random thoughts – Day 2,148 (Monday) – lunch, taxes, dance

The day flew by. In addition to the usual routines that keep me functional and semi-sane, there was time spent in the kitchen starting a pot of stock with the rest of the turkey carcass that has been in the freezer since Christmas. After several hours, the bones were removed from the liquid and the onion skins and trimmings were removed from the freezer and added. After a couple hours, the heat was shut off and the skins were removed. Later, the pot went into the refrigerator. Tomorrow, soup making will resume with the addition of vegetables bought on Sunday. Bonus -- there is now enough room in the freezer to hold some ice cream. Finally.

Stuffed mushrooms.

Lunch was a quick heat up of the rest of the artichoke stuffed baby portabella mushrooms. They came in a package of seven, prepared and ready to heat from the produce department at Aldi and were quite tasty. The first three were had for Sunday night supper. 

As the aroma of simmering turkey broth filled the house, I sat at the desk and tortured myself. There were job applications and then work on the tax return. Ugh. The timer feature on Turbo Tax estimates how long the return should take and mine started with a laughable estimate of 54 minutes. I remembered from last year how far off the estimate was when it was simple, but this year is blowing it to shreds with the house sale, unemployment, and the moving of bank accounts and the former company’s 401k. There is no longer a module in Turbo Tax to calculate the value of non-cash donations, so dealing with the eight or nine pre-moving donations to Epilepsy Foundation, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and St. Vincent de Paul are a lot more complicated. I don’t see me building a spreadsheet, logging the handwritten sheets done at each donation, and hunting down the values. If only I were a millionaire able to make large, easy to log cash donations. Sigh.

The countdown.

So far, I’m at 4 hours and 24 minutes on the clock on the tax return and I'm only 3/4 of the way into the Federal return. Chunks of that time were spent searching for online documents and entering information from paper forms and discovering there are still some forms missing from accounts once held at the now-defunct former employer. Super fun.

The evening included dance practice and it was a good way to shake off the dust of the afternoon. Redemption was sweet and had a great soundtrack.