Got the verdict from the IRS yesterday. The good news? I don't owe them the $700+ they figured I would if I didn't provide them with the other stuff they needed.

The bad news is that after providing them the stuff they needed, I owe them $395, or approximately half.

Sigh.

No, it's not a ton of money, and it's not $700+, so I should be relieved, of course. Except right now, I don't have money for my plates which are now past due, I've got creditors calling me 15, 20 times a day for these little niggling bills that I haven't had the money to pay off, and I need to scrape up the $25 I owe my doctor's office so I won't feel like a total dick asking him for free Cipro because I've been pissing fire for the past two weeks (yeah, Ok, too much info, and no, I have NOT contracted anything creepy; it's a run-of-the-mill UTI, is all, but it still hurts like a whore). And yeah, I'm acutely aware that my shit could be eleventy billion times worse like the people down south, so don't go there with me. I'm just frustrated.

Speaking of the hurricane, I started writing a post about it Friday night, but then I scratched it because it was a lot of blowhard ranting. Truth is, as much as I would love to blame Shrub and will still do out of principle, after talking with a Red Cross coordinator for the story I worked on yesterday, I'm not sure he can be blamed entirely. Yeah, Katrina is considered a Category 6 disaster, which I'm told requires the Fed to get involved from the get-go. And yeah, FEMA has been dismantled terribly, etc. etc. But the thing is, until the water receded, no one was getting in there at all. For example, the Astrodome wasn't flooded, but everything around it was. Also, why didn't Nagin force those people out? Well, he can't force anyone to do anything, naturally, but the coordinator was telling me that there was talk that they were going to go around and have people sign waivers saying that if they weren't going to leave, then the waiver would be used to identify their bodies. That never happened, so whether it would've done any good, I don't know. I do know that we should probably wait to play the blame game until after things are reasonably calm, though.