Deep cleansing breaths

I was going to clean house tonight. My house does, after all, look somewhat like a cross between a college dorm room and a crack house.

I got it partially tidied and then made a huuuge mistake - I decided to Turbo Tax my taxes. That wasn't a big deal until I decided to calculate my mileage from freelance writing last year - which involved pulling out every one of my articles and strewing them about. Now it looks like the Crazy Newspaper Saving Lady lives here, too.

The best part of that is, after an hour of figuring out mileage, I still don't qualify for the standard per-mile deduction. Brilliant!

There is good news though. I thought I might owe as much as $5k in taxes. Oh me, with my delusions of financial adequacy. I actually only owe a more manageable $1600. So I am taking deep cleansing breaths and trying to look at that as a GOOD thing.

Then why don't I feel the security?

The new security guy is freaking me out. He has those intense, starey-blue kind of eyes that fix on me, and he is sort of overly aggressively nice to me, stopped me to ask my name yesterday and now calls out to me every time I pass, which is about 6 times a day due to my penchant for not being at my desk where I belong.

As a Woman of a Certain Age who has been A Certain Age for quite a while now, I am just not used to the attention. You become generally invisible to most people, which is relaxing in a way, once you get used to it. It can also be infuriating, like when you are at Best Buy and KNOW you want to lay down about $500 on a new digital camera, but you can't get any help because five of the the 18-year-old sales dudes are hanging on every word of a gum-chewing 110 pound blonde girl in Daisy Dukes and Ugg Boots.

Most of our security guys are pretty laid back. Many of them don’t speak English very well (or Spanish, either - they tend to be Tagalog speakers except for the Russian guy). That is not a criticism.

I figure that actually puts them up there in the Rocket Scientist of Security Guys realm - I mean, they come to a new country, don’t speak the language and still land a job where you are inside and can relax a lot instead of dealing with hot dishwater or dirty bathrooms...Nice work if you can get it.

But this guy speaks English perfectly well, seems to be in his early 50’s, fairly fit...and here he is, with no visible skills other than staring intently at me from behind his desk and clipboards.

I don’t pause when he speaks to me. I just say hi. I am old enough to know that interacting with crazy people is seldom profitable in any way.

I just scamper on by. After the nutty postal lady in Goleta just, well, went postal, I don’t want to take my chances and find out what the Man with the Plastic Badge has up his poly-blend sleeve.