Week 16, Day 1 (My brain came home and not a day too soon!)

Whew.. what a week it's been. This is a manic time of year for accountancy-type people.. end of financial year, the usual PAYE returns plus the GST returns for nearly everyone (including the ones who hit you with six months worth in one fell swoop), and to add icing to the cake, IRD decides to start up their seminars again.

I hate seminars. I had to endure so many of these when Telecom was going through it's touchy-feely stage (let's make up for restructuring frights by sending all the staff on non-stop training courses!) that up til now I've been avoiding the IRD ones. Okay.. now I've been to one, I realise I was wise to avoid them and it's unlikely I'll attend another. A much better plan would be to look at the invitation's topic list, then hit their excellent website and find out everything I needed to know from that. I snuck out half way through (two hours in!) to discover I wasn't the only one waiting for the lift ;-) Probably half the room escaped when I did, and all in my crowded lift agreed we should have stayed in the office and checked the website instead.

Heads-up, IRD.. we tax agents are supremely conscious of time constraints this time of year, and if you're going to ask us to sit in a room for hours, be SUCCINCT, be INTERESTING, and put the coffee bar inside the room so that we can top up our flagging caffiene levels and thus somewhat stay awake. (Butt-friendly chairs also wouldn't go amiss)

I'm so grateful my brain chose this week to return to full working capacity. Not a moment too soon, I assure you. Hello self, I've missed you - and if you leave me again, can I come too?

This will tell you how flat out I've been this week - we have a beautiful new SLR digital camera and I have barely touched it. I'm hoping to get some practice in with it tomorrow afternoon. We did not intend to upgrade our camera just yet - Wayne suggested a bit of window shopping while we were in town on business yesterday, and normally when we window shop we're not at all likely to whip out the chequebook for many months yet. Love to have a good look around, do a lot of comparisons, then investigate prices & reviews online so that when we DO make a decision, we can smugly agree that we've done the right thing.

Hmmm.. so what happened, eh?

Well in our defence, we didn't buy it. We leased it, or rather one of the businesses did. I won't bore you rigid with the tax benefits on this strategy, but it did make good fiscal sense, plus it doesn't whack us with interest (say, if we did an HP), or tie up valuable cashflow (no that wedding client STILL hasn't paid up! Told ya told ya nya nah nah nah nah).

True SLR digitals are still new technology (or at least, the good ones are), and this baby is rather nice. The manual (the English bit) is more than 200 pages long - does that give you an idea of the complexity? But my sweet little 3.2 megapixel Kodak had taken me as far as I could go, and you can't stretch pre-sets. I do not plan to be wrestling with bank statements & unruly clients forever, and photography & digital imaging is my special love, so Wayne suggested I give my passion free rein. He's going to learn with me, bless him. He went a bit pale when I suggested night classes to get supremely skilled on SLR's, but I still want to give that a go before I'm tied to a baby and all that they entail. I may hate seminars, but I LOVE further education! Seeing as my plans to get to Uni this year went on hold, I need my learning fix to come from somewhere.

Something tells me from October onwards I'll be fully engaged in a very different learning curve.

As far as Tadpole goes, she's growing fast. The books tell me she's 11.5cm long now, from the top of her head to the end of her bum. As Kaz Cooke would say, "I'm not showing, I'm showing OFF!" Mucho blessings to my sister who passed on some totally incredible clothes my way, and despite the fact she's definitely skinnier than me, the lovely roomy shirts will see me well dressed and avoiding the naff 'maternity' outfits for many months yet.

I had a bit of a browse for maternity clothes, and was aghast to discover big collars and frowsy prints are still very much in evidence. Yuck.. I'd rather wear a grain sack, thank you.

Taddy often settles in for a good round of kickboxing most nights from about 8pm onwards, and my stomach for once is rock hard. Belly and boobs are still in competition to see who can get to the middle of next week ahead of me - so far the boobs are still in the lead but I'm hoping they give up gracefully and settle for a respectable but distant second place before we hit the finish line.

So all in all, it's been a beaut week and I'm looking forward to going to a baby-themed flea market tomorrow. This pregnancy is getting to be terrific fun :-)