Wednesday 9 October 2024: It’s deadline day! 😱

I had such a leisurely start yesterday, not rushing or worrying. I mean, I had ALL day to write a story that was due in today, and I’d already done all of the planning. It would be a walk in the park. But first, I’d just…set up my laptop ahead of our trip to Horsham next week.

I knew I had all day, but I didn’t think it would take long. I’d already made a start before setting up the desktop. All I had to do was make sure things like Scrivener and TickTick were working on there.

So I opened it up, switched it on and…it started to do it all by itself! I was fascinated as I watched program after program pop up on the screen. And when I checked Safari, all of my bookmarks and folders were there too! It was amazing! The only thing I did have to do was install LibreOffice and Kindle. Oh yes, and transfer over any live files I’m working on, but I’ll do that at the end of play on Friday.

Feeling chuffed that it hadn’t taken long at all, I then turned to my tax return. First of all I had to access 2 of my bank accounts online so I could collect the statements. Then I had to look at my 3^rd bank account, on my phone, to see how to extract statements from there. That was easy too. All I had to do was upload them to Google Drive and then save them to the desktop.

Ha! And there is where my day fell over and I slipped down a rabbit hole…

I have several saving ‘pot’s on this banking app, with each pot allocated to things I regularly pay for. I have savings in there too, a rainy day account, and an account for things like dental and, back in the day, vet fees. And I had to go into each and every one of those pots and upload a statement for every single month of the financial year.

Then I had to download them to the desktop, remove them from the Google Drive (and the bin!), and print them off. By the time I’d finished, including my PayPal as well, which I haven’t used at all this year and only used once last year, I had a pile of paper almost a ream thick.

The plan had been to take these statements with me next week and work on them in the hotel. But there were too many of them. It would be easier to just start working on them here, first highlighting things like income, expenses, interest, etc, all of which have to go on my tax return.

I created my first ever spreadsheet on LibreOffice, in Calc, and took it from there. And before I knew it, the poet was home from work! That was ALL I’d done ALL day, apart from set up my laptop first thing.

And I completely forgot that today is deadline day for 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS.

So guess what I’m doing first…after first rattling of a quick blog post.