Been a bit of a week

...yeah, the usual tax season slogging about. Most of my clients have begun to wake up and realize "Say... perhaps I should get my taxes done." The next three weeks will be incredibly busy.

Outside work is busy too. Our pastor is retiring on Sunday. I'm on the Interim Pastor Search Committee, chiefly because I'm the disbursing treasurer. Let's just say that our committee and the Presbytery are having a disagreement over some things, and I'm not really happy with the Presbyterian Way of doing things right about now.

To top it off, I broke a tooth last week. It's tax season, so I must need a crown, right? (Four of my five crowns have now been acquired during tax season.) Went to the dentist yesterday - now, let me say up front that I love my dentist. Been going to him for 22 years. But yesterday, for some reason, the novacaine didn't work. Three shots of it didn't work. The tooth never got numb. (Cringe with me, people.) The drilling was Not. Pleasant. At. All.

So, after a week like this, what's a person to do?

Order more Wollmeise, obviously.

I totally blame my friend Benne on Ravelry. Yeah. That's it. See, normally I'd just lurk around The Loopy Ewe to see when some Wollmeise might go up and then try to snag some, but Benne is wise and crafty. She's locked into the time on the Gen-u-ine Wollmeise website out of Germany as to when they put up new product. So she told me about it, and I promptly bookmarked it. By the way, they send you a pack of gummi bears when you order from them.

So today, Benne let me know that they had grab bags up. What did I order?

I don't have a clue -- it was all in German.

But if it looks anything like this, we're golden:

Is this thing on??

...tap...tap...tap.....testing...

Ok. I know I kinda went on radio silence there for (*cough*sevenmonths*cough*) awhile. I'll try not to do the disappearing act again. I could use the trite old excuse that things got busy, or that life got overwhelming... but all of you are way too smart to fall for that trick. Bottom line is: I'm lazy. And, I didn't think I had anything particularly interesting going on. You have to admit you get tired of me yammering on about business and taxes. I know the look -- it's that glazed over look people get right before their eyes roll back in their head... or that kind of glassy stare they give me right before they say "uh huh..." very earnestly and I know they have no clue what I've just said.

Fortunately for me, Steve (my new business partner) is a fellow geek. He also gets excited about taxes, of all things. We were positively beside ourselves with one return with a total boatload of income that ended up owing no taxes due to all the taxfree bonds (srsly, we nearly blacked out the name and put that one on the bulletin board). And we just about threw a party when an audit letter came back showing zero liability.

Dang, when you think about it, we're sooooo easily amused.


Steve's the tall blond on the left. We've even got our name on the office, so we look official and all. The 720filer.com thing is stalled a bit. Our programmer kind of bit off more than he could chew, and he didn't deliver the e-filing portion. Let's say he's now our ex-programmer. Unfortunately, that means we're still filing these forms by hand, which is so not what we wanted at this point.

So, it's now tax season. Outside of a laptop failure (what? you don't think that copy of Windows I have is legal? what is this box on my desk, then?) and subsequent laptop shopping (how fast is the hard drive? No. 2.3 ghz is not the hard drive. No. An I3 is not the hard drive. Never mind.), it's been going ok. We have an intern now -- and along with it comes the opportunity to warp shape a young accountant to be.

Other than work, you ask? Miss Penny (aka "Princess Chunky Butt") is now officially 2 years old. She's grown into quite the beautiful pup, if I do say so myself.



Of course, she rules our house with an iron paw. She went on her first vacation trip to Highlands this summer, charming everyone within her sphere of influence. She particularly likes to charm them out of food and is now up to 17 pounds of dachshund fury, which is how she got the "Chunky Butt" moniker. She had her annual checkup yesterday, and the v-e-t said the ugly "D" word... as in "Diet". Richard and I gasped in horror, since Penny can be quite the pawfull when she's hungry.

Stitching and knitting? Been doing a little... not a whole lot. When I get in at night, I generally sit down and immediately fall asleep. But I did crochet these booties for a friend who is expecting a little girl.



I was fairly pleased with them. I've got a lot of stitching here, and I put stitches in here and there, but I never seem to get anything finished. Perhaps if that stitching ADD wasn't so bad and I worked on one thing at a time, eh??

That's my little catch up... I'll try not to disappear again. I thank those of you who contacted me and told me you missed my little blog. Makes me feel good to know you notice.

And please, pray for the people of Japan. I have Japanese clients who were there when the quake hit -- we've heard from them, and they were in Tokyo -- and many of their employees are from Japan and have families there who are affected (to my knowledge, everyone has checked in and is fine). Japan is a strong country, but this has been a hard hit and it's going to take a lot of help for them to get back on their feet. Please watch out when you donate to relief organizations and make sure they're legitimate. Go to www.charitynavigator.org and check them out if you're not sure.