Generally after the warm, fuzzy glow of our New Year's hangover wears off, Seattlest is left staring into the abyss of January without much to cling to, except our quickly fading memories of the resolutions we made and the knowledge that tax season is fast approaching.

This year we're filing as a newly married, first-time independent contractor who bought a home last year and we're mighty worried. We liked the 1040-EZ we'd grab while dropping off a batch of Netflixes and very late Christmas presents at the post office. With so many complications now in our financial life, we volunteered to write about Amazon.com's new Tax Central store. Basically, we figured we could write off anything we bought, right?

We really don't know for sure, but we're guessing that there's not much difference between tax prep software packages and are happy to buy the one from Intuit because we used their online software years ago. Amazon seems to know this too. But being a helpful retail giant, it wants to help reduce our tax burden by offering a larger variety of "related products" than tax software options for us to buy. According to them, tax-season essentials include aromatherapy, coffee, calculators and massage.

There's also a cheesy feature called "What Kind of Taxpayer Are You?" starring the wacky kids from The Office. (Oddly, the feature is really lo-fi. You'd think Amazon might have noticed online video by now and tried it out for a cross-promotion with a television show.) Clicking on each character gives a short description of how they'd take on the task and - what's this? - gives one some ideas on how to spend your refund! Joy! Write-offs for 2008 already!

Browsing through the site we found ourselves wondering how Jeff Bezos does his taxes. Harkening back to our time as an Amazon cube slave, we decided that he probably just tells bad jokes while his minions figure out new ways to file receipts, shift funds and turn plus signs into minus signs.

That got us looking to see if we can buy some minions ourselves. If we find them in time for tax season, can we write them off this year or the next?