Driving Advice for England

Three weeks from right now I will be boarding a plane to Europe!
3 Weeks!!
I know I can I hardly believe it.
We will arrive in London, pick up car and drive to Bath.

Isn't it just the most beautiful little town you've ever seen.

Of course I will not be driving. I will leave that up to my professional driver husband. I am hoping that his years of driving experience and years of watching Top Gear will enable him to conquer driving on the left side of the road. I'm a little anxious about it, but then again I'm anxious about the whole trip. Flights, cars, trains, getting my money's worth, eating, sleeping, walking, it's all making me anxious.

I've still got 3 weeks left to work myself up into a tizzy. I'm going to try and just roll with it. My last European adventure was traumatic and involved many panic attacks and terrors over ever making it back across the ocean. I'm nervous and excited.

In other news I just found out tonight that Rick Steves divorced his wife Anne. The Anne we've all travelled with across Europe, the Anne I've listened to Rick talk about and joke about for years. I was devastated tonight while reading Rick's blog to find out he was getting his initials engraved on a bracelet with his new partner Trish. See here for details and see here for his new girlfriend's blog that is all about her travels with Rick.
Of course I can't even begin to imagine what problems Rick and Anne had that led to divorce, but I'm disappointed. It's always sad when people get divorced. I'm a little late to the news since they were divorced in 2010, but I will still mourn for them today.

Hair Attack

So imagine a pleasant Sunday afternoon... I'm sitting on the couch reading quietly for a few minutes before I start making dinner when my beautiful just turned 7 year old daughter walks up to me with her hands full of hair, crying.

Now imagine me having an instant panic attack. Heaving chest, palpitations, sweats, swirling eyes, the whole deal.

She had a scrunchy in her hair and then there were bits of hair all around her, hanging down lower than her already long hair, there were clouds of hair everywhere, puff balls, trails of hair. It was terrifying. I followed her to the bathroom upstairs to figure out what was going on.

Alopecia! That was my first thought. Then cancer, and other un-named things that could be wrong with her.

Once in the bathroom where there were more strands of hair on the counter and in the trashcan, I started combing through her hair to find the source of the hair loss. Finally after pulling out all the loose strands I saw on the side of her head the signs of a scissors attack.

Now I lost it.

After sorting it all out it seems that my daughter used some new hair clips that she got for her birthday. They are little stars with Velcro on the back. Once you affix them into your hair they are pretty stuck. In order to get them out you have to pull them down the length of the hair, which for her is about 18 inches. She however did not know that. She thought they were stuck so she got out the scissors and CUT THEM OUT HERSELF!!!!! Herself!

I was in hysterics and so was she. I was so mad and disappointed that she didn't come and tell me and ask for help. She was so embarrassed. And all that gorgeous hair.

And this photo is from last year.... add 6 more inches to this.

I am still recovering today. I am still seeing flashbacks of strands of hairs on the floor. It's like a nightmare. Her hair is okay. You don't notice unless you pull it back that the left side of her head has hair that is only 2 inches long. We will not be doing any ponytails or pigtails on the side of her head for a while. 

After thinking about it, it's not so much the hair, but the fact that she didn't come and ask for help. She always asks for help, but this one time she didn't... this one very important time. It just breaks my heart that she was to scared or embarrassed or what ever to come and ask me to help. Or did she just think she could do it herself like when we trim/cut her Barbie's hair? I don't know, but we've discussed it many times since yesterday, about how if you ever need help, or get into a big mess, ASK for HELP!

Oh the joys of parenting.

Insolvency

So a few weeks ago I posted that I was waiting to hear back from my accountant about whether we were going to owe a whopping $22,000 in taxes this year since our 2nd mortgage was forgiven. The fabulous answer is NO we do not owe $22,000. In fact we will be getting back $2,200.
How is this possible?
Well I have a fabulous accountant, Nordstrom and Assoc., here in Flagstaff, but also because we had to declare insolvency.
That sounds like a really scary word. It sounds scarier than bankruptcy, but it's not.
Insolvent just means that you have more debts than you have assets. There was a cool worksheet to fill out that listed all of our debts and all of our possessions including the worth of our house and our business.
What saved us was the low value of our home. According to Zillow, the house we paid $680,000 for back in 2006 is now worth only $435,000. Yeah, I know. Where did my $245,000 go? I feel the same way.
I thought our numbers were going to come up looking horrific, but it wasn't so bad. We were really only about $80,00 upside down, almost exactly the amount of the 2nd mortgage debt that was forgiven. That means that if we now sold everything we had we would break even at $0.
Pretty impressive.
So as tax day looms, I am happy and insolvent.
Things can only get better from here, right?

