How do you know a planned relaxing weekend is headed south?

When you have to spend it stressing over your income taxes because you missed the news Hawaii isn’t going along with the federal government and other states in extending the filing deadline a month to help taxpayers tapped out by the yearlong COVID-19 pandemic.

Since you can’t figure your state taxes without first doing your federal taxes, I found myself hurriedly downloading tax preparation software and digging through the box where tax-related mail had been thrown, praying I had all the forms needed to file.

I was OK on the documents but not so much on the software; my computer is so old it wouldn’t run the latest version of the operating system needed to use this year’s tax preparation app.

The state allows an automatic six-month extension to file, but with the catch that if you owe money you have to send it with the extension request or face a monthly penalty of 5% on what you owe, plus 0.66% interest.

You can’t find out whether you owe money, or how much, without doing your taxes, so round and round you go.

Since I was years away from remembering how to do taxes by hand, I saw no choice but to borrow my grandson’s much newer laptop.

He said it was no imposition as he graciously set me up a private user account with my own password to which I could load my tax software, but I could see him gnashing his teeth.

His life is on that computer, and giving it up for a weekend was an imposition, indeed. I would occasionally see his shadow outside my door as he passed by to surreptitiously check whether I was done.

One of the few good things about getting old is that your taxes usually become more straightforward, and I was able to get my returns printed, check written and the computer back in his hands before the weekend was over.

This is where I’d usually gripe about the state for refusing to go along with the feds and every other state that taxes wage income in extending the tax deadline under these difficult circumstances, mainly because it was too much trouble to be worth it — for them.

But this stupidity was on me. I’m a voracious consumer of the news and should have known the state tax deadline was not being extended. I’m on the mailing list of most state agencies and probably got a personal copy of the news release. So it’s nobody’s fault but my own that I almost missed a tax deadline for the first time in my life.

For those reading this, I hope you’re able to have a chuckle, or even a smirk, at my boneheadedness. If this is a “holy crap” moment for you of the kind I had, you have until Tuesday to figure it out.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.