Kidney stones, that is. What started out as minor hunger pains yesterday turned into a lunch-time trip to the ER. If you have never had the pleasure of experience kidney stones, consider yourself lucky.
The pain reminded me of the side cramps I’d occassionally get when Dad and I were training for the Mini-Marathon, only these cramps lasted for hours. The pain brought on nausea and I surrendered the three bites of my double-decker taco I’d managed to get in before the ER trip.
Fortunately the doctors were able to set me up with some *very* nice drugs and I went from white-knuckled pain to drifting in happy nevereverland. Did I mention how nice the drugs were?
So I took today off of work, still waiting for those stones to work their way out of my system; I got my taxes done instead. As an aside, filing taxes with an online service like TurboTax Online is so incredibly easy, and worth the $40 (which I get to deduct on next year’s tax return).
March 26th, 2005 at 11:07 pm
The stories some folks will concoct just to get a day off work!! I can’t believe they fell for the ole “I’ve got kidney stones” story - thought GFS was more sophisticated than that.
NOTE ON YOUR TAX ADVICE: I think the $40 is ONLY deductible if you itemize your deductions (pretty much worth doing only if you tithe and have a house payment). Even then writing something off only means that it will save you whatever your federal tax rate is x $40. So if you are in a 15% tax bracket it would save you $6. Worth doing certainly but some folks go crazy buying stuff saying, no problem about all this debt - I will just write it off on my taxes. Its not like you get it all back. But I will stop here. Kyle will tell you that that is my Sermon #34.
March 28th, 2005 at 6:51 pm
Very true on the tax stuff, but if you can afford it, the $36 (after the $6 credit) is well worth the time saved by using tax software. The return is greater in subsequent years, because your year-to-year information is saved (hence saving laborious data entry like address info or the amount in box 333 on last year’s tax returns, etc.).