Wallowing in my Mental Illness

Today I am at home because I'm mentally ill, so technically I can still call it a sick day. Yeterday just got to be too much for me. Not so bad that I had to take a Xanax, but bad enough where I felt I needed to take a day to recover.
It was a deeper anxiety that what a Xanax could cure.
I get anxious when there are things out of place. While I was at work all I could think about were all the piles of laundry that were lying around the house, the dishes that needed washed, the knee deep crap in the playroom, the bills that needed to be paid, and the files that needed filed. I know everyone gets anxious about that kind of stuff, but mine was debilitating yesterday. So far I've gotten a grip on the household clutter and I feel much better, well enough to sit here and write this even though I am surrounded by piles of books and papers that I have yet to attend to.
Sometimes I need a day to wallow in my mental illness. I need to stop and refocus, and clean up both physically and mentally. Does that make me mentally ill? I think it just makes me human.

Petey the Dog

 

Yes I am allergic to dogs, but that does not mean that I am immune to their charms. We make a weekly ritual of stopping at Petsmart every Saturday before grocery shopping. Usually we just peruse the cats and go home, but a couple of weeks ago we met Petey and her siblings. We went back on Sunday to see if anyone was left and there was this cute little puppy with a huge soft puppy belly and an enormous cold wet nose sitting there all alone. We could not resist.
She's been with us for three weeks now and it has not been easy. Our house smells like a kennel while we try and house train her. The kids sometimes hide in their rooms for a break from her boundless energy.
But at night when she gets tired there are fights over who gets to snuggle with her. She is a mix of beagle and daushund, and definitly more beagle compared to her short leggged black and brown siblings.
I'm not totally sure it will work out for us with her and the cats and my allergies, but we are giving it a try. Don't get all up in arms we aren't going to dump her again, we have a grandma willing to take her if we give up and can't handle it any more.
For now she is a sweet little girl who keeps shitting on my rugs and wants desperately to curl up on my desk while I try and write. It's a love/hate relationship.

Spring Break

So it's Spring Break and I'm bored out of my gourd. I just drove all the way into town to go to the post office and the library. Then for fun I took a cruise down the main drag and was lured in by our fancy new Dunkin Donuts. It's a big deal that we have that Dunkin Donuts. No the donuts are not the greatest, but it's there and I had to pull in even though it was 11:30 and I wasn't even hungry. I had to make that trip into town a little bit more interesting. I bought a dozen and a chocolate milk, downed a chocolate glazed cake and a powdered vanilla creme with my milk in the parking lot and then headed home.
That will be the highlight of my day.
I feel like we are missing out. It seems as if the whole town went out of town this week. All the college kids left of course, but also a lot of the townies too. The mall was deserted on Monday, Target on Tuesday, and Sam's Club on Wednesday. I remember last Friday when all the kids at school were talking about all the cool places they were going and I was envious, of 8 year olds. Of course they were just going to Mexico, or Phoenix, or Cali, but still I was totally jealous.

We are stuck at home penniless, trying to catch up on cleaning and paying overdue bills.
We do have those two big trips coming up, so it's not like we aren't going to travel, we just aren't travelling this week like everyone else. It 's frustrating. The weather has been kind of crappy and when it is sunny it's accompanied by a bone chilling wind of at least 20 mph.

I feel like I should be doing more. So here I am. If I can't be doing something big and important at least I can be here writing. I love to write, but don't do it often enough. Lately a lot of the crap I have been putting up here has been put up in the interest of getting more page views per day, not like it's working, but still I am editing myself heavily in order to appeal to somebody, but I don't know who.
I write here because I like to broadcast stuff. I like to have an audience and I sometimes feel like I have something important to say. Other times I just want to get some stuff off of my chest, exercise my fingers and try and make someone laugh or feel like someone else out there has problems too. It's not all roses, unicorns and rainbows. I like to read about other people and know what's going on with them and compare my life to theirs, and maybe you like to do the same. It's like literary voyeurism.
Your welcome.

All of that censoring I've been doing has meant little or no posts here. So I'm going to try and stop thinking and try to just write with no censoring.
I hope you enjoy.

Taxes on a forgiven loan

Let's get the business out of the way first. I am currently awaiting a phone call from my accountant about whether or not we will owe $22,000 in taxes this year. Why you may ask? Well it's all about that forgiven second mortgage.
See the deal is that the tax exemption is only on mortgage loans forgiven for the purpose of initially purchasing the home. Since we took out the loan after the purchase... after we had put down $140,000 on the house and had no cash left, we will now owe taxes on the forgiven amout. So apparently taxes on $79,000 for us comes to around $22,000.
Is there a way out of this mess? Our accountant is looking. Since it is spring break around these parts I probably won't hear from him this week. I'm on pins and needles. Needless to say we don't have an extra $22,000 laying around. I'm not sure how the IRS handles that sort of thing, but it will be an interesting ride and I will document it all for you here.