The Shriek Heard Round The World.

Depending upon your location, time zone and ability to screen out auditory stimuli, you may or may not have heard a loud shriek this morning. It was me and I'm sorry if I interrupted anything important.

Now, you may live in an area where random screams are the norm and, if so, are probably too preoccupied with revisiting your living situation or taking stock of your mace supply to have distinguished my bellow from the others. For those of you who have an interest, this shriek was of the plaintive, horrified sort. A cry that reflects pain, outrage and despair in a range of three notes of the higher pitch.

You see, The Sheep decided to finish her taxes today.

Here's a little financial tip: Do not begin your tax prep. whilst battling the stomach flu. Call your accountant. She will back me up on this. Now, to be fair, I was home with little to do at the time and felt that this might be a something of a diversion from my aches and chills. There are fewer phone calls and the cats sleep in the daylight hours. I had thought that I might get some of this done without the usual distractions. Sound thinking with a fatal flaw.

When all was said and done this morning, the program I was using reported (in what I felt was something of a smug manner) that I now owed the great state of Maine thousands of dollars. Let me repeat that: thousands.

The Sheep is not a mogul. She does not run a multi-billion dollar organization. She teaches, is a social worker and shops at WalMart. Thousands???

Now, I am something of a tree-hugging liberal. I actually do feel that we have something of a responsibility to see that all are clothed, fed and have necessary medical attention. I'm willing to pay for that as well as the roads I drive on and the nice police officers who keep me from driving too briskly upon them. And I fully support paying the firemen...I like firemen...alot...wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah: Social Responsibility.

Despite this, I simply couldn't believe that I owed that much in income taxes. I decided to put the whole thing away until the afternoon and try again. (The Sheep has the equivalent of a PhD. in denial) Revisiting the situation and recalculating added another couple hundred to the amount and I was beginning to think that fleeing to Canada was my only option.

Third try was the charm. It seems that filling out the Federal form with a fever might have been the problem. I neglected to fill in the box which states how much I had already paid to the state so the amount was never carried over to the state form. Thousands owed was magically transformed to under a hundred. The program lost it's formerly smug attitude and started treating me with the respect that a tax-paying member of the community deserves. All is now right again with the world and the Federal government now actually owes me some cash.

That little detour into madness over, I was able to accomplish a few more rounds on the second sock. A stitch was dropped, but The Sheep has something of a new perspective on what constitutes a "tragedy" at this point so the error was corrected with a shrug and a "whaddaya gonna do?" Jacob got a turn on the wheel and, while there was little progress, I'm not too concerned. Spring break is right around the corner and the summer break is not far behind. This will get done.

Now I'm off to go write my report for job #2. That would be your tax dollars at work, you see.

SA