February is a month out of the year that people tend to enjoy, loathe or hate.
People who enjoy it are usually happily in love and able to celebrate the festivities that accompany Valentine's Day. Chocolates, flowers, and all the other commercialized nonsense associated with February 14, as it were. Conversely, people who hate it tend to be in the opposite scenario. Maybe they've had a bad break-up or gotten divorced and haven't yet been able to make peace and move on to whatever comes next for them. In the middle are those folks who just plain loathe the month of February which, at least this year, is where I find myself. Not for any kind of marital issues, mind you - rather issues of the sort that come from dealing with the Internal Revenue Service and hospitals/medical insurance providers.
My wife & I are pretty good at handling our personal finances. That's something I'm proud of seeing as how it seems like you hear of just as many, if not more, young couples splitting up as a result of stress over financial matters as you do matters of infidelity. We make more good decisions than we do bad ones, I would say, as neither of us are particularly prone to going off on spending sprees that would put us out of whack. We both have good jobs and we make sure our bills get paid; we sometimes have to juggle with more running chainsaws in the air than we'd like, but who doesn't these days?
Filing taxes has never been a particularly rosy endeavor for me. As far back as I can remember, it was always the case that I would wind up getting a little bit of money back from the state of South Carolina only to then have Uncle Sam turn around and say "Wait, I need that too, sorry - maybe next year?" (while snickering under his breath, no less). It was a frustrating cycle when I was single because I would see all these other folks out enjoying their suddenly bloated wallets, meanwhile I'm eating bologna sandwiches and drinking tap water.
Things have improved only somewhat since my wife & I have been married. If I remember correctly I believe we may have looked into the prospect of filing separately our first year of marriage. That idea got squashed quickly when it developed that I would've had to fork over a substantial amount of money to the IRS. Suffice to say that things got much better when we combined our information into a joint filing, but be that as it may I felt bad then and I have ever since because it seemed as though I (through no real fault of my own other than trying to earn a living, I guess) was damaging our potential for getting back a decent a return.
Since Jill and I have been married, we have always taken what we got back on our taxes and put it towards our annual trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We've been lucky in that we've gotten back enough to pay for the rental of the house we stay in; this year we were particularly fortunate in that we were able to handle that expense plus pay off the majority of what we had left over on the amount due for our next Walt Disney World adventure (which is coming up in May for the 2014 edition of Star Wars Weekends).
Those were monies which were returned to us by the state of South Carolina, for which I am thankful. We aren't getting any money back from the federal government, however. Nope, not one cent. As a matter of fact, we owe the Internal Revenue Service $190. Yes, you read that correctly - one hundred and ninety dollars.
When my wife informed me of that (yes, she does our taxes - because she's awesome, that's why), I couldn't help but laugh. $190? Really? I'm not begging for punishment here but what is $190 to the United States government? If you look at the nation's debt, we rack up roughly $50,000 PER SECOND in expenditures that, as a nation, we can't actually afford. How is our measly $190 going to help matters, given the state of things?
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we don't owe more. It just seems like a futile amount in the grand scheme of things, is all. That's not enough money to hire a decent plumber, for crying out loud. What are they going to do with it, pay the guy who shines some senator's shoes? That gives me a great idea, actually. I think every tax paying citizen of the United States should receive an itemized list of where every single penny of their taxes are spent. I think we deserve that level of transparency seeing as how they, on some level, apparently know about every phone call, email, text message, etc. that we generate.
Actually, I take that back. I don't want to know what they're doing with our money. It's bad enough that our government takes from us as much as it does, knowing how it's being spent might only make the situation that much more frustrating. "My money contributed to a study on whether or not cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior? (Yes, it happened.) Well isn't that lovely..."
