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View of Clallan County Courthouse in the film,...

View of Clallan County Courthouse in the film, Ma and Pa Kettle (1949). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Millions of peaches, peaches for me, millions of peaches, peaches for free.

Yeah, my taxes are done, over with, filed and presumably finished traveling cyberly to the place where cyberly filed taxes are cyberly received.  Whoopee.  Triple gonzo!

My Soundgarden internet radio channel helped me to survive the relatively painless ordeal.  Gonna eat a lot of peaches, I tell YOU.

Why do I feel dirty?  Like I just lied to my mother or something?  I file via Turbo Tax, so there is little room to fib.  I did claim the dog and cat as dependents.  They are technically just that and often I mistake the dog for my son, so they count.  It might have been a bit much to claim my purchases of baked beans as an energy improvement to my home.

I have been using Turbo Tax for a long, long, long, long time.  Long enough that I just tell Turbo Tax to transfer my info from last year’s return, verify it, answer a few simple questions, do a naked tax return dance around my computer before I press the “calculate my return” button, and then send off my return.  E-filing used to be a bit scary — I’m pretty sure I saw some guy outside my bedroom window with a foil antenna trying to steal my personal info the first time I filed.  That might have been easy.  In those days, I had to hope my wife didn’t pick up the phone downstairs or someone didn’t call in between to mess up the phone modem.  But it’s so not a problem in these modern times.  I think I will strap on my rocket pack and zip over to the local DQ for a milkshake to celebrate.

Doing the taxes, working on the checkbook and paying bills gets me wonky off kilter.  I’m going to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches.  Forget the milkshake.

It is pretty amazing to me how many people now accept electronic transactions so matter of factly.  Even Mike, my coworker who has sworn for years that he would never e-file, did his taxes online this year.  Mike is one of those guys who refuses to quit wearing the floodwater pants and ratty cardigan sweater he has worn for the last 12 years.  He swore until this year that electronic filing was evil.  He confessed that he enrolled in an epayment service through his bank a few weeks ago.  I wanted to tell him that I forget what an envelope and stamp look like.  Mailing a check seems like something Ma and Pa Kettle did.

Now to go lie to my wife about the amount of our refund.  Good night.