportunity to see an elderly man reading a Nora Roberts book. It’s all good.

Tonight, hockey game! This is my fourth of the season.  I can’t believe how quickly I’ve converted to total hockey fan.

Thanks

I must say, I love the internet.  You know I do.

Days like today, though, the internet gives me amazing support when I open the screen, and when I want to just be alone and curl up under the layers of feathers and flannel, I can do that without making excuses or needing to explain.. I just close the screen, and hide.  To some, that may seem weird and antisocial, but it’s just right for me.

At this point, I think that I’ve either experienced a chemical pregnancy or a cyst.  I was SO GOOD about waiting to test until I was officially late, and there ARE lines on the tests, the first one broader than the second, but definitely, I got 2 lines, twice. 2 faint-as-hell lines, for sure, but they are there. I am not crazy.  Mayne they’re evap lines, but that doesn’t explain the 10 days (and counting) late period.  The only non pregnancy things that can cause that would be a chemical pregnancy (making me wonder if I had jumped the gun and tested early if I would’ve been on this train for longer) and ovarian cysts.

My doctor was really disappointing.  I waited at home for more than SIX HOURS to hear back, and when I did, it was a nurse, who had this information: "Dr. S says to wait another week and take another pregnancy test."  To which I said "What? But I had a negative blood test, yesterday, and I’m now ten days late…. I’m not even concerned about pregnancy at this point, but my period being so late and NOT being pregnant. . ."  The nurse sort of stammered and said "Well, ahh, wait a week and test again." What the fuck EVER. I really feel like my chart, the message, etc were not read thoroughly, and it pisses me off, frankly.

I’ve been sort of ho-hum about the group anyway; it’s convenient, because Dave’s doc of forever is there, and my original PCP is there, and the plan was to stay there with the DO who does "Family Practice with OB," out of convenience, mostly.  She seemed nice when I talked to her this summer, but fuck, I need to feel like my concerns are being heard.  If I were a frequent flyer, I’d be okay with a nurse brush-off, but I only ever go to the doc when I have a damn good reason to, and aside from a routine pap in August, and the cryo situation in March, I’ve been in ONCE for an office visit due to an immediate problem, until now.  I just feel like that should give me some credibility, you know?

I’m going to try to call Jess and ask her about her OB again.  She’s recommended her a million times, but I figured I was okay with the DO, but damn, I want to be called BACK. And, since it’s an OB/GYN practice, I presume that there would be well-educated nurses as well, who might be able to say "hey, you’re right, testing again in a week after a negative BETA is stupid, let me have her call you back."

Also, selfishly, I think that Jess’ practice does ultrasounds in-house, and if I do get knocked up, I could get pictures earlier. Not so much for the photo album, but I read about seeing heartbeats and think that that shit is COOL.  It’s not a matter of insurance acceptance, or being closed to new patients, so I think I need to go for it.

So, thanks internet (and real lifers who have been so supportive, too).  I appreciate it. 

Negative

The title says it all.

I called in to school today, because I decided that no matter what the answer, I wanted to be home to process it.  The lab tech had said to call for results, and the office opens at 8.

I started calling at 8, and kept getting the answering service.  By 8:30, even the service operators were saying "I don’t know what’s going on, they usually start taking calls at 8. . . ." Of course.  The Today Show featured all the things babies need, and then did a spot on grandparents.  When I finally got through to the lab, I got a voice mail service, asking me to provide a whole bunch of stuff, and that my provider would call back in 24 hours. TWENTY-FOUR HOURS?

I waited a bit, talked to Amy, and called back to see if I could reach my doctor, or someone, because I needed to know.  I got the lab, who told me it was negative.  The lab person said she didn’t know how to transfer back, so I waited a bit and called back, and am now waiting for my doctor to call back.  Even that was a debacle, because I had seen one doc up until my last pap, and the doc I saw at my last pap is the one that I would see if I was pregnant, and finally I just told the recpetionist "Look, either one, just one of them, please, I just want to ask about the whole late period thing."

Then I emailed Dave, with a "Negative. I’m Sorry." and that’s when I cried.

Fucking A.

And also? No fucking period.

Update

I didn’t actually see my doc, I only met with a lab tech who did a urine test (negative, but it was at least my 6th or 7th time peeing that day, so . . .) and a blood test, with results tomorrow. Fuck. Fuckety Fuck.  I really wish I knew. I hope when I call for results tomorrow I don’t get too upset at a negative. And, if it is a negative, where the fuck is my PERIOD?

Anyway.  I do have Breana’s dream to ponder:

In my dream I had all this stuff to help people who are TTC
(like HPTs), and since I’m not trying to get pregnant, I was
all, ‘What the Hell am I going to do with this?’ So I got
really giddy and started boxing everything up for you,
because I figured I could save you some money. And I called
you to get your new address and you said, ‘Well, I don’t need
that stuff anymore,’ and I about flipped out. The dream
changed shortly afterwards (something about post-it notes
stuck all over my gas heater starting a fire) but I woke up
thinking, hot damn, Gretchen’s pregnant! Sort of strange,
don’t you think?