Amy J. Bennett

I just can not stress enough how anal I am being about our taxes this year. We had some friends over last night (more to come on that) and he was saying that since Scott works for the state, there is some meal allowance he gets. It would be like $800 if I figured it out right. Scott apparently ignored the email they sent about it. Now I am dying to find something out about it but I can’t find anything on the Internet. I even emailed them to try to get more info but I haven’t heard anything. And our W2s are still not here!

So we had another trooper and his girlfriend over last night. We are both from the same area and we both moved here when they got the job. We are about the same age too. We had a really nice visit. We ordered pizza and I had made brownies so we had brownie sundaes. She was so good with Emma and Emma loved her! She wanted to play her animal board game thingy with her the whole night and when it was Emma’s bed time, I gave Emma to her in the recliner and she held her down like a baby and rubbed her tummy and Emma was out like a light in about a minute. I was so impressed. I thought for sure Emma would not go to sleep until they left, but no. It was so nice for someone else to do it! I told her she needed to come over every night. We planned to go on a shopping trip together soon. We all had easy conversation. The funniest was when he was talking about Scott eating so fast in police academy. Apparently it was a running joke. I have said lots of times Scott inhales his food. He puts his head down and shovels. Seriously.

Mom and Dad are coming down tomorrow. I guess I’ll be home alone for the big football game on Sunday. You guys just don’t know how crazy people are being up in Charlotte. I work for a bank there and they are letting everyone where jerseys to work. It’s a bank, people, and they’re letting us where jerseys and jeans! Random gas stations have tables set up with all kinds of Panthers stuff for sale. People have flags and stickers on their cars. Well, you get the picture. Go Panthers!

<img src= “http://sabennett.com/emma/100_3429s.jpg”/>

We were at Home Depot where I saw this apron for .99 and put it on her. Everyone we passed said something about her. I didn’t have my camera with me like I usually do, so we gave her her hammer when we got home and snapped this.

Have I mentioned my two best friends from school are both getting married this year? I have TWO weddings to be in. You know, now that I think about it, the one hasn’t asked me to be in her wedding. Maybe I’m not in it? Hmm. That doesn’t make me upset at all, but I’m kind of confused. That’s not really something you just flat out ask–am I in your wedding? She hasn’t asked me and she hasn’t talked about dresses at all even though we are planning a dress try-on trip with the other friend. I guess if she asks me to come try on a dress too, I’ll know I’m in hers too. The only reason I think I am is because well, one, we’ve been friends since we were 8 and the other is when I had my wedding, I wanted her and my sister as my maid of honor, but I made my sister my maid of honor and her my honorary maid of honor and she said she was going to do the same with her sister and me when she got married. I guess that was 6 years ago she said that…

Trying something different here…

Scott , another trooper and a guy who the other trooper knew who had been in a wreck sat around talking about their beloved dogs after the wreck last night. The guy, who Scott described as a big ‘ol country guy said he recently came home to find his dog out in the cold. Mad as could be, he went in the house, took off his pants and threw them at his wife’s chest. He said, “Put these on.” She said, “I can’t wear those.” He said, “That’s right, I wear the pants in this house.” She quickly took her pants off, then her panties and threw her panties at his chest and said, “Put these on!” He said, “I can’t get into those.” She said, “I know and unless your attitude changes you won’t be any time soon.”

These past two days I’ve gotten quite a bit of work done. I guess after last week, getting ANY work done feels like a lot. Emma has been pretty independent and Scott has been home in the mornings so it has been pretty easy.

There is not too much new going on in Emma’s world except a really bad diaper rash right now. And, she loves playing chase. She gets these big eyes and this deep throated giggle, bends at her knees and gets ready to run. She just cackles when you go after her. When I ask her what a pig says, she scrunches up her nose and tries to snort. It’s so cute. She doesn’t play with her tea set too much anymore. She still likes her books and especially those about animals. She LOVES animals. She also has a puzzle that has farm animals on it that she likes. It’s so funny because I go through the pieces and name all the animals and then say like, What does a cow say? And then say, Mooo.. But I always get to the goat and say What does a goat say? And then I say quickly, I don’t know what a goat says, here is a duck! I’m blanking out! What sound does a goat make??

