Remember me grumbling and whining about how getting a new computer messed with my TurboTax juju by making it impossible for TurboTax to import information from last year’s returns into this year’s returns?  (see my post from yesterday)

When I finally got a chance to chat with Anthony last night (“chat with Anthony” is my euphemistic phrase for “blather to him about all the shit that’s making me grumpy today”), I grumbled about the problem with TurboTax, and how the 2014 program was unable to extract information from the PDF version of our 2013 returns I had saved to the external hard drive when we moved over to our new computer.

Mr. SmartyPants Professor stared at me blankly for a second. He might have been making sure he heard me right. He might have been thinking of something else (e.g., “I should remember to tell Carla about what the Tigers’ starting line-up has been doing in the off-season”). He might have been counting to 10 or something like that, to avoid blurting something mean. Then he said, “Why don’t you just turn on the laptop and see if you can find the right version on it. You can copy it onto a flash drive and get it onto the new computer.”

[dreadful silence.]

Oh.

Duh.

Yeeeaaah. The crappy, broke-down laptop is in the basement, where I put it on the off chance we might need to find something on it that I failed to move over to the hard drive successfully. Like, say, prior years’ tax returns.

Well then. The laptop turned on (it only took 30 minutes for it to download and install 3 months’ worth of Vista updates, which it had to do before it would start up), and I managed to jimmy the power cord so that it would stay in the socket without getting loose (else the ancient chargeable battery fails in 3 to 4 minutes), and I found the correct file. And so on.

Abracadabra, shalamazoo. It took me less than an hour to complete and e-file our not-especially-complicated tax returns, thanks to TurboTax and its magic ability to import information from last years’ tax returns when it can find them in the correct not-PDF format.

Remember Jesse head-butting me yesterday and  telling me I’m not smart enough to help her with her third-grade homework?  Today I’m thinking that she’s probably right. Especially because JUST NOW, I remembered that almost an hour ago I was supposed to get my rising bread dough shaped and into the oven, but now it’s too late for me to do it before I go pick up the kids, and the dough’s probably wrecked now anyway, and SHIT SHIT SHIT. I just got so excited about getting the taxes done easily.

Jesse is definitely right about me.