Taxes.....Ugh........

I knew our income tax situation this year wasn't going to be pretty. But it was nice just to assume that for a while and not see the cold hard facts in black and white. Or red and green. Whatever.

We usually get a pretty significant refund at income tax time, because we allow the government to take more out of our regular paychecks than they should. We KNOW the conventional wisdom says not to do this. We KNOW we are allowing the government to keep our money for a year without paying us any interest. We KNOW that we could make some interest on it if we put it aside every week/month and saved it.

But we also know we won't do that.

We do commit a pretty significant amount of money to savings anyway, and we really don't mind helping out the government with our measly few thousands every year. They do so much for us. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

We usually take a spring trip with our income tax refund, or occasionally we use it to improve something in the house. One year we used it to put a privacy fence around the swimming pool. But we usually spend it on a vacation.

We knew this year would be different. I went back to my part-time online teaching job, which is considered contract labor and does not have taxes taken out of it. I was smart enough to set aside 1/3 of that pay every month (well, almost every month) with the anticipation of having to pay taxes.

Then we won that damn Harley. Don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining about winning a Harley. But that is also considered "income," and they didn't take taxes out of it either, unlike the folks at The Price is Right who deduct the taxes before you leave the stage.

So we're getting slammed this year with a tax bill of more than a couple thousand dollars. And I really shouldn't mind. We sort of broke even, after all. When we won the Harley, we sold my Honda, and we used THAT money to pay for the trip to the Dominican Republic we're going to take in April. We can pay the tax bill with the money that I set aside just for that purpose, so it all evens out.

It just doesn't FEEL like it.

I Didn't Want THAT Color.....

You know, it's the little things that motivate me sometimes. I wrote a few days ago about my cycling goals for 2009. I want to double my monthly mileage from last year every month except for January (when I had 0 miles) and June (when I had 367.37).

I was determined to get a ride in during the month of January. Not just so I wouldn't have a big fat zero on my log, but also because I realized that in the yearly comparison graphs, I would have a whole new color.

So I went out and rode yesterday just to get a new color. Please don't send the men in white coats to get me yet.

I wasn't really sure I wanted to ride. The weather was beautiful, but it was still a bit cool and slightly windy. I don't DO wind on my bicycle.

I stood in the yard with my hands on my hips, debating whether or not it was really worth it. I already had the bike out and had aired up the tires, so that excuse was gone.

Then I remembered that I would get a new color. That inspired me enough to get on my bike and actually pedal. I use a GPS, so I couldn't just say I rode "about" 10 miles. I actually had to ride.

I have a sweet little route with little traffic (but lots of train tracks, and I managed to get stopped by the same train TWICE) that's just over 10 miles. Perfect for a late afternoon ride. Plus it has this sweet little downhill section where I once reached 37 mph. Yesterday I only hit 33, but I didn't want to go fast because it was COLD! I just realized I used the word "sweet" twice in this paragraph. I don't think that's allowed.

It actually felt good to be on the bike, and I would have ridden longer except I knew that when the sun dipped beyond the tree line, I was going to be miserably cold. Did I mention I don't do cold?

And this is my reward.


See that little blip above the "1" that is of some undetermined color? That shows my mileage for my one and only ride so far in 2009. I was hoping for a vibrant, lively color like the ones for 2006, 2007, and 2008. A sunshine yellow would have been nice. Especially since that is my very favorite color in the whole world. Or a soothing lavender color. Even orange would have been okay, and I do orange even less than I do cold.

I think that little blip has bar graph envy.

Happy Birthday, Nurse Jane.....

Happy birthday today to my eldest sister, Nurse Jane. She only became an RN two years ago, after several other careers in her life, but she has always been a nurse.

She was the one who bandaged my knees and elbows when I was young. When a creepy kid who lived in the same trailer park we did threw one of my shoes into the swimming pool in the dead of winter, Nurse Jane dived into the green, freezing cold water to retrieve it. We didn't have multiple pairs of shoes, and she saved me a serious ass-whipping on that occasion.

I have a distinct memory of a scraped knee when I was probably 5 or 6 years old. I was sitting on the washing machine getting my knee bandaged up, and Nurse Jane was blowing on my knee to take the sting out of whatever evil substance our mother had punished me with. HER sympathy was usually of the you-shouldn't-have-been-doing-whatever-you-were-doing-to-get-hurt variety. In my childlike innocence, I said through my tears, "Jane is the best blower in town."

I was grown before I realized why everyone else fell on the floor laughing hysterically.

