Xblog

So, 24 hours ago, I was sitting at my computer, trying to finish up my taxes. Unlike last year, circumstances and my own procrastination had left things up until nearly the last minute. While I contemplated some of the more bizarre elements of the California Tax forms, and yes we really did pass a law providing tax exemptions for victims of the Armenian genocide, fate’s hand was at work in more than one mysterious way.

First there was the realization that the tax man got me good this past year. Despite truly impressive amounts of money handed his way over the course of the year, I still owed him more, Bush tax cuts be damned. Nearly enough to wipe out the ol’ checking account balance. Not that bad really, but not exactly a great way to get you in a good frame of mind, particularly when you are exhausted and ready to crash.

I woke up in the morning to my son’s usual antics, although he was particularly fixated on a pair of his shoes that had been misplaced over the weekend. He’s a clothes horse (yeah, definitely didn’t get that from me), so not being able to wear the preferred pair of shoes to school is a crisis roughly as significant as when the Soviets tried to sneak some missiles in to Cuba. Fortunately, I managed to find the shoes hiding in the last place I’d ever have thought to look for them, so we didn’t have to nuke Russia. That crisis had put me behind schedule, but I’d almost made it out the door when the phone rang. Stupidly, I answered it. That’s when it became clear that this was not going to be a good day….

It was the collections department for the Pottery Barn. Apparently I’d applied for a Pottery Barn credit card this past October, and then promptly ordered over $3,000 worth of Pottery Barn merchandise to be delivered to some place in Gardena. Now, I have never ordered anything from Pottery Barn. My wife certainly has, but frankly she is more than frugal enough that she’d probably have a fit before ordering that much stuff from them. Beyond that, the Gardena address was the dead give away that this was a case of fraud. The nerve racking bit was that whoever ordered the card clearly had some personal information, so this wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, but rather a case of identity theft. The rest of my afternoon was spent unravelling the Kafkaesque world of identity management, which I’ll write about in more detail once I’ve got my head fully wrapped around it.

My wife was tied up in meetings today, so she came home late and exhausted, and my son was in a fussy mood too. While he’s mostly over the horrid period that was our mid-year crisis (terrible twos be damned, as far as I’m concerned it’s a cake walk compared to 3.5), he does seem to be regressing on a few points, the end result being me having to get him to clean up his mess while trying to cook dinner, feed the dogs, and a few other tasks. I can’t complain too much about this part of my day, because I’m all but certain this is what my wife typically experiences during the hour or more before I get home each day.

After surviving dinner, we slogged through the nighttime routine, and all of us were starting to drift off to sleep… Then my son woke up, and promptly vomitted all over his bed. We scrambled him in to the bathroom as quickly as we could. There was enough stuff in his stomach that despite getting a lot on the bed there was more to spread all over the bathtub. Lovely. “Daddy, I don’t like throwing up.” Yeah, me too kid, me too.

So much for getting to sleep early.

The good news is the day is over, and we survived it almost entirely intact. Here’s to a new day, with less drama.