Post-Tax Crash

April 16th should be a holiday.  After all the stress that everyone goes through to make it easy for the government to steal from them it’s the least they could do.

Austin, Texas, is in the top five cities for procrastinating with their taxes.  I don’t know how they work it in other cities, but Austin needs some help.  There’s only one IRS office, and it closed at 4:30pm yesterday.  That’s a few hours short of midnight, when everything is supposed to be turned in.

Since everything needs to be post-marked for April 15th, surely the post offices would be open until midnight.  No, just one.  For the entirety of Austin.  At least they did it right.  The post office is on a two lane road and they turned one lane into a huge drive through.  People that already had postage on their stuff could just give it to a postal worker on the side of the road and be on their way.  If you needed postage you could get into the post office.  It was a genius setup, really.

But it’s all done now, for most people.  Sure, there’ll be people who filed for extensions and forgot and everything else.  But for the rest of the country, we just sigh in relief that we have another year before having to be worried.

Dunkin’ Donuts

Back in the old days, when I was a kid, there were times when I didn’t have school or was too sick to go to school. My dad, being a single parent, would sometimes have to take me with him to work.

Sometimes, when it was time for lunch, we would go to Dunkin’ Donuts. On the menu was an item that read, “Bowl Bread Butter Donut.” That was a bowl of soup, a piece of bread, some butter and, most wondrous of all, a donut. And that’s what we would have. The soup changed. Sometimes it was chicken noodle, sometimes it was beef barley. That’s when I learned the importance of stirring your soup so the hot stuff at the bottom would be cycled to the top and cool off.

But that wasn’t the important bit. No, the best part was at the end when you got your donut. I would get the Bavarian Creme. My dad would get a cruller, which seemed kind of boring to me. Those were good times.

As I got older I developed a taste for Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I loved it. When I had a friend working at a Dunkin’ Donuts I would drop in frequently for a donut and some coffee. I liked it so much I would buy a ½ pound to bring home with me. Up north, Dunkin’ Donuts were just about everywhere.

This is a MapQuest map that shows my home town, Parsippany, NJ. There’s five right there and another 46 within ten miles. Wow!

This is a Google Maps picture of how many Dunkin’ Donuts there are where I live now. One. You might be wondering why I used Google to find it and not Dunkin’ Donuts store locator. It’s because, according to the official site, there are no Dunkin’ Donuts around here. Needless to say, I haven’t had anything DD related since I moved to Texas.

Until this morning. My friend Dan brought me two honest-to-God Dunkin’ Donuts, bless his heart. They weren’t Bavarian Creme, but they were good nonetheless. I didn’t have any DD coffee, either, but such things can’t be helped. I’m just glad I was able to have what I got before I bite the dust.

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