Nurse Jane got married when I was only 6, and I had no idea what a honeymoon was. I kept hearing them talk about a honeymoon, and I convinced myself that they were going TO the moon. I remember getting quite hysterical at the reception, because I was sure I was never going to see them again.

I used to spend my summers with Nurse Jane and her kids, and I'm sure there was at least one time she wanted to kill me. Not only did I want to stay up all night and sleep until mid-afternoon, but I wasn't very reliable. (I would later prove to Katydid as well that I wasn't a reliable babysitter.) She and her husband lived waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay out in the boonies, and there wasn't really a lot that could happen to my niece and nephew other than the usual setting the house on fire or swallowing drain cleaner. So one afternoon when I was SUPPOSED to be watching them I sort of dozed off on the sofa instead. My nephew didn't swallow drain cleaner or find any matches to set the house on fire with, but he did find a bucket of tar. Tar. Yes, tar. As in Tar-Baby. As in stuff they pave roads and patch roofs and perhaps put shingles on with. As in stuff that can only be removed from a toddler's legs with copious amounts of gasoline. It's a wonder Nurse Jane speaks to me to this day.

I had a job interview a few years ago with a principal, and I went in there all ready for the questions about discipline in my classroom and how I assess progress and all that malarky. I was ready for it. What I was NOT ready for was the question, "Who are your heroes?" I didn't expect that at all, but I recovered quickly enough to say, "My sister." Mainly because Nurse Jane would have known what to say in that situation.

She always knows the right thing to say. And do. She takes care of everyone in the family, and she can step in and put any disaster to rights. You know that joke about how things would have been different if it had been Three Wise WOMEN who visited Baby Jesus in the manger instead of Three Wise Men? That joke has Nurse Jane written all over it. She would have taken charge and history would have been completely different.

She and Katydid were the ones who kept Mom from killing me when I got suspended from school in the 10th grade. They were my other moms, and I'm so glad I have them in my life.

Happy Birthday, Nurse Jane!

Things I'm Not Very Good At.......

• Scuba diving -- It's just unnatural to breathe underwater. We've been told all our lives not to do that. I tried to learn many years ago; really I did. We only went down a few feet in a lake, and the people who were on the bank watching our air bubbles said I took two breaths to every one of the other person's. At that rate I figured I could never go down very deep anyway, unless I hauled about 5 spare tanks of air with me, so I said screw it and stuck with skydiving.
• Skydiving -- I could jump out fine, and most....a lot.....some...... of the time I could land fine, but I just could not hook up with people in the air. And that's sort of what it's all about in the skydiving world. Having 66 solo jumps (okay, a few of them were attempts at 3-ways, but most of them were solo) is sort of like riding in the Tour de France with training wheels. There was that one time that I couldn't find my ripcord..... And on my 13th jump, when I was so freaked out by the number 13 that I wound up hanging upside down under a perfectly good canopy.... And my last jump, when I jumped with a jumpmaster and he was earnestly trying to convey something to me in freefall. I kept getting closer to him, trying to understand his wide eyes and his hand motions. Seems he was trying to tell me to "PULL!!!!!!!!!!!" He pulled my ripcord for me, the ultimate embarrassment in skydiving.
  
• Hiding my emotions -- If I like you, you'll be able to tell. And if I can't stand you, you'll be able to tell. And if I'm pissed off or excited or depressed or angry or worried or pensive or confused you'll be able to tell too, because I just cannot hide my feelings. I would be great testifying under oath, but I would be terrible at poker. Except 3-card poker, where it really doesn't matter if you jump off your stool because you got a straight flush.
• Keeping my desk clean -- It doesn't matter if I start out with a pristine desk and can actually see the wood (or whatever my desk is made of; I'm really not sure), in no time at all it will be covered with stacks of papers and books and tardy slips and lunch order forms and print-outs of every draft of a project I'm attempting to post on my wiki. I occasionally make an effort to put everything in file folders, but pretty soon they're scattered all over my desk too. I rarely lose things; it just sometimes takes me a while to find something specific.
• Keeping my house clean -- Don't get me wrong, it's not filthy or anything. I keep the laundry done and actually fold it (most of the time) and put it away (all of the time if it gets folded), and I wash the dishes every night, and I make up the bed every morning. We don't have clothes lying all over the place, but we do have a considerable amount of clutter. I sweep and vacuum and mop occasionally, but not every week. We tend to put things down in the nearest place, and that is often the kitchen table. Luckily the table seats four and there are only two of us. That means the other two places hold neat piles of mail and other stuff that needs to be dealt with but just not right away. The piano also lends itself to things getting put on it, like the instructions and the stand for the Wii. At least they hide the dust. Sort of.
  
