A Bug's Life

Well, I'm getting started on my tax return. I have now collected all the pieces of paper relating to my finances into the same room. Next - sort by category (savings, employment, self-employment (I went from one to the other in the tax year 2004-05), rent-a-room, charitable donations) and tax year.

Then come the sums. I hate the sorting, but I love the counting! Unfortunately, the Inland Revenue do their best to obfuscate the process with the special "Calculation Guide" - there's no way to ignore the parts which aren't relevant, and you end up carrying zeroes all over the place. The flow must work well enough for a computer program, but the intermediate calculations are rarely meaningful to humans. Maybe in my Copious Spare Time™ I could write an alternative Tax Calculation Guide.

Do berate me in Comments to advise me that I should have done this earlier, or on-line, or whatever, but I doubt you'll be telling me anything I'm not already telling myself :-(

I've just come back from my Tai Chi class - I walk there, which takes about 50 minutes and is usually okay, but today a) it was so cold I thought my eyeballs were going to freeze over and b) as I rounded the drive to the school where the class is, four or five girls came out and one of them spat in my general direction. When I got changed I saw that my backpack had been the target! Gross. If life had a sense of fair play, it would have been so cold that the spit froze as it left her mouth and she had to go around for a week with a spit icicle on her face. But I will just have to hope that when she's about 30 she'll remember what she did and be mortified. Humph.

After that I wasn't terribly in the zone for calm and gentle movement - luckily, after the warm up we did thumping and throttling and walking obsessively in a circle giving mean looks to an imaginary opponent. I should write up the new moves while I remember them, but I must finish my tax. Only 8" of stacked paper to wade through now!