a no good day

It's not really that. For one thing, it was not raining hard when I went to feed the animals. Still cold, still wet, still very few daffodil blooms out there, but I did not get drenched.

Then, Ed asked to tag along on my trip to the bakery. He never does that. Usually I bring home the fresh breads and pastries and eventually he wakes up and we eat them together. But today is voting day and he had neglected to send in his absentee ballot, so he tagged along to the bakery and had me drop him off at the voting place so that he could cast his vote. Not an important one, to be sure, but still, we are civic minded!

He asked if I wanted to hang out at a coffee shop and that was super sweet since he knows I like that sort of thing. but it was a gesture, nothing more, since I had a box of fresh pastries in the back seat. Nothing at a coffee shop would trump that, so we went home. 

Breakfast, looking awfully much like it always does. At the kitchen table.

And now comes the super slide into abysmal nothingness. The weather is so bad, so bad that a religious person might think that a divine being was sending me a clear message: do your damn taxes already, because in a week, the weather will be fine and you will have work to do in the garden, whereas we are giving you this cold and now very very wet day so that you would not be tempted to go out and take a walk or ride a bike. You will be inside, reading a book or wasting time on the internet and that is just so dumb because you could just get those taxes out of the way already.

The thing is, I cashed in on a lot of my retirement savings last year so that suddenly, my taxes, which normally have only two sources of income ( a state pension check and a social security check) suddenly have all these other details that I have to account of in my tax return.

I fell into the tax rabbit hole. Suddenly schedules were required. And worksheets had to be completed. I am sure I made endless mistakes, despite the fact that Ed helped (he is way more confident with bureaucratic forms than I am). I laughed, I groaned, we both laughed. It was insane! And then I scratched my head in puzzlement over some computational quagmire and I found a tick in my scalp! (Not unusual: we usually pick up a couple in the course of the season, but still, I almost missed that one!)

And then he got a call from his buddy and I had a question that I wanted to consult him on and so I did not finish! Did not finish, despite having devoted the whole day, up until picking up the kids, to this brain sucking task that I'm sure everyone loathes (except those who pay others to do the taxes for them, but those people then loathe the expense of paying someone for something that should be ever so straightforward).

Well, it's mostly done. At the federal level. Wisconsin taxes will have to wait until another bad weather day which, let me note, is coming straight at us tomorrow. So, we have the very real possibility of having two no good days in a row! ("No good" to a degree. We are fine and despite travel and such, we have no Covid in the household and the tick is out of my scalp. How's that for good fortune!)

I leave the house in pouring rain.

By the time I get to the school, it's no longer raining. It's snowing. Hard. The sign over the highway warns of a winter storm. Wait, winter storm? Are we in winter? 

The kids come out in heavy snow.

It takes us twice as long to get back to the farmette. The roads are slippery, the traffic is crawling.

 

(In one hour, we went from nothing to this...)

 

 

The kids scramble to get inside against the falling wet snow.

I feed them, I read with those who want to listen, we play some...

 

 

... and then I put on a Bluey episode and exhale.

I mean, it's been a rough day! (Again, relatively speaking.)

I cook soup for supper. Use up the unused veggies. Comforting soup. And as it simmers on the stove, giving off those wonderful aromas that are so fitting for this day, I bring up the tax forms again and I finish them up.