Borderline insanity

Very good news: Tim is back in the US. That means except for a brief (week long) trip of my own to Germany in a week, our family is all back together again. Finally. Being a single parent is not any fun. I was getting tired of waking up early in a panic every morning, trying to sort in my head the lists of all the things to be done for my house (my plumber, my electrician, my builder, my bathroom specialist, my gutter guy), my job (my teaching, my research, my committees, my new faculty orientations), my child (my nanny, my nanny tax, my preschool, my preschool homework, my child's lack of clothing), my travel (my train tickets, my talk, my papers). You see? The lists send my heart rate way up and make me ill. I am probably losing weight. Now that Tim is back, I have someone else with whom I can lose weight. You always read that weight loss is better with a partner.

Tim does not seem so keen on the weight loss through stress plan, especially as we both are bordering on underweight, if anything. He was not very happy upon arrival in our "home" late last night -- especially after touring the house. In fact, he's probably more frustrated than I with what has and has not been done with the remodeling. On the other hand, he has already been a major force for good in the unpacking project. He has moved a huge portion of boxes out of the living room into a basement storage space to wait out the remodel. We nearly have a living room.

So here's something fun. On top of all the chaos that is Life right now, chaos bordering on panic, the IRS decided to send us a letter.

Yup.

They want us to pay up for our 2006 tax return, because they don't believe we really made any charitable contributions that year. They had somebody go through and figure out what we would owe had we not made any charitable contributions at all, and sent us a letter demanding that money within 30 days.

Of course, they sent the letter to the wrong address.

So now we have a couple of weeks to find the box in the basement, somewhere in a sea of boxes, with our 2006 tax documents that has the receipts proving that yes, we did indeed make all the charitable contributions we claimed to have made that year.

Um. Would you like to trade lives for a little while? Just a month or so? Please?