• Getting to school on time -- That's a new one. I have always been the kind to get to school at least 30 minutes before I had to be there. The most punishing school schedule I ever had required teachers to be at school at 6:50. And I was usually there at 6:20 or 6:30 at the latest. Now I don't have to be there until 7:45, and I've been rolling in around 8:00. It's not that I'm lazy or I'm watching television or wasting time, either. It's that I usually convince myself that I can do JUST ONE MORE THING before I head out. Grade one more online assignment. Read one more blog. Try the slalom ski activity on the Wii Fit one more time. Crochet one more row. Read one more page in a book. So I cram all this activity into my morning, and then when I should be making last-minute preparations for departure, I'm getting in the shower. Then it's make-up, hair, dress (if I don't have to throw ironing in there somewhere), and oh crap, I need to make something for lunch. When did I turn into this person? I feel guilty, and it's not even like I'm shirking my duty or anything. Our students don't report until 8:45, so I'm not leaving them standing in the hall waiting for me or anything. I keep telling myself I'm not going to be late, and then I just can't make myself stop whatever I'm doing and get going.
  
• Asking for help -- I'd rather kill myself trying to do it alone, thank you very much.
  
• Multi-tasking -- Uni-tasking is often more than I can handle. I used to think I could multi-task, but either I've changed or I was just lying to myself. I did once manage to transpose a piece of music to a different key WHILE I was playing it on the piano AND harmonizing during a church service, but that was a fluke.
  
• Saying the right thing in stressful situations -- I can always think of something brilliant that I SHOULD have said, but the necessary words just don't come when they should.
• Giving advice -- I can listen and sympathize, but I really suck at telling people what they should do in a given situation. I don't know if it's because I feel unqualified based on the sheer number of screw-ups I've had in my life or if I don't want to be the one to blame if things don't go well.
• Knowing when to end a blog post.
  

Some Randomness from My World....

A couple of random, unconnected things from my world today....

First, a funny story from a student. Not one I'm particularly fond of (I guess it's okay to admit that), but she made me laugh so hard today I almost cried.

Students in the last class of the day started talking about different whippings they got from their parents as children. Of course I had to interject my story about my mother spanking me with the butcher knife.

But this one girl said:

"My grandma would chase me with a broom handle. I learned to run to a part of the room where her oxygen tank wouldn't reach."

Oh my God, the mental image of that.

--------------------

When I got home, we had junk mail......er, direct mail advertising (we're not supposed to use the term "junk mail" in our family) from one of the local funeral homes.

Seriously? Advertising funeral services? And really, just how does a funeral home compete? Do they bundle their services like the phone company? Offer interest-free financing for 18 months? Tell people to call in the next 20 minutes and they'll throw in a handy slicer-chopper-dicer-shredder-origami machine? Offer a 100% money-back guarantee? Have a price war, like some gas stations? That would be pretty funny. "I don't really need any right now, but I'm gonna pull in and top 'er off just 'cause it's so cheap."

I know the economy is bad all over, but I don't think THEY have to worry about business falling off. Or going under.

I'm hilarious.

Navy for Moms.....

Sweet Girl sent me a link a couple of months ago to a website called Navy for Moms. As you might have guessed by its clever but oh-so-subtle title, it is a website for moms whose children are in the Navy. They are a warm and friendly bunch, and I immediately felt welcome and a part of this huge family.

I have only joined two groups so far: Moms of Daughters in the Navy (which is listed as "Mom's of Daughter's and I almost didn't join because I am a grammar snob and can't possibly be a member of a group who so blatantly misuses apostrophes) and Georgia Moms. The Georgia moms got together for lunch this past Saturday (well, some of them anyway), and although I'm not usually all about going somewhere where I won't know a soul, I enjoyed it tremendously.

It struck me as I was driving home that none of us talked about what WE do for a living. Some of the dads were there, but the talk was all about the kids. I was one of only two there who have daughters in the Navy, and I was the one whose child has been in the longest. Yet most of the other moms seemed to know a lot more than I do. I'm going to chalk that up to their being moms of sons, who are by nature reluctant to hand out details, and therefore the moms have to do a lot of research on their own if they want to know anything.

Sweet Girl tells me a great deal, but the information she shares usually has a lot of letters in it that don't make real words, so my eyes tend to glaze over a lot. "My LPO told my XO that I need a BAH form, but no one seems to be....."

I wish I had known about this website when Sweet Girl first signed up. I might have known how to handle it better when she decided a month after signing that she wasn't going. We talked to her recruiter, who said they actually wouldn't MAKE her go if she really wanted to back out. That was news to us. And we kept it to ourselves.

