Saturday, February 16, 2008

Emily's Sweater, snow and a taxing story

I have been working very hard on Emily's sweater, and I'm nearly finished:

I really like doing the top-down thing. My only problem is that I don't have any size 9 dpn's for the sleeves--and I got to Hobby Lobby yesterday and they didn't have any (seems to be a basic theme lately). So I'm going to see if I can improvise with 2 circs.

Otherwise the story is--snow. Again. We are supposed to go see Barack Obama on Sunday--I am SO excited (and so is Anna.) Unfortunately, we are supposed to get another 6-10+ (Yes, that's a plus sign) inches of snow. Remember my table I've been chronicling all winter? Here it is right now:
Here is the view down the street...you can see how high the snow is piled up the sides:
Other than snowing and knitting, I have been trying to locate the kids' baby books and/or our tax returns from last year or the year before. See, we were very smart and used Turbo Tax the past 6 years. Most of our returns are on our second to last computer (that we just commissioned into service for a short while between our last computer dying and our new computer). We have 2001-2005 on that hard drive. 2006 is on our last computer's hard drive, and we are using the new computer for 2007.

Short story long: We can't get into the hard drive with the 2006 tax return on it. We tried a hard drive enclosure with no success, so we think the drive is screwed. We can't open the 2001-2005 tax returns because the latest software will only open the previous year (2006). And we can't claim the kids as deductions unless we have their social security numbers. That are on the cards in their baby books. That went into boxes SOMEWHERE when we moved.

I managed to find Nicholas'--which is good because that was the one I had NO CLUE where to find. So we went from owing to getting back money. Because, let me tell you, after having the worst possible financial year of our life, I really, truly was ready to move to another country if we ended up OWING money on top of it all. As it is, we don't qualify for the Earned Income Credit because we had "Too much in the sale of stock or pension". Because we had to cash out Brian's stock option and 401K (about $5000 altogether) so we could do fun things like eat and keep the electricity on. Evidently that makes us too independently wealthy to qualify for the poor people credit.

Anyway, enough whining! I am going to go scour a few more places and see if I can't come up with the box with our documents in it....and enjoy the sunshine before it's covered by a bleak snowstorm. Again.

2 comments:

Ruby said...

Emily's sweater looks great so far! Good luck with finding the documents. Can't wait to hear all about Barack's appearance.

Thora said...

Isn't top down great? No seams and the other thing is you can try it on as you go to see if you have to make adjustments.

I hope it stopped snowing by now. You SO don't want to know what the temp is here today.