I’ve hosted visitors these past two weekends. First, an old friend, who lives in New York, came in then my best friend, who currently lives just north of San Francisco, made my Albany Park flat her home base for five days.

I enjoyed seeing them although taking on extra responsibilities when hosting a guest can be tiring.

I’ll make sure to have fresh linens on the sofa bed in the guest room and fresh towels in the guest bathroom. I’ll make a home cooked meal on the day a visitor arrives. I’ll look for theatre tickets or research restaurants I think they’d enjoy.

I bought Coke for my New York friend because I know she loves the stuff. I would not normally have Coke, or any type of soda pop, in my house.

Following each departure, I cleaned the guest bathroom, laundered the sheets for my next guest and combed the place for anything they might have forgotten that they might like to be re-united with.

When my last walk-through was completed, an odd sense of satisfaction came over me.

I thought they enjoyed their visits. More importantly, I felt DONE; complete about the out of the ordinary activities I took on in preparation for their visits and for returning my solo lifestyle.

During the time leading up to their visits, I was also working on completing tasks involved in filing my tax returns for 2015.

Unfortunately, although I started on this project weeks ago, being that it is not as much fun as hosting friends, and being that I needed some professional assistance, declaring I was DONE was not as easy.

I dropped off earnings documents to my accountant and emailed a spreadsheet of expenses, contributions and records of various transactions a while ago. His initial estimate of what I owed shocked me.

For years, I’ve been filing as an independent contractor and I’ve come to look at quarterly estimates as best guesses, so owing something didn’t surprise me, but the amount did.

Luckily, I was able to consult with family members who are pretty savvy and other financial advisers and was able to reduce the amount I owed. I set up a new retirement account and learned that I was not applying all my allowable expenses.

I got quite an education on things that affected my taxes. While not DONE with my education on this, I expanded my understanding of how things worked.

Before I affixed Ray Charles tribute stamps (I can’t just use American flag featured FOREVER postage) on four separate envelopes (to the US Treasury, the state of Illinois, for an amended 1040 form for 2014, and for sending a check to my accountant), I realized that DONE was more about reaching a milestone in my financial education than about getting the damn envelopes in the mail.

In the course of looking through my tax document folder, in which I usually just place documents as they arrive during the first few months of the year, I found a form for my homeowner’s exemption, which I should have filed months ago.

When I discovered it, I immediately went downtown to the Cook County Assessor’s office and handled registering.

Remembering the decorative brass elevator doors anchored in the Bottocini marble walls of this beautiful old building became my image for completing each step along the way. I remember the doors as closed with little lamps to each side.

That the doors were closed, for me, means DONE, and yet, not entirely DONE. The nearby blue lights are important as well.

Remembering that nothing is DONE until you learn something from the experience is no small thing.