Happy April???

Patrick Joubert Conlon has days when he drops off the blogger entity because he has to do his taxes. I have done that myself, though I confess to filing automatic extensions and procrastinating everything.

This year is different. I pump numbers into Turbo Tax and they don't seem to have any relationship to how things are going. Most of the problem is that they don't have questions for me to answer that deal with the expenses of surviving in a foreign country while a member of the family is hospitalized, and WHICH OF THESE is deductible and WHICH OF THESE are just extended vacation expenses. I had to rent a car to get from my adopted residence to the hospital. How much of the cost of the car rental is deductible? How many trips are deductible and what if I went from the hospital down town to buy flowers, or drove back to Porvoo to talk to the doctors who saw Janet first? The hospital bills are easy. None of them got paid till after the first of the year, so they won't have application to 2006 anyway. Should I have kept a notebook about the meals in the hospital and those eaten at roadside diners.

Janet asked me the other day how our taxes were going. I told her truthfully that I had loaded the program into the computer. The problem is all these credit card bills, and all the other little pieces of paper I accumulated, and how these fit into which files.

I have always had a really good system for doing taxes. I buy my little Turbo Tax Deluxe, and sit down with the expanded files that have an opening for each month along with separate openings for charitable giving, medical expenses (driving to the Medical

College of Georgia and back over and over) business expenses etc. Today, the system is not helping me.

Excuse me. I have to stop writing right now and sit in the corner and gibber a little. I am becoming more and more convinced that I need a caretaker.

GIBBER gibber blub bub doodle scritch scratch. I am hoping that when all my pieces of paper are in the proper??? segments of my expanded file labeled 2006, that my sanity will return. Duhh! (here paper, here paper, come to daddy. Nice paper!)