Ow, my brain hurts. It's been a busy day at work, but I seem to be caught up for the day (fingers crossed). I tried to balance the budget just now but I saw a couple of charges I wasn't sure where to categorize and my brain just shut down. I'll do it tonight with some help from the family. Can't wait to go home, partake of a relaxing beverage and cook a nice meal.

Last night, AS got a call from the IRS regarding her response to their claim that she owed $1800 on her 2009 taxes. She gave them some additional info that wasn't in her letter, and the lady said OK, I'll take care of it. Clerical error on their part, and I have to say that it was pretty painless to get it fixed.

Today, I sent my confirmation back to the tax guy, along with a $325 check to cover their invoice. So they'll e-file my taxes and I just have to send a check to the MN government for what I owe them. I'll do that on April 15, along with sending a check for what AS owes the IRS, and an estimated 4th-quarter payment for her 2011 taxes.

Since she hasn't gotten her latest freelance check, and we don't expect to get our tax refunds for a while, we may have to use the lawyer fund to cover part of the above, but it's just temporary; I'll have it fully funded again as soon as those payments come in.

I promised myself we'd get a spending-money bonus when we got all this settled, so whatever is left over of AS's freelance check will get divvied up. I'm expecting about $320, so I'll probably give each adult $100 and put $20 into savings for little AA.

AS is also getting a $150 speaker's fee soon for a job-related function, and she's going to use that to get her dreadlock maintenance (once or twice a year they need to be separated and tied at the base so they continue to grow in individual locks).

Now that this year's taxes are settled, I'm back to planning our train trip for the late summer/early fall. Should be fun, but there's going to be a bit of wrangling to get the seating arrangement and car rental conditions we want. (Train bedrooms have a max occupancy of 2 adults and 2 kids, so we may have to purchase a separate seat for one of us, then just hang out in the bedroom car together anyway. And I want to rent the car in St. Louis but drop it off in Minneapolis, which is easy to do airport-to-airport but not as automatic for nonairport locations, for some reason.)

Thanks to MonkeyMama's helpful advice on the SA forum, I'm not feeling so intimidated about amending my past years' taxes. I've decided to put aside money little by little, then submit a revised form whenever I have enough money to cover one of the bills. I'll just figure out what tax I owe and let them send me a bill for interest and penalties, which MM says will be about 10%-12% per year for federal. (Probably about the same for MN tax, but I will owe them less so the fee will be negligable.) It'll feel good to have everything settled and feel more confident going forward that I'm preparing our taxes correctly.

OK, nothing else came in to work on, so I'm ditching this place a few minutes early! I got a notice that a package came, and I'm hoping it's some cute spring clothes that I ordered online. Usually I find it hard to think of something to spend my allowance on, but lately I've been blowing through it!