Today is Absolutely Today

I caught a brief snippet of Terri Gross’s interview with Tom Friedman the other day and they were talking about Walmart. Apparently Walmart is now so big and buys so much stuff from China that if it were to be a country it would be the eighth ranked trading partner of China. That’s pretty amazing for a little old company from Bentonville, Arkansas.

So we have reached the end of our first week together and all is going well, though mum has been a bit jet-lagged and sleeping a lot. Her mantra these days is a saying of her father’s – once a man and twice a child. Translated to the feminine gender that would be once a woman twice a child – but she never says that. She is well into that second childhood stage of her life now ands she is increasingly frustrated by how little she can actually do for herself.

We went out to eat tonight at Espanol – an age old restaurant in Sacramento. Despite the name, it is an Italian restaurant. It is way over the top with the quantity of food, but quality is perhaps not their strong suite. Looking around the restaurant, I saw so many tables like ours – an elderly parent, usually just one of them, with a 50 something son/daughter - or at least that is my interpretation. It’s the place to take your parents when the hip California cuisine doesn’t appeal anymore. The great thing about it is that there is so much food you come away with enough to feed you for the next day.

For all you non-American residents, today is April 15, a day know to every American as the deadline for filing their Income Tax returns and making good with the Government for all that they owe them. The Tax filing process is just way too complicated and the government should be ashamed of putting their residents through this – you should not need to hire an Accountant or be an Accountant or buy Software to do the job. It just doesn’t seem right to have to pay money to figure out how much you have to pay the Government. Here in California we also have a State Income Tax, so we have the privilege of filling out two sets of forms. I have long since stopped filling the forms out by hand (I took pride in doing this for so long), and I have been using tax software for the last few years.

I finished my forms on Thursday but waited until this evening to mail them. Since I owed the Government some money this was just fine – no point in giving it to them too early. Mum and I drove out to the main Post Office this evening to mail in the forms. I was not the only one who left it so late – the Post Office was quite the popular place – the police were out in force controlling traffic, the Post Office had people collecting envelopes from you as you drove by, the local TV stations were there, and cars were in line for a quarter mile or so.