The IRS and auto repair
I haven't been blogging over the past few days because I am currently getting hit with a double whammy of crappy situations.

First, I took my car to get an oil change at Valvoline last week. In addition to jacking up their price by $10 ($10!!!) for certain models (including Volkswagen), the technician claimed that my car was leaking transmission fluid *and* my main seal *might* be leaking. Sweet! I get screwed on the oil change price *and* have to take my car to the dealer for service to see if my car is actually screwed up or not.

Because my car has a 10-year powertrain warranty, I have no choice but to take it to the dealer to check out Valvoline's claim. If there is a problem, there is a good chance of it being covered under warranty. However, if there is not a problem, I am forced to shell out $88 *per hour* for VW to look my car over. I almost find myself wishing for a problem that is covered by warranty.

I dropped my car off this morning and it will be in the shop for 2 days while they inject dye into the system and see if anything leaks out. Now I have to sit and wait for the potentially expensive news.

In addition to the car drama, on Friday night (the same day we received our Federal tax refund), we received a notice from the IRS that we owed them over $20K in back taxes from 2005. Nice, right?

Of course, after nearly sh!tting ourselves (twice), we determined that there was some mix up with paperwork for stock options that I sold a couple of year ago.

Did I mention that we were going out to celebrate my wife's birthday that same night? Well, as you can imagine, the whole IRS thing weighed on us all weekend until I was able to dig out all of our paperwork and find the issue (which doesn't appear to be our fault).

I gathered the supporting paperwork together and wrote a letter to the IRS stating that we disagree with their claim. Now, we just have to sit and wait for them to respond.

So, in case you were wondering why I haven't been blogging, you're all caught up :)