Taxes

A little more catching up here, as I have again gotten behind in my daily posting regimen.  I blame this activity for Wednesday's derailment this past week: doing my income taxes.  I don't actually mind filling out my tax forms and doing the calculations; it's pretty straightforward.  The part I mind is the way that there is always, always some little piece that I don't quite understand, about which the instructions remain frustratingly vague.  So I spend way too much time looking for answers online, agonizing, and trying different things before settling on what I think is the most correct option.  This year I e-filed for the first time, and the free program I was using did not explain exactly how it was calculating each step of my taxes.  So I got almost all the way through before finding that there was something I thought was incorrect, at which point I was unable to fix it without doing the whole thing over on the IRS's free fillable forms.  I did this, but then the state taxes were similarly frustrating, and I ended up just mailing the traditional paper forms for those.  Seriously, Congress/Department of Revenue, there has got to be a better way to do this.