I don’t think I ever mentioned but Scott talked to his corporal about putting in for a transfer and his comment was that the first sergeant wouldn’t be happy. He said, you could do it and get it and then be treated badly until you left or take the chance of not getting it and be treated badly for a long time. Not “badly” but just first sergeant would give him a hard time. He wouldn’t let small things slide. Corporal told him that he knew Scott never took that kind of thing seriously and could probably deal with it, but it was up to him. The highway patrol is first sergeant’s life and he would take it very personally if he tried to leave. Which I don’t see why because he knows that Scott doesn’t want to be here. He gave him another “stay a few years and you’ll love it” speech the other day. The thing with me is you know, I really don’t care if we don’t move back home. Just let me know. I want out of this apartment and into a house if I have to be here any longer. I searched for some houses for rent the other day. We could so afford being in one. I wish we could have found one a year ago. It would make living here so much easier. This apartment just feels so temporary. Believe me, it is very nice, it’s just, I sorta still feel like I’m living in a hotel. There’s too many neighbors around us and the public parking and no back yard doesn’t make it feel like home. I try to get Scott to just say, ok, this is it, we’re staying here for 2 years and then we’ll go home and then we can plan for that. But not knowing whether we’ll be gone in June, January or in 5 Januarys, it makes it very difficult to feel like you can go on. I know that sounds strange and really, on a daily basis, I do feel like we’ve moved on, but I don’t like not having a goals. Like, I would like to be able to say in June, we’ll leave the apartments and then find a house to rent for a year and if we still plan on staying, we’ll buy a house. Well, right now, he’s *thinking* of putting in for a transfer and he *might* get one who knows when. Really, as I’m thinking about this, this is what we think we know. Our lease ends at the end of June (we know this). The HP is thinking of having a class in January that would graduate the next June. Why doesn’t he approach the transfer and say, once the class is graduated and you have someone to replace me in June 2005, I’m gone. That would give us the ability to get a house to rent for a year and then be able to plan when we can start looking for a house back home to buy. Why doesn’t first sergeant listen to me! Did you know first sergeant told Scott he knew that a lot of the reason that Scott wanted to go back home is because of me?? Uh, no. We BOTH want to go back home and neither of us dislike being here, we would just RATHER be near our family. Ok, I need to get off my soap box. I do this every time I start talking about this.

I think I might be quite pathetic. I have been DYING to get our taxes done. I am always so nervous to find out if we are going to have to pay/excited to get a refund. We have had some good years in the past but I changed my exemptions at work to try to offset that and I am scared we are going to have to pay. I haven’t gotten all of our W2s but I did have our check stubs at the end of the year and of course I already have all our itemized deductions all lined up. I pulled last year’s tax returns and figured what the heck, I’m going to figure this out. So, yes, people. I just spent an hour doing Federal form 1040 along with Schedule A–Itemized Deductions for fun. I think this ice here has frozen my brain. But really, the thing is, it wasn’t that hard. I finished and thought, hey, I could do our taxes, in fact, I just DID our federal taxes! Bad news is it looks like we won’t get a huge refund, good news is, it looks like we might break even. It hurt that we didn’t have Scott’s education credit (of course, we didn’t have to pay for his school this year either), we didn’t have our house taxes, our mortgage interest wasn’t as much and our gifts to charity were down. And for some odd reason, our income was about the same even though I cut my hours by about 25%. Of course now I REALLY want the taxes done just to see how close I am ;).

You’ve found the final (hopefully!) home for Permission to Peruse. Thank you to <a href=”http://javamama.net”>Allison</a> at <a href=”http://javapixels.com”>JavaPixels</a> for hosting and helping me.

I would say move any and all domains at <a href=”http://www.namezero.com”>NameZero </a>to <a href=”http://godaddy.com”>GoDaddy</a>! They were great until I actually tried to do something “different” with my domain. And the customer service I received while trying to do it was quick, but horrible.