Adding to this frustration is the fact that during the month of February I received an unexpected medical bill related to the sleep study I had done last year (click here to read about that experience, if you haven't already). This is on top of what I'm already paying the hospital in monthly
intervals, mind you; from what I've been able to gather it's an adjusted sum that my insurance didn't cover. (Insurance being another deduction that gets sucked out of my paycheck which goes towards a service that rarely gets used then doesn't seem to help much when I need it.) Fortunately it wasn't an absurd amount of money (it's in the area of $60) but when you consider I had that procedure almost a year ago and I'm just now getting this bill, it left me wondering if there's not a statute of limitations on this kind of thing. Am I going to be 40 and get another bill related to this thing or what?
I hate to complain via my blog because I know people don't necessarily enjoy reading this kind of trite, but the simple fact of the matter is that this arena is one of the better opportunities I have to vent. Getting out your frustrations is healthy, and it's even better if you can do so in a constructive manner. (In my mind, it was either this or I go knock over a gas station; I think I chose wisely.) Trust me when I say that I would sooner write about a dozen different things than this - even so, this blog is about my life and February 2014 has been affected by these issues. It's one of those deals where you have to take the good with the bad, the uplifting moments with the frustrating ones, and try to look forward to whatever comes next. We shouldn't expect defeat, after all, because that only makes things worse.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Thursday, February 20, 2014
ICE-OCALYPSE 2014
Living in the South, you get used to almost never seeing anything in the way of frozen precipitation; anything aside from hail, that is, which is odd because it typically accompanies severe thunderstorms that hit our part of the world during the warmest, most humid times of year. We Southerners are more accustomed to sweltering heat than frigid cold, so on the rare occasion that the skies part and something icy does fall we tend to panic (sometimes unnecessarily as school districts, government offices, businesses, etc. located here have been criticized - read, made fun of - for being too quick to pull the trigger on closing up shop at merely the threat of wintry weather). Bread and milk become hard to find, a fact I've never understood because neither of those are food items that hold up all that well (I'd sooner go for something canned like Beanie Weenies and Spam, personally, but that's just me), and people forget how to drive with any sense of caution. These sound like stereotypes regarding Southern culture but that's the thing about stereotypes, usually they're at least partially true which is what makes them funny and/or offensive depending on your point of view.
People in my adopted hometown of Saint Matthews, SC talk about an ice storm that hit the area back in 2004 as having been a horrible scenario. I wasn't here for that one, however my wife and I did make it through a particularly rough ice storm back in January of 2011 when we were still renting a house in Orangeburg. Our home, cars, and everything around us was encased in ice during that event. At the time, it seemed like something so extreme that we'd surely only encounter it once every decade, if that.
As it would turn out, we got it again only this time much worse and less than 5 years removed.
Over the course of February 11-13, we (along with the rest of the residents of the midlands of South Carolina) endured what I have dubbed ICE-OCALYPSE 2014. The precipitation began as rain on the evening of the 11th then changed over to ice during the night. The ice continued for almost a full 24 hours, finally ending in the early portion of the 13th. My wife & I were out of work for two days because of the conditions. What was worse was the fact that power in many areas was knocked out for almost a week; we were lucky as ours was out for maybe 5 hours, total, over the entire two days we were at home. Power lines, trees, and other structures were severely damaged. The terrain began to take on the look of an area that had been hit by a hurricane instead of an ice storm thanks to all the downed limbs and trees.
I'm going to stop writing at this point and let the following pictures do (most of) the talking.
My wife and I both complained when a crew showed up to begin clearing the wooded lot beside our house to make room for a new house to be built about a month or so ago. What we didn't realize then was that they were more than likely doing us a huge favor as certain of those trees were either dead or dying. I fully believe had they not done what they did, at least one of those trees would've wound up on our house as two of them were huge pines. Just goes to show you that when you think your world is changing into something you don't want, oftentimes what it becomes is exactly what you need.
Here we are literally a week removed from the storm and aside from the huge piles of limbs stacked along the road you can hardly tell that 7 days ago our little town was covered in ice. The ice storm wasn't the last encroachment of Mother Nature that we'd encounter, though. This past Friday, February 14, we had an earthquake of all things!
