Kitty Company

Leila loves to be around her people. Whenever I'm home working on one thing or another she always manages to find a cosy spot nearby to curl up for a snooze or a bath. Above is a picture from last week while I was blogging. I was sitting on the bed and she came over and cuddled up right in my lap. Actually, we are sitting in a very similar arrangement this very moment. I'm not sure it is the best thing for my back, but it is so nice to have her close by. On a side note, that is one of my favorite skirts in the picture. I love the green wildflowers and grasses in the print and it always feels like spring when I wear it. 

I had a bit of a hard time deciding to include the picture above. It is a photo of Leila trying to make do with my very very messy desks. Paper always seems to thwart me but it is one of my goals to get my desk cleaned up. I'd like to move that box of receipts she is lying in and instead make that into a little bed for her so that she can be near me when I'm working on paperwork at the desk. That desk is also one of the reasons why I often find myself blogging while sprawled out on the bed. It's so much cleaner!

This week I decided it was finally time to finish up our taxes. Leila decided to help me. Woodley had scanned and sent in most of the documents a couple of weeks ago so all that was left was figuring out our California Sales and Use Tax. I had never heard about it before, but now that we are married and have someone to help us with our taxes I have learned. Apparently not too many people pay it but in this age of computers and Internet businesses it seems like it must apply to more and more of us every year. 

Basically, California residents are supposed to keep track of any purchases we make online or while we are traveling but which we end up using in California for which we didn't originally pay California state sales tax. I don't know about you, but I do love finding good deals on Ebay and sometimes I can't resist a new book I discover on Amazon. That tendency, combined with the amount of traveling we did last year meant that I had quite a bit of calculating to do last week. 

I gathered together all of our bank statements and went through each of them, line by line, and created a new spreadsheet to keep track of the date, location, amount, and type of each purchase. Leila decided she wanted to help too and promptly jumped up and sat on all of the papers I was going through. After I finished with that (which took several hours), I decided to go back through the list to find purchases we had made in other states that actually did charge us sales tax. Because we could credit that sales tax towards our California sales tax we did manage to save some money. I'm glad I took the extra time to do that and it didn't take too long. This year I hope to keep track of the purchases we make that would apply to the Sales and Use Tax each month so it isn't so overwhelming next tax season. 

To try to encourage scratching on proper scratching items, we got Leila this cardboard scratching "post." These are some pictures of her right after I applied some dried catnip. She loves it!