Bet you can’t guess what I spent pretty much the entire day doing today. 😅
Having spent a full day in Utah, I was already feeling really low emotionally. Struggling to function on a useful level but needing to get my taxes taken care of.
I begged my last accountant to please come back and do my taxes, but she had not renewed her tax software, so she couldn’t do it anyway really. And so I tried calling some other accountants nearby, and I found one who was willing to help, but I didn’t really like the vibe I got from him.
Jared suggested his accountant, but he was going to be super expensive, I mean super super expensive. Gratefully, he got in contact with another accountant he knows, and she was willing to help me out.
🥳
Super super nice lady. One of those people with bubbly personalities that laugh at everything and are just fun to be around and interact with.
What was a massively stressful, discouraging experience to that point for the last multiple weeks, and even worse in the moment, melted away because it was clear that she did her taxes like I do my car mechanic work, so I could tell right away that I could trust what she was doing, which was nice. And she just dug in. It wasn’t going to be cheap, but it was going to get done, and I could have faith that it was going to be done properly.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just quick and easy. I spent most of the day, by far, just working on taxes. Going back through records, answering questions, realizing because my new accountant was more experienced and better at what she does than my previous accountant, that my previous accountant had screwed some stuff up, so I had to go back through my records and gather all new data from things that I never thought I had to gather data for it all and haven’t been for years.
So I’ve got some returns that have incorrect information on them, which probably gave me refunds greater than what I should have received.
So I may need to go back and fix those. I try and always air on the side of giving the government more money than they probably should get, but at least that way I feel like I’m safe in case I’ve accidentally missed something up.
So it’s quite possible that they still shouldn’t get any more money than what I’ve already given them, but I don’t know, so I’m probably going to go back and amend those last 2 years of returns.
😕
But it was super cool to find an accountant that I felt like I could trust.
🥳
So, thank you to my brother Jared for recommending his accountant who then pointed me to the accountant I ended up using, and thank you to Whitni for being such a fabulous person.
I missed going to lunch with my brother and mother and niece and nephew and their spouses. And that stunk to be stuck doing taxes instead of visiting family. But realistically, I was also emotionally messed up and would have had to put on a face, perhaps, to have been able to be with them at that particular time and not drag people down.
Anyway, I taxed and taxed and taxed some more.
At some point, I went for a walk into the foothills with Jared, and we chatted about the main things I’ve been struggling with for the last many years.
After coming home, I taxed some more, before calling it good for the night and leaving the rest for the next day.
I had some challenges that I dealt with that evening, and so I went for a walk to decompress a bit with my backpacking pack on and just decided to crash wherever I wanted to crash.
I ended up at the little park right at the base of American Fork canyon. Having seen a wild cat in that park before, I didn’t just want to lay out in the park, which is right next to the mountain, and not like in the middle of a neighborhood or town or something. So I didn’t want to be in the park and risk having an unwelcome visitor, so I actually bed down for the night on the little bridge that goes over the creek as you enter the park.
On the eastern side of the bridge, it’s got some pretty big boulders right before the concrete flat spot That’s just over the water, and so I pulled a bunch of the extra clothes and bedding out of my pack to lay down on the concrete as some kind of a pad, and then I slept with half my body on the extra clothing and bedding and half my body on the pack. It certainly wasn’t comfortable, but I’ve had worse, and I slept at least a decent amount.
I’m grateful for headphones and noise maker apps that I could put my headphones on, turn the noise maker app on, and that drowned out the noise of the cars driving by just a couple of dozen or so feet from me. Using that to get rid of the background noise that would keep me up all night, and then putting my beanie on so that it covered my eyes so that I wouldn’t wake up from the extra light, I was able to rest decently enough.
Another day in the books.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 