The shake was centered on Edgefield, SC but it was felt all over the Carolinas. My wife & I happened to have been in our kitchen when it happened (why we were in our kitchen at nearly 10:30 PM is a story for a different time) and we knew something had caused the house to rumble. How did we know? My wife keeps a piece of cookware from Pampered Chef in our microwave; it's technically called a deep-covered baker but I refer to it as the voodoo pot because it's magical in what it can do with food. It's a heavy clay pot, more or less, and when the quake began we heard a rattling noise coming from the area of our range. My wife thought there was a pipe rattling behind the wall but I knew there were no pipes in that area. Turns out the rattling we heard was that of the lid on the voodoo pot shaking against the body of the vessel.
Remember how I said frozen precipitation is rare in South Carolina? Earthquakes aren't unheard of but they're even more rare. I'm not saying what we're witnessing is a Biblical event, but at this point if a plague of locusts hits I wouldn't be too terribly shocked.
People in my adopted hometown of Saint Matthews, SC talk about an ice storm that hit the area back in 2004 as having been a horrible scenario. I wasn't here for that one, however my wife and I did make it through a particularly rough ice storm back in January of 2011 when we were still renting a house in Orangeburg. Our home, cars, and everything around us was encased in ice during that event. At the time, it seemed like something so extreme that we'd surely only encounter it once every decade, if that.
As it would turn out, we got it again only this time much worse and less than 5 years removed.
Over the course of February 11-13, we (along with the rest of the residents of the midlands of South Carolina) endured what I have dubbed ICE-OCALYPSE 2014. The precipitation began as rain on the evening of the 11th then changed over to ice during the night. The ice continued for almost a full 24 hours, finally ending in the early portion of the 13th. My wife & I were out of work for two days because of the conditions. What was worse was the fact that power in many areas was knocked out for almost a week; we were lucky as ours was out for maybe 5 hours, total, over the entire two days we were at home. Power lines, trees, and other structures were severely damaged. The terrain began to take on the look of an area that had been hit by a hurricane instead of an ice storm thanks to all the downed limbs and trees.
I'm going to stop writing at this point and let the following pictures do (most of) the talking.
My wife and I both complained when a crew showed up to begin clearing the wooded lot beside our house to make room for a new house to be built about a month or so ago. What we didn't realize then was that they were more than likely doing us a huge favor as certain of those trees were either dead or dying. I fully believe had they not done what they did, at least one of those trees would've wound up on our house as two of them were huge pines. Just goes to show you that when you think your world is changing into something you don't want, oftentimes what it becomes is exactly what you need.
Here we are literally a week removed from the storm and aside from the huge piles of limbs stacked along the road you can hardly tell that 7 days ago our little town was covered in ice. The ice storm wasn't the last encroachment of Mother Nature that we'd encounter, though. This past Friday, February 14, we had an earthquake of all things!
The shake was centered on Edgefield, SC but it was felt all over the Carolinas. My wife & I happened to have been in our kitchen when it happened (why we were in our kitchen at nearly 10:30 PM is a story for a different time) and we knew something had caused the house to rumble. How did we know? My wife keeps a piece of cookware from Pampered Chef in our microwave; it's technically called a deep-covered baker but I refer to it as the voodoo pot because it's magical in what it can do with food. It's a heavy clay pot, more or less, and when the quake began we heard a rattling noise coming from the area of our range. My wife thought there was a pipe rattling behind the wall but I knew there were no pipes in that area. Turns out the rattling we heard was that of the lid on the voodoo pot shaking against the body of the vessel.
Remember how I said frozen precipitation is rare in South Carolina? Earthquakes aren't unheard of but they're even more rare. I'm not saying what we're witnessing is a Biblical event, but at this point if a plague of locusts hits I wouldn't be too terribly shocked.
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