Guachimontones!

I’ve just realised all my entries are looking very much the same as the ones exactly a year ago. This time last year I rang me nanny to wish her a happy St David’s Day. Can’t do that this year cos of the prohibitively expensive international calling rate. So mum, dad or bethan, could you pass on my nationalistic wishes, thanks. I spoke to nanny (and grandma) on Skype on Sunday though, so that’s a start. With the whole webcam/ video conferencing thing no less. The average age of a skype user definitely peaked that day…

The picture is me in me (old) manu chau t-shirt and goes in tandem with my cars that resemble where they’re parked Flickr set. Brits whose clothes resemble where they’re slouched…

Sita’s off to Tequila this avo and Arandas on Friday. I thought I’d be able to meet up somewhere with the tour but apparently not. She’s strangely apprehensive about the whole thing. Personally I’d love to do a 4 day tequila tasting but i suppose we’re just different in that regard… what else? erm…

Oh yeah, Pat’s become a new slave owner of a beautiful dog, Devlin. There’s some photos round K’s website. He looks like a character. Get him on Dogster and we’ll corral him with Atticus… or at least give him a bone. 🙂

Thanks to el “Chiva Congelado” for this brilliant explanation of insanely common Mexican gestures that will save you time in restaurants, on the beach and avoiding squeegee merchants at traffic lights… His blog’s also great if you’re interested in Belgian beer reviews from a Mexican perspective, bilingual sports coverage, and, *edit* bizarrely, pan-global teeniebop phenomenon, RDB *edit* other fine topics…

Still trying to master the “gracias” one…

Never. Ever. Check your work email on a bank holiday. Just enjoy the day. You can’t do anything about it, and you’ll just worry about something you have no control over for 24 hours. No. Sit back, relax. Rent a DVD if it’s raining, have a beer or five, go outside, take photos of clouds, cook a new recipe, do a bit of gardening, or just hang out with rabbits. Just don’t, for any reason whatsover, ruin a potentially nice long, stress-free day by clicking “send and receive” on Outlook.

This public service announcement has been brought to your by the letter G and the number 12. November resolution is a production of the Children’s Television Workshop….

Oh and while i’m at it. Does anyone want to help me install Linux. XP has been nagging about activation since i installed a DVD burner. I had to phone a nice Indian man and tell him a 32 digit code to get things going again…

On the blessings counting side… me mum’s doing ok, just bored out of her mind, probl’y for the best she’s not stuck here with American TV. Stu and Anne are back unscathed with anecdotes aplenty. Sita’s cooking something with yams. And we’ve signed the contract to move house down the road, nearer safeway and blockbuster, and with a real fireplace. The landlords (landpeople) are a lovely couple from the Azores. We get the keys on saturday and once it looks homely enough there’ll be a virtual tour for all me mates, family and enterprising burglars…

That’s it from self-absorbtion central for today. love to my peeps, cheers, gwyn

Sorry to keep posting about BASTARD national organisations, but I really have to vent somewhere. Feel free to skip to the happy-go-lucky post below about our holiday snaps from France last year rather than this lengthy diatribe…

So we got a decent tax refund this year two days ago. Unfortunately today we received a bill from the auditors for more than that amount for the year before. We went to H & R block- a national tax preparation franchise where we go and pay over the odds for tax stuff specifically to avoid all this crap. Last year I’d done a few web design projects so it wasn’t a straightforward joint filing for both our jobs but a fully-fledged small business affair. We spent over an hour itemising purchases like cameras, motherboards, software, scanners, even petrol and travel expenses to file. At the end of it we still had to pay a grand or so to keep the US in missiles and border patrols. Anyway. Today’s letter says we didn’t declare our earnings for the business. So after unearthing our documents from last year from the bowels of the garage we went over the forms we sent in through H&R and there is no record whatsoever of all this stuff we did. Even the W2s aren’t there. So we might end up having to pay $1300 dollars extra (which we can ill afford) unless Watsonville office can find all our stuff that they lost.

I’m extremely pissed off with all this. They’d better ring us up with news that they’re sorry, they’ve found all the forms they never sent, they’ll pay whatever they need to because of their gross incompetence. I’m a bit doubtful though, because we have no evidence whatsoever that we went through all this last March. It seems like the woman who prepared our forms doesn’t even work there anymore, and we don’t have her name because she put Richard someone or other on the forms. Arrgghhh. Repito, Arrgghhh.

Thanks for bearing with me… have a link to CuteOverload for fluffy animals as an antidote to the venom contained herein…

but it’s too bloody hot. I’ve been playing me guitar in the basement and had to stop.

Today’s new song to play, Art Brut, Emily Kane…

On the same day sita gets name checked in Amy’s blog I discover Jesse’s a nascent blogger too. Which means I have another bookmark in my Firefox ‘Peeps with stuff to say’ folder to check on about 8 times a day. At least one the sites has usually been updated by then. Others in the ‘check-every-2-or-3-hours’ folder include…

A daily dose of imagery Arty Photo blog from Toronto
Boing Boing Interesting links aplenty
My boyfriend is a twat Sarky rants from Brit in Belgium.
Med Rib Blog Annelise lives in Rugby and takes care of kiddies. What’s not to like?
Sighclub 2nd degree of separation from Amy, Kathy + others…
Flash’s journal I’ve known this woman on and off for nigh on 15 years and learn more every day…
This Is Chris Great film reviews, essays and enthusiastic posting.
AdRants.com The world of advertising actually has its moments.

There’s another folder for checking on less often, but that’s quite enough for one day…

Sita came home with an 6gig IPod mini yesterday, which she let me take for a test run today. She’s been mp3ifying all manner of CDs I never knew we had. The ‘mug me’ white headphones are really comfortable and sound great. I might have to invest in something similar to plug into me zire. I’m listening to Jon Ronson’s series from radio 4, which is a Anglo version of This American Life. You can download MP3s from his site. Jon’s been on TAL a couple of time reading extracts from Them. So no coincidence there. Anyroad, that’s plenty to be getting on with for today.