Val Is Thrust Kicking and Screaming into the 2026 Tax Season

I hate progress!!! Especially the electronical kind of progress. 

It's tax season, you know. I've always done our taxes. Even back in the dark ages when you got a packet of forms in the mail, and had to order (by mail!) any extra forms you couldn't find stocked at a post office or library. Then those forms stopped! You could still order them. But they were not delivered, nor readily available in town.

That's when I started using TurboTax. The disc you could buy at Walmart and slide into the tower of your desktop. It walked me through the items I needed. Then made a file of them in proper order. All I had to do was print them on my laser printer that sat beside my trusty desktop computer. I had adapted to progress!

But wait. My laser printer quit working. So I had to save my file on a thumb drive for Hick to take to town and get printed at the UPS store. The gals there really liked him for some reason. I swore I would get a new printer. By the time I did that, I was not going to the basement to my desktop. It was after my unfortunate HospitVALzation, and I wasn't making trips up and down those 13 rail-less basement stairs.

My new printer worked for one month. I might have used it twice. Even then, it didn't work well. It took The Pony a while to set it up and make it go. Because everything these days wants to run on those magical invisible signals floating around. My laptop HIPPIE was having none of that. Or perhaps it was the printer. HIPPIE would say he sent out the signals, but the printer in the living room didn't get them. 

Hick wasn't going to the UPS store any more. I figured I'd take a chance, and just save my tax forms on HIPPIE. He has several years worth. Luckily I didn't need to look up anything. Until NOW.

My tax life became a whole lot more difficult over the past few years. Walmart quit selling TurboTax in favor of H&R Block. But I could still get my TurboTax from Amazon. Until TurboTax quit making the CD version. So it had to be downloaded and somehow made usable on HIPPIE. The Pony did that for me. 

The second year, we couldn't remember my password, which was required to use my own laptop to utilize the software that I had already paid for. INTUIT was holding my account hostage! There was no way to say I forgot my password and reset it! After trying every imaginable version of my go-to password, with me in tears, and The Pony apologizing for not being able to find a way around that password... I suggested one little tweak to that password family, and it WORKED!

Well. This year, equipped with The Pony and a password, a new monkey wrench was tossed into my tax life. Like Adam Sandler in Big Daddy, tossing sticks into the path of roller-bladers in the park! TurboTax geniuses decided that this year's version could no longer run on Windows 10. Only Windows 11 or higher. Which meant I had to use a whole new laptop, as HIPPIE was not compatible. Too old and slow to run Windows 11. No simple upgrade.

Luckily I had a "new" laptop The Pony got me a couple Christmases ago. I call him LENNY, because he's a Lenovo. He works just fine. But he's NEW to me. The keys are a different spacing from very wide HIPPIE. So I have to look down and make a lot of corrections.

Oh, did I mention that I'm not good at using that little finger pad thingy instead of a mouse? And I only have one mouse. It works fine with LENNY. All I have to do is unplug a little thingy on the side of HIPPIE, and insert it in the (opposite of course) side of LENNY.

Here's the deal. With HIPPIE slowly dying, shutting down randomly from overheating, I had transferred my previous few tax year files from HIPPIE to LENNY. Just in case I might need them. Which I did, because of a dang lump-sum payment of SS when teachers were allowed to draw it on their spouses like every other profession or non-workers.

Yep. I had everything done. From the sale of three properties in 2025, to Hick's business, and his new non-employee contractor status due to his less (now more) than $300 a month job with the senior apartments. He got a 1099-NEC. But I got it figured out. Yet now it was my own income that tripped me up.

I needed to find the taxable amount of Hick's SS in 2024, because that's what my lump-sum payment was for: a few months in 2024, because they backdated the teacher claims for when the law was changed.

Anyhoo... the point of all this confusing stuff I forced you to read is that I HAD those 2024 tax forms for reference. I only needed two items. Hick's full amount of SS for that year, and the taxable amount. 

LENNY could not open my 2024 tax return! He needs some program to open it in. I will have to consult The Pony for that. But wait! I still have the file on HIPPIE. Sitting right there behind LENNY on the kitchen table. So all I needed was to open the file on HIPPIE to read the info to type into LENNY where I had TurboTax open.

Well. Did you forget that I have one mouse? So I had to unplug and replug and shuffle the guys around to get into HIPPIE and open that 2024 file. Then switch the mouse back to LENNY to type it in. Oh, I got it done. It took way longer than should have been necessary.

Back in the olden days, it was SO EASY to open last year's manilla folder and look at any tax forms you needed for reference.

That was my point...