Tax day and other things

I’m thinking I might live. I was able to eat two things Friday, plus I went to the gym. Tons of thunderstorms rolled through from the afternoon until nearly midnight. Rex and Margot: not happy. Guinness: thinks eating could be a great cure for foul-weather fears.

Another tax day has come and gone, and even though I didn’t feel so great, I couldn’t resist going to the downtown post office to see the last-minute filers on Wednesday night. However, for the first time ever, I couldn’t get NEAR the post office, even though I left the house well before eleven.

The small lights of the building you can see on the right over the tops of cars are the windows of the post office lobby. This is as close as I could get without waiting in traffic for at least forty-five minutes. And since my refund was already sitting in my bank account, my car didn’t need to be taking up the space of any midnight filers. Traffic was:

Backed up coming in from the west.

And the south.

And the east.

In order to ensure that their returns were time-stamped by midnight, people were parking their cars haphazardly and illegally and walking to the post office. Drivers were putting their passengers out with their returns. I saw people make the trek to the post office and get all the way back to cars that had moved only a few feet in the duration.

After I pulled into a bank parking lot and got out to take pictures, I remarked to a guy who was watching it all from a bridge over the bayou that I’d never seen things so backed-up. I wondered if the economy was forcing more people to file at the last minute because they couldn’t pay taxes owed. He told me what he thought the real reason for the chaos was: understaffing due to post office layoffs. I think that’s entirely plausible, because in years past, this whole last-minute rush was handled with amazing efficiency.

People everywhere–at midnight, downtown. Surreal. One woman saw my camera and shouted, “Call mine the picture of procrastination!”

The dogs went with me and were the souls of patience while I got stuck in traffic or got out to shoot photos, leaving them in the car. On the way home, I figured it was only fair to take a detour to order something from the value menu at Jack in the Box. Just because I couldn’t eat didn’t mean no one else should. Besides, if Debby had been with us, she’d have made sure BoBo Butterbean and the girls got a treat. So here they are, each of them scarfing down their own plain and dry junior bacon cheeseburgers:

Margot is always the last to finish, and I love the way Guinness and Rex are checking out each other’s empty bowls: