Oh, how I wish that today was a paid holiday for Company O. Alas, President's Day is not on the list. No paid holidays for me between New Year's and Memorial Day. I don't doubt that I've mentioned this before. It starts to bother me every year starting around the month of February.
Saturday was devoted to getting together with friends and going to an open house for a winery. The winery sponsoring the event was Winery R., a specialist in Zinfandels, Syrahs, and Petite Sirahs. I was told that they open everything when they have an open house, and these reports were not exaggerated. There were about 50 wines available to taste, of which I had 23. The bulk of those were Zinfandels. Even with the copious amounts of food they had on hand, it made for a rather long 3 hours of tasting. The wine was nearly all excellent however, and made the effort more than worth it.
The real down side of the afternoon was the weather. It was raining hard most of the day. This was not a problem as long as we were tasting in warehouse space normally used for barrel storage. The problem occured when we moved out to a tent in the parking lot taste wine. As the tent was sitting on asphalt that had a couple degrees of grade, water was flowing across the floor of the tent in shallow sheets. I'd worn a pair of Rockport leather dress shoes with artificial soles. It turned out that the soles of both shoes were cracked. Water just loved to wick up into my shoes whenever I stepped on wet ground. I could feel water pooling between my toes by the time we left.
(Needless to say, I went out and bought new shoes on Sunday. I also got new cross trainers, as my current pair were also showing their age.)
On Sunday, I finally decided to bite the bullet and do our taxes for the year. It was not a pleasant experience. Mrs. Geek and I both used Turbo Tax last year. I was sorely disappointed when I changed my status from "single" to "married filing jointly" because Turbo Tax did not ask to import last year's return for Mrs. Geek. That meant locating additional paperwork for the both of us for last year. The end result was also not very desirable. We're going to end up owing the IRS good sized chunk of change. It seems that I did not correctly estimate how many Personal Allowances to take after we got married last year and took too many. The automatic withholding from my paycheck was too small, and we ended up owing the government some money. It was disheartening.
We shall survive. The amount is merely going to be an inconvenience. No kidneys will need to be sold on the black market. It just means that cancelling some plans Mrs. Geek and I had to travel around Easter.
Oh, how I'm looking forward to the end of the year. Except for a few student loans, Mrs. Geek and I will finally be debt free... and making payments like this will be much easier to manage.
said drgeek
on 2005-02-21 at 5:01 p.m.
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