Traffic for 2005 June 26 (entry 0)

(4) Sun Jun 26 2005 20:05 PST The government giveth, and the government taketh away: Part 2: My brother won a used 1999 Ford Contour at a Stingers baseball game last night! Well, he says that everyone they told at church today only had one thing to say: Ooooh, you'll owe taxes. Dumbies. No one knows what that means, they just know it's true.

So of course my brother calls me. My family (except my mom) only calls when they want something, so I always get nervous when they call that something is terribly amiss (that includes my in-laws as well). As a quick aside, it sure would be nice to have a call or email from someone just wanting to shoot the breeze, especially with free long distance these days. Anyway, back to the story.

My brother wanted to know what taxes he owed. Here's the scoop: YOU will have to pay to register the car in your name AND pay the taxes on it. YOU will also include the FMV of the car, date of prize, on your next year's tax return, as line 21 other income. But because my brother makes less than Susie does and has two kids (I still don't know how they make ends meet), I think they'll be ok. Now everyone knows. Go win something.

Actually, my old high school friend called me on Saturday to tell me that she is getting married. It was good to talk to her. Susie was ok that we talked because she was never my girlfriend. I liked her all of junior year but she never reciprocated; she liked me all of senior year but by then I had moved on.

I said good-bye to my grandma yesterday. My uncle that had the tumor was there but I am pretty sure he didn't recognize me, as he didn't say Hi or anything. When I asked my grandma about him, she just started crying. I'll miss Grandma June, but now we can visit Grandma Rosie more often. Life is about tradeoffs.

Comments:

Posted by Sumana at Mon Jun 27 2005 10:46

My condolences on your uncle's decline, John.

I've been worried about just calling to talk because you've been a busy student and worker and now you've been moving. Once you have moved successfully then maybe we could do the casual conversation thing?

Posted by John at Tue Jun 28 2005 10:30

Basically, won't we always be busy? But of course you can call and talk (or come and visit) anytime you like. We should plan a weekend excursion in Morro Bay or something, since it's like half way between us.

Posted by Sumana at Wed Jun 29 2005 08:32

Students and workers, in my experience, are busy in different ways. Good students do homework and are thus busy during the evenings and during their classes. (Bad students have too much free time because they're slackers!) Workers are busy basically 9-5 M-F (or whenever their 40 hrs per week are) but have no homework. I figure once your CPA exam is over, I'll be able to call and converse with you at length qualm-free! But until then I will reassure myself that you would tell me nicely if you were too busy to talk.

And of course the nice thing about e-mail is that you can come back to it if you are insanely busy at the moment! Which reminds me that you made me LAUGH OUT LOUD for about two minutes with your recent email about my haircut column. My boss was wondering if I was ok.

Posted by Susie at Thu Jun 30 2005 09:08

I am a bad student! Yipee!