Trying to Make a Comeback

A Double Crested Cormorant at Fishtrap Creek Park

They are very shy and when I tried to get too close, he took flight.

He only settled down again when he thought I was at a safe distance.

I have a number of hobbies and one of them is this blog. There has been so little time, lately, to do this thing, but I am trying to make a comeback. Funny how work interferes so much with life. Yes, work is picking up, like it does every spring, but this time around, the jobs are many and small. Doing five small jobs in a week is a lot more time consuming and inefficient than doing one five day job. As well, there is not very much money in small jobs. I usually like them because they are a filler for the between times for large jobs, but lately it is all that is out there. We were spoiled last year with a six month job, the largest one I had ever done. 

We went to a "Heat" game a few days ago. They are our AHL hockey team, one tier down from NHL. It is good hockey, but, our guys, even though they were the better team, lost by one goal. The half full arena reminded me of the fact that the sport of hockey in our town is heavily subsidized by the tax payer. If I had not had a free ticket, I would have been paying double for the seat. 

My accountant has finally waded through my financial situation and told me how much money to send to the government. When I peruse the PDF files of my tax return, I cannot believe the complexity of the whole tax thing. In my world, simplicity is the key to efficiency. Inefficiency is the key to costly ways of doing things. I cannot help but think that there are thousands of pencil pushers in the civil service who have to justify their huge pay cheques, so they come up with more and more convoluted ways of figuring what the tax payer owes. But, it does feed the accounting industry and those guys have to eat too. My Accountant tells me that there about 250 changes to the tax act each year and it is their job to know which changes are relevant to which client. We paid our taxes today, but are now six weeks behind in our installments for 2011 and this week I have to send in the HST that I collected for the government, off the backs of my clients, in the last three months.  It just never ends.