Oh the Humanity

Now I know why afternoon posting is tedious for me ... last night seems so long ago!

Anyway, so last night was book club, it was J9's month to host but because of various things going on, she ended up hosting at my house instead of her own. So there was a mad panic to get the place clean after the home-made pizza incident (making pizza tends to leave flour all over the place and use plenty of dishes!) and getting the place ready and then a minor altercation with Varen because I wanted to set the TV up to do a slide-show of my Polar Bear photo's and I can never connect to the TV laptop or figure out how to get whatever new software he's installed on the thing actually working (this was like the 5th or 6th time something like this has happened ... and that's probably out of the 10 times I've ever tried to do anything like this! So reason to be frustrated in my book, what use is this fancy system if only one person can use it?!).

And then, happily I get that sorted and J9 get's dinner going and people start arriving ... and then I get a call from Varen (who was still at work) who has misplaced his car keys. So what happens? As all my friends start arriving, I have to leave and race to Varen's offices, drop off his spare keys so he can go and play his Action Soccer match and race back home to Book Club, which is At. My. House. Today I hear it was some idiot in his office who took them as a joke and left without telling him a) that he'd taken them or b) where they were?!? Boys. You can imagine my lovely mood :P (In his defence the poor guy did sms me to ask me if he could come home ... I imagine only partly because of the Book Club girls being here :) )

Luckily the rest of the evening was lovely :)

Today however I received a very upsetting, practically-ill-making phone call. From my tax lady. There is something wrong with something (we're in the process of trying to figure out what?!?) in one of my IRP5's (I changed jobs in the last Tax Year) ... that currently results in my tax return showing that I owe the receiver 15K. yes, R15 000. Oh. My. Freaking. Freaking. Now you can imagine my horror, not simply because it is a huge amount, but also because usually (and I wasn't expecting this year to be any different) I receive a refund. I have every year since I started submitting my tax. And I *am* actually receiving a bit of a refund, you see the money I owe is even more that 15K, but my refund is reducing it slightly ... and I lost a bit on Capital Gains tax (the amount of which was like a quarter of the cash I actually got out of the sale :P Count me annoyed). I'm practically devastated by this news, how could this have happened? That's more than a thousand rand a month over the entire tax year! I'm in a flat panic and I expect shall remain so until this little matter has been resolved (which better be before next Friday, which is when the tax return is due!) I think just typing that has pushed my blood pressure up :(