Oh Joy! End of the tax year and so Australians were meant to lodge their tax returns by midnight yesterday. So of course I was sitting in bed with my laptop at 11:30pm doing the bloody thing. We are trying to secure another rental property, find out tax information, get the children ready for Halloween and then of course I had to leave amongst all the chaos to go to work in the evening.
First things first. How crap is Halloween? I mean really. Children pull a sheet over their heads and then beg for sweets at various neighbourhood houses. It is sort of cute and fun, but also a bit shit really.
And our boys did not have proper costumes so they went as a dragon, Spiderman and a Star Wars Stormtrooper.
Our tenancy in our lovely house is coming to an end. So when a big house almost across the road went up for rent on the weekend we decided to have a look. Suspiciously it was cheaper rent than our current house. We soon found out the reason. A very old house by Australian standards. Almost reminiscent of The Adams Family. So I guess I'm going to have to change my entire wardrobe to look like Morticia. But it is a nice big old house, even though it is very simple in terms of kitchen and bathroom. Instead of nice shiny floorboards there is carpet everywhere. I can just imagine the amount of food that will be embedded in that carpet in a few years time.
How bad would plastic on the floor look in the dining room? Not up to Camberwell standards I'm sure but hey ho.
The tax people ask questions like "Did you, or do you, have you, or have you ever had, a reportable superannuation fund which you may or may not make contributions to, now or in the future and if not why not?"
What?
Thursday, 31 October 2013
Wednesday, 23 October 2013
What Cheeses Me Off
There used to be a rather popular show in Australia when I was a little girl called "Hey, Hey It's Saturday". The basic premise of the show was a man, Daryl Sommers, and his puppet Ostrich. Sounds crap but it was very funny. Anyway, years later it became more of an adult show on a Saturday night. (For further research watch Australian film "The Castle" for an insight viewers demographic.)
Anywho. There was a segment on the show called What Cheeses Me Off, and people would write in - literally as this was before email - with their grievances. I mean this blog is really about that anyway. And here is another one -
What really cheeses me off is single friends - and by single I mean without children yet, who bemoan their action-packed lives. Young and carefree, without the constraints of time and dinner-cooking and unpacking and re-packing of lunch boxes (my whole life!). These Facebook-looking, Twitter-participating, night-club dancing, iPod-listening, iPhone-texting singletons really get my goat.
But let me tell you why. They will constantly tell you they have literally no time. That is because they have filled it with all sorts of social media. Including the time-poor posting of every single second of their lives. Look a picture of me in my bedroom. Look a picture of me putting make-up on. Look a picture of me on the loo. Oops!
I recently went on a girl's holiday with English pal Emma B to Noosa. She won't mind me telling you that we were both in hysterics over the fact that I was actually enjoying the palm trees, the balmy breeze, the pool, the cafe with the view and she was living it by posting all of it on the internet through various communications. She was so busy tapping the keyboard, taking photos, sending endless texts that she forgot she was meant to be whale-spotting and missed the bloody whale.
Every week I get extremely short emails from singletons "I've got 2 minutes to say hello...". Bullshit! They have hours and hours of free time. Only they don't know it yet. Before I had children we didn't even have a TV. We didn't have social media. The internet had only just arrived - but I didn't know about YouTube in those days. What did we do with our free time? I remember a fair amount of drinking and parties and lying in the garden. But we also bemoaned the fact that we had no time.
Anywho. There was a segment on the show called What Cheeses Me Off, and people would write in - literally as this was before email - with their grievances. I mean this blog is really about that anyway. And here is another one -
What really cheeses me off is single friends - and by single I mean without children yet, who bemoan their action-packed lives. Young and carefree, without the constraints of time and dinner-cooking and unpacking and re-packing of lunch boxes (my whole life!). These Facebook-looking, Twitter-participating, night-club dancing, iPod-listening, iPhone-texting singletons really get my goat.
But let me tell you why. They will constantly tell you they have literally no time. That is because they have filled it with all sorts of social media. Including the time-poor posting of every single second of their lives. Look a picture of me in my bedroom. Look a picture of me putting make-up on. Look a picture of me on the loo. Oops!
I recently went on a girl's holiday with English pal Emma B to Noosa. She won't mind me telling you that we were both in hysterics over the fact that I was actually enjoying the palm trees, the balmy breeze, the pool, the cafe with the view and she was living it by posting all of it on the internet through various communications. She was so busy tapping the keyboard, taking photos, sending endless texts that she forgot she was meant to be whale-spotting and missed the bloody whale.
Every week I get extremely short emails from singletons "I've got 2 minutes to say hello...". Bullshit! They have hours and hours of free time. Only they don't know it yet. Before I had children we didn't even have a TV. We didn't have social media. The internet had only just arrived - but I didn't know about YouTube in those days. What did we do with our free time? I remember a fair amount of drinking and parties and lying in the garden. But we also bemoaned the fact that we had no time.
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