I suppose I deserved that...

Ohmmmm.....

OK. Now I feel better. Maybe someday I should really learn how to meditate. I'm sure it would help. I'm sure organizing my office would help, too.

I successfully avoided doing taxes on Saturday and Sunday, leaving them until today. I cleared a few things up at work, then took a few hours off so I could concentrate. I was able to find most of the information I needed quickly and easily in the online records of my credit card companies, and I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Then came the great W-2 panic.

In my records, I had a W-2 without any income or tax information on it. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. This was a problem.

I called our HR person. She wasn't in today. This was a bigger problem.

However, panic doesn't usually help, so I got over it quickly and decided to just use the best information I had from my last pay stub, and pray it would be good enough.

On to the next problem - finding the documentation from selling our house. We have bought and sold several houses over the years, and each time we have gotten a stack of paper so thick that it's impossible to lose, even if you want to.

Not so with the house we sold last year. Instead, we were given all of the documents scanned into electronic format and burned onto a CD. A tiny CD that is easy to misplace, especially when one's filing system is akin to a landfill.

I looked through all of my filing cabinets. I have three two-drawer cabinets here in the office. There is more paper on top or the cabinets then what's filed away inside, but I'm deluded and thought I might have actually put it where it belonged.

I found a folder marked "House Papers" and pulled it out. The CD was not in there.

But another copy of the W-2 was. And this one had numbers!

Encouraged, I dug around through the piles on top of the cabinet and found the CD, stuck it in my computer, and of course the pages I needed to read were scanned in upside down. But at that point I figured I couldn't complain.

OK, so I eventually got everything done with the taxes, and hopefully the IRS will take pity on us and not audit us because of our large medical deductions.

The best part is that I got my taxes submitted before 5:00, with more than seven hours left in the day. After all, I wouldn't want to wait until the very last minute to do something this important.

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