Julienning Julian

Sweet Gummi Mary! I am too old to be jumping through hoops. I might throw out a hip.

There I was, sailing along, having done my federal AND state tax returns over two days. Yeah. Not even full days. A couple hours each day, with an extra one that night I declined TurboTax's offer to SAVE. The whole process was SO much quicker without filing Genius's taxes this year. Even though we lost him as a deduction, what with him being such a working man through the spring and summer...we picked up an education credit for The Pony because this past year, he didn't MAKE money off his scholarship.

Anyhoo...all that was left to do was print and file. I'd been putting that off, because I wasn't looking forward to the PRINTING part. Yeah, yeah. I know. All I have to do is push a button. But there were 35 PAGES of forms and worksheets. Normally, I make more than one copy. Because of Genius, and sending him his own set. Plus he had federal, Missouri, and Kansas. But without him, I just made one copy for us. So the whole process wasn't as formidable as I'd anticipated.

Anyhoo...I was chugging right along, all I had to do was hit FILE, which entails several screens. In the past, we've had an issue with Genius and the identity theft that he fell victim to his first year at college. He was not the only one, and I think it was eventually traced to something data-related at the bookstore. So this was the first year in five that I did not have to alter my tax process to provide paper follow-up copies to prove that Genius was really Genius.

Anyhoo...as I was in the process of filing, a screen came up asking for driver's license data for Farmer H and me. Not a big deal. I went upstairs for my license, and called Farmer H to see how soon he'd be home from the auction. My info was already entered when I got my hands on Farmer H's license. Well. His looked different. That being a chauffeur's license that he'd needed for work. His did not have an issue date. The screens would not let me progress without that issue date. Even looking up help, where I discovered that Missouri does not require license information for tax filing, did nothing to get me past that screen. Hmpf. That was a fine kettle of fish.

Further investigation tipped me off that older Missouri licenses (and apparently chauffeur's licenses) don't show an outright issue date, but have a kind of code vertically along the picture. Not so much a CODE, as the Julian date.

SWEET GUMMI MARY!

Do you know how hard that is to decipher? Even though I knew which numbers represented what, I could not find a converter online that only needed the year and day number. At first. I think it was about my 5th try where I found one to give me what I needed.

Shh...don't tell Farmer H that I found a Julian converter. He thinks I'm a genius. An evil one, perhaps. But still a genius.

Not gonna lie. I was ready to julienne that dang Julian calendar.