Every year I say I'm going to have it done by January 31st, and every year I file for an extension near the deadline.

It's the medical expenses. Medical billing is so opaque in this country (by design, I suspect), that it's a lot of work keeping it all straight.

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April Fool's Day seemed appropriate somehow.
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I am having trouble with TurboTax on my 11-year-old laptop and it's a 2.5 hour wait estimated for live help.

I've been at it since yesterday, trying to get to a point where I am not in a loop where TT thinks I need to add something in a blank line.

I was slothful, as usual.

It turned out I didn't owe any taxes so I told my accountant to go ahead and take care of it rather than wait on the rush this week.

I did have a meeting with him today - several things have happened in the last two weeks and I wanted to make sure how it would affect this year. It turns out I will have more losses so I probably won't owe any taxes next year, either.

Not filing until deadline

I am now out in the middle of nowhere near the tip of Cape Cod, MA with no printer or scanner or any of that other hardware I come here to escape for a few weeks of every year. So, now they are frantically FedExing me forms to sign and I am frantically searching for FedEx dropoff points where I can send them back. Oh, and they want a whole bunch of money from me that the Germans will ask me to pay them as well at the end of the year. There is a double-taxation treaty that is supposed to prevent this, but neither country seems overly eager to say it applies to them.