Courting the IRS

Well, after a long drawn out pursuit, I have successful extracted my AGI from the IRS. It required me to call them at seven in the morning and then to wait for twenty minutes. I alternated between being lulled back to sleep by the lilting strains of the Blue Danube and then jarred back to reality by the grating voice of some nameless IRS representative assuring me for the hundredth time that my call was important to them and would be taken in the order it was received. I don't know what I would have done without her.

I went shopping yesterday. It has been a long time. Keith and I have been aggressively paying off the credit cards, our financial plan for deployment. And we have paid off two already and now can turn our undivided financial attention to the one remaining. I sit and watch the evening news with an unending hymn of Thanksgiving rising wordless from me that we are so blessed as to be able to pay off credit cards in this economy.

We had a conversation yesterday, while I was sitting outside on the deck, my bare feet in the block of sunlight that reached over the neighbor's roof line. The dogs wrestled in the dust of the back yard and little birds flew back and forth from the roof of the deck to the bird feeder, quibbling over their breakfast.

"I can't spend any of my own money," complained Keith teasingly.

"Oh,you spent it all right," I countered gaily. "You just spent it so long ago you can't remember what you spent it on anymore. But it's sure spent."

"Humph."

Not long after we met we were visiting with his good friend from the same company and he said that he had once been young and wild and then he'd met his wife and been broken in. "She shredded all my credit cards. Now I have an allowance," he admitted with a grin. Somehow, he didn't seem to mind this, but Keith looked at me.

"Don't even say it," I said. "Have I asked for them? Have I?"

About two weeks later I was shredding them.

We talked also about the tax return money, how much would go toward bills and how much to spend and without blinking an eye my husband gave over a huge percent of it for me to spend. On anything.

"It's your money, you paid in taxes too," he keeps assuring me. Yes, I did, but never have I gotten a tax return even a half of what is mine this year to spend.

So I went shopping and the bags are still on the couch upstairs. I bought a sweater worth fifty two dollars at Bass for eight bucks. Eight dollars. I'm spoilt forever, I'll never be able to pay full price for anything now.