Birthday Blessings and Bellyaches

I had a mostly wonderful birthday. The bad parts were definitely a product of my own making so I have no one to blame. (No one to blame except myself but I did find a way to partially blame a thing/product.)

Here is a brief recap of my birthday on Monday:

I didn't work on Monday so that was a good thing. All of our guests had left on Sunday. Our house still had that, "just had guests to the house" feel to it. I kept up the extra table that had some leftover cookies, the leftover cake, and presents on it. No shame since it was my actual birthday! I also kept up the birthday banner that my sister hung up for me on Saturday. I had flowers on the kitchen table from Alyssa's boyfriend's mom to me and from my sister.

I started working on laundry from when we had guests over- we had five overnight guests over the course of the weekend so there were a lot of sheets/ linens to wash. Then I decided to finish doing our taxes. Yes, waiting until the day before they were due was pushing it quite a bit. Most years, I complete our taxes by early April. This year was a new record in procrastination and of course I could have avoided having to deal with taxes on my birthday by finishing them before April 17th. Still, I had almost completed them so I wasn't too worried. I had one small section left to complete on TurboTax and then I would be done. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy was what I anticipated. Spoiler alert- that was not the case. 

It soon became apparent that I was missing two documents that pertain to the kids in college and that were necessary to get the correct (and beneficial to us!) tax implications for the money we pulled out of their college savings plans in 2022. Jacob's college does not mail out the 1098-T (the document that I needed) but it's easily accessible online. He had to get it for me which he did after he was finished with a class. Abby's school does mail them- I verified that for the last tax year, I'd received a physical copy. But, this year, if Miami mailed the document, it did not end up in our tax document folder. I contacted her school to try to access it. It turned out that Abby would have to do something on her end for me to access the document (sort of like what Jacob had to do but there was an extra step). Until the kids were able to get their 1098-T's to me, I couldn't do anything. I still wasn't worried-  I knew I'd get the documents and then I could finish up our taxes.

At one point in the morning, the doorbell rang. I had a flower delivery! The flowers were beautiful and a balloon was attached. This was from my sister in law Denise and her husband Don. Such a sweet surprise! 

About an hour later, I checked my email. I had a message from DoorDash saying that there was a delivery out for me. It was from a friend (who was named in the DD email) so I knew that it would be a gift of some kind. The email had an option  to "reveal your gift." Hmmm, did I want a surprise at the door or a find out prior to its arrival? OF COURSE the latter!! I clicked the button to reveal the gift. I'd classify it as a partial reveal. It only said "a six pack" when I selected the reveal button. A six pack? Whuuuut? Of beer?? No, I knew beer wasn't it. Diet Dr. Pepper? Possibly. My pop drinking proclivities are well known in my social circle.  It seemed like an odd, though, quirky product to DoorDash as a gift to someone. The DoorDasher's arrival revealed what the six pack was- six large, humongous, glorious CRUMBL cookies! Oh my!! Much better than a six pack of Diet Dr. Pepper.

In the early afternoon, Abby facetimed me to wish me a happy birthday and to tell me some good news. Apparently, she's getting another scholarship. It seems fairly odd (though really good) to find out about a scholarship on a random day in April.  She received an email from the administrative assistant of the Department of French, Italian and Classical studies(?) saying that she was being awarded one. The amount of the scholarship was not listed. There's an award ceremony in May that she's invited to attend to find out more details- like the amount and hopefully why. I mean, she's a great student and all but she's not majoring in French, Italian and/ or classical studies. She's planning a minor in French but without the trip to France happening this summer (it was going to result in nine credit hours towards a French major or minor) that's going to be tricky for her. We will gladly welcome any additional scholarships and are grateful that Abby is a student who's dedicated to studying hard and doing the absolute best that she can. 

Meanwhile, Jacob and Abby were able to access their 1098-T forms and send them to me. I got all of the information into TurboTax and was excited to get the taxes done and filed. Should be done by dinnertime! TurboTax required me to restart the application due to some updates. No problem! (Or so I ignorantly thought). I selected the button to restart the application. 

While I was blissfully unaware of what the rest of the day vis a vis TurboTax held, a couple of additional good things happened. Jacob texted to say that he was coming home to see me on my birthday. He'd been unable to come up over the weekend. He had told me that he'd try to come up on my birthday so I knew it was a possibility but I didn't know for sure if it would happen. Shortly before he arrived, the doorbell rang again with another delivery! It was a large bouquet of flowers from friends. I was blown away by the flowers' beauty and my friends' kindness.

Jacob walked in the door with a balloon, flowers and chocolate for me.

A couple of pictures of my flowers and goodies...

I decided to forget about the taxes until after dinner. I'd selected the button to restart the application due to updates since I was so close to being done. We got take out for dinner and then after Jacob left to go back to school, I resumed working on our taxes. Here is where things went south. In a nutshell, TurboTax ate our return. After the update, TT restarted and our return was NOWHERE to be found on our PC. It was just gone. The program was all updated and ready for me to START OVER. None of my work was saved. I called the resident IT specialist (Donnie) to the study where I was sitting in stunned disbelief (with a huge pit in my stomach) to assess the situation. I didn't think he'd be able to recover anything but I wanted him to try. He tried but to no avail.

I had to start all over. It was just time consuming and annoying. Very annoying. I have been using Turbo Tax for over twenty years to do our taxes. No more! I will make an appointment with a tax professional  next year so that what happened on my birthday won't happen again. I know it was my fault to wait so long to finish our taxes but I should have had about fifteen minutes tops of work to do to finish the taxes, not to have to start from the very beginning.

I finished up the taxes at 12:03 on the 18th. Naturally filing them electronically and being finally done was too much to hope for. Our e-file was rejected (with no explanation) so I had to print forty pages of paper, sort the federal from the state, find two big envelopes for the two returns, look up the addresses to send both to and then go to the post office to mail them.  I handed the envelopes to the clerk and asked (just to verify), "These will be stamped with today's date, right?" The guy looked at me and smiled, "Naw, I'll hold on to these for a couple of weeks!" Ha ha- So funny. 

I was thinking about how neat having a birthday in mid April is. My birthday has fallen on Easter Sunday one time since I've been alive (and/ or aware of such things. Maybe it did when I was three but I don't remember that!) which was last year. It's fallen on Good Friday two times (again, that I can recall). When my birthday is on a Monday like this year, it usually (maybe always?) falls on the Monday that the Boston Marathon is run. And of course it falls very near tax day each year!! The weather is quite varied from year to year. The weather on my birthday has been everything from freezing, rainy, tornado warningy, beautiful with perfect temperatures, sunny and cool- really anything except it has never snowed on my birthday ;). (I guess I'd have to live quite a bit more north for that to be a possibility.) The weather on my birthday this year was not good! It was super cold. Just one week prior was the exact opposite- Alyssa had a track meet which is how I remembered the weather. The athletes were complaining about having to compete in the heat. Such is the fickle weather in spring...

I culled through the fifteen or so pictures of my childhood that I have and found this one that must have been near my first birthday (based on when tulips are in bloom). Plus being one of five kids, it was rare for a photo to just contain one kid. I'm thinking this was taken of just me because it was my first birthday.

Here I am opening a present on one of my birthdays.