All she does is complain....

Would you like to hear why exactly it is that I allot 6 weeks to do my taxes?

If not, please proceed to another blog.  If so, pull up a chair and let me give you just one example.

The night before last, Sarah was trying to print something and she needed to replace the cartridge.  She asked me to help her so I did.  What can I say?  I'm in the running for World's Greatest Mother.

The black ink cartridge was still half full so I changed the tri-color cartridge.  The screen immediately flashed an error message and said that it wasn't an HP cartridge.

WRONG!

It was totally an HP cartridge and it was in fact purchased at a store.  It wasn't one of these no name refillable ink cartridges that you can purchase online.  I was  irked to say the least because as I told Sarah - that's just one more thing to deal with.

The package that I had purchased contained two cartridges so I tried the other one.  It printed fine.  (In hindsight it only printed because Sarah switched images while I was fumbling around with all the cartridges and printed something that was all black.)

So imagine my great annoyance when I sat down yesterday to print off everything I needed to print of for my taxes and was able to print one and only one of the documents before I got a message that the printer wouldn't print because it was out of ink.


insert lots of unpleasant words 


I took out the printer cartridges and shook them because I knew they were NOT out of ink. I hit print again and got this:

A bunch of weird symbols where all the numbers and letters are supposed to be.

So I did what I always do when I'm having a printer malfunction. I googled and tried several different things.  I downloaded updated firmware (but alas, my firmware was already up to date). I found a tutorial from a very hard to understand Indian man and did the things he recommended. (Turns out what he was instructing me to change had already been done and that clearly wasn't the problem)

I ran the HP trouble shoot program and when that didn't yield any results I tried what they suggested as their last ditch effort.  I was going to attempt to clean the contacts.

The first step to cleaning out the contacts was  to remove the ink cartridges.  As soon as I did this, I realized my problem.

I failed to remove the little piece of tape over the contacts before I inserted the tri-color ink cartridge the night before. Which is why black only files would print but any file that would need any other color than black would not print.

What an idiot!  I brought all this unnecessary angst and wasted time on myself.  (Sorry HP for all the bad things I was thinking about you in my head!0 So I excitedly removed the little piece of tape and hit print and got this:

Same exact piece of  crap!.   Printing off the documents is supposed to be the easy part and this was taking forever!

But then out of desperation I attempted to print a different document and it worked just fine.  I think printed everything else I needed  so perhaps the other document was corrupt.  I just left that one and made a note to try to print it on another day.

After I finally got everything printed off I needed a break. It was 11:30 so I made myself a salad and then watched an episode of This Is Us.
I also did a load of laundry, balanced the checkbook and paid bills, discovered that my car registration needed to be renewed so I frantically hopped in my car to go get it inspected but realized I had until the end of March not the end of February (crisis averted as it was February 28) so I put that off until next week.  (If there's one thing I'm good at, it's putting things off.)

And then and only then did I sort through the paperwork I had printed to get everything ready to actually sit down and do the taxes. 

So basically this is why I allow 6 weeks to do my taxes because it took me all day just to get to the point where I can actually download TurboTax and get started. 

Enough tax talk. I'm sure you are totally bored with all that.  (It's going to be a long six weeks my blog reading friends!) Let me take a minute to chat about the weekend.

Tonight the boys lacrosse team has an away match.  (Assuming it's not rained out and based on the current forecast, it most likely will be.) If you will recall, Sarah is the water girl  manager. Which means we have to pick her up after the team (or who ever didn't get picked up from the game) returns on the bus.  Not sure what time that will be but it will most likely be after 9:00 PM as the match doesn't start until 6:45 and the school they are playing is over an hour away from her school. This means I will not be in my favorite Friday night party spot (the couch) wearing my favorite Friday night party clothes (my pajamas) until bedtime.  And by then, I might as well go to bed because...

Peter has a track meet on Saturday morning so we will be up at 0-dark-thirty to get him there in time.  The only nice thing about this is that he has to be dropped off  at least an hour before the meet even starts so that will give Dan and I time to get breakfast before we go back to sit all day to watch Peter run for approximately 64 seconds.

I want to see him on Saturday because between Sarah's swim and lacrosse and Peter's track schedule, I'm not going to be able to make it to every one of his meets like I did last year.

And now I'm off.  Not to work on my taxes but to do a little shopping with my mom.

Happy Friday everyone!