In which she has an afternoon off

[zeborah]

On Monday and Tuesday I worked an hour and a half extra for a bunch of tutorials, so I got this afternoon in lieu. As if sensing this upcoming pleasure, the IRD took the opportunity to send me a letter late last week inviting me to consider filing my 2009 return real soon now.

Therefore I spent this afternoon:

1. washing the dishes,
2. cooking lunch,
3. picking up rotten peaches from the garden,
4. observing Boots and a white adolescent cat observe each other (though I missed the moment when Boots ousted the youngster from its spot on the fence by, I presume, a casual comment that it'd be a shame to get blood on that pretty white fur, because next thing I saw it was on the neighbour's garage roof instead, trying to figure out what was going on),
5. finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora which I'd vowed I wouldn't finish reading until my taxes were done,
6. added an illuminated psalm to an A7-sized Latin psalter I'm writing by hand because you just try buying such a thing (I'll share more, with pictures, some other time, but suffice for the moment to explain that it generally takes me two hours per psalm),
7. checked email and feeds and flists thinking, "Well, their website probably still has that stupid occupation code problem and it's really too late now to do anything, I'll do it tomorrow evening instead," which sums up the reasons I didn't do it last September or indeed April,
8. and finally (because I'd told a friend at work I was going to do it, so I couldn't very well go to work tomorrow without having tried) forced myself to sit down and at least start with it.

This time I managed to defeat the evil website by pasting in a 2010 occupation code instead of the 2009 occupation code that it refused to accept. If the IRD complains about that I'm liable to go pacifistly postal: they've had the problem for *years* without fixing it. I also defeated several other stumbling points, and wrestled with my balance sheets, and submitted them, and only phoned my father twice, and even got a pdf out of my stupid browser. So that's done, until oh, next month, when once again I'll forget how (apart from the website) it's actually stupendously easy.

As per usual I managed to miss the line that says "This is where you input your tax-deductible donations" and am growing a suspicion that the box is labelled something slightly more obscure. Oh well, I came out in the black anyway. Maybe I'll be able to find it next month.