Because we thought that since she had made a commitment with full disclosure, she needed to honor it.

Two weeks before her ship date (I TOLD them giving her seven months to think about it was a bad idea), I went to the recruiter's office with her and pretty much sat there until she agreed to go.

I felt like a terrible mother. What kind of person insists that her only child go off to serve in the military during wartime? I wonder how often that kind of thing happens? It would have been nice to have others to bounce my conflicting emotions off of during that stressful time. Oh, and never mind I was also working on my doctorate. The day I left her at the recruitment center and drove away, I thought the world might come crashing down. But that day actually came a couple of weeks later, when a box arrived at our house and it contained the clothes she had been wearing when I dropped her off.

Another time I could have used a cyber support group was in the fall of '07, right before Sweet Girl was deploying to the Persian Gulf for seven months. It happened that she was leaving just a few days after the annual Georgia-Florida football game, for which tickets come at a premium and during which there are NO PLACES to stay in Jacksonville. At least not ones that mere mortals can afford. I thought it was excellent that my child had a new condo in Jacksonville. She wanted to go to the game, so I bought tickets ON EBAY, FOR GOD'S SAKE for the two of us.

Then two weeks before the game, she decided she didn't want me to come.

"But what about the tickets?"

"Oh, you can just sell them."

Screw that. It's the game of the year. Everybody wants to go to that game. I'm not selling my tickets.

But I clearly had no place to stay. She didn't want to see me before the ship left. In her words, she "didn't want to see me get emotional."

But what about the football game? Really, I'm not the emotional sort, unless it comes down to not going to a football game that I really wanted to go to.

There was no budging her. Little twit. I definitely was NOT calling her Sweet Girl right then.

Katydid bailed me out and said she would go to the game with me, and we drove the six hours down there the morning before the game. There I was, in the same town as my only child, and I didn't get to see her. Katydid and I had a wonderful time, and it was worth every minute of the drive, because FOR ONCE we beat Florida and it was nice to be able to drive home with the flags still on the car. Instead of hiding them under the floormats, which is what we had to do this past year.

But I couldn't get over the fact that my child didn't want to see me. It felt a lot like when my college boyfriend broke up with me. I couldn't get either of them to tell me why. (I should have gotten even with him and made HIM her father.)

We did talk in the few days leading up to her departure, but I was still depressed and hurt and mad and sad and confused and frustrated and full of self-doubt.

She called me at school at 8:00 AM on the day her ship was leaving and said, "They've just closed the doors." I wasn't ready.

And although I was surrounded by friends and family who supported me and sympathized and wanted to swim out into the Atlantic and jump on that aircraft carrier and beat her little butt, it would have been nice to have a support group of moms who had been through that kind of thing before.

I'm keeping that group bookmarked, because I'm almost certain it's not the last time she'll break my heart.
That's my girl, in the middle, manning the rails when the USS Harry S. Truman returned from seven months in the Persian Gulf, June 2008.

I swore I wouldn't be there when the ship returned, but of course I was. Because moms just have to get over it. Navy moms included.

Cycling Goals for 2009......

I use an internet cycling log (of course) to keep track of my mileage every year. It's very motivational to compare each month (or even week) to where my mileage was this time last year and the year before that and the year before that. I could put in my data from 2005, but that's just way too much trouble.

In 2007, my goal was 2000 miles and I missed it by TWO MILES!!!! On December 31st, I told Hubby I was going to ride my bike up to the middle school and back just to get my miles in. But it was raining and visibility was poor, and I decided it wasn't worth getting dead just to say I had met my mileage goal.

I didn't do nearly that well last year. My total for the year was just over 1000 miles (sigh). And over a third of that was on BRAG, so it's not like I was busting my butt (pun intended) in any given month.

So my goal this year is to double my monthly mileage, with the exception of two months: January and June. I didn't ride any at all in the month of January last year, so doubling nothing won't get me any progress. In June I rode 367.37 miles (you bet I'm counting those 37 hundredths), and it might be tough to double that. Still, if I do 5 out of the 7 days of BRAG and Katydid and I manage to ride in GOBA (that means we can't take the layover days off, Katydid. I'm just sayin'), I guess I could potentially double that one too.

But I really need to get a ride in during the month of January, even if it's a short one. And I've only got this week left. Saturday I'll be in Atlanta from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and I doubt I'll feel like taking a little spin by the time I drive home.

Maybe a late afternoon ride when I get home from school one day this week. Yeah, that's really gonna happen.....