The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

The Witching Hour for the Goblins of Oz fast approaches. At the stroke of midnight a bright shiny new Financial Year begins. Just the perfect excuse for a certain serpent to dust off the cobwebs and make a squeaky clean new start.

It is the ideal time to do a Scrooge makeover. This involves an unusual but very useful ritual observed for many many moons now. The habit of recording every single cent spent encourages mindfulness with money. But there are other side effects. The easiest way to do this is to replay the day's activities at the end of the day and write down all transactions in the order they occur.
As well as remembering the day's events it means that months or even years later I can look at the list for a given day and remember it in remarkable detail.
It also means never being sucked in by all those scary so called financial advisors telling folks that they'll need tons of loot in retirement and then offering some dodgy get rich scheme to get there.

Since squiggling in the Scrooge book is an almost daily ritual, it is also the obvious place for putting appointments, interesting events, names and addresses and a whole bunch of assorted notes.

Had tried many times to use another diary devoted to all this other stuff but it always falls by the wayside.
The local cheapskate shop had a stash of 2014/2015 diaries last week. Some of them were A5 size with one day to a page. One week for two pages is simply not enough space. When some of the daily diaries were mistakenly marked with the $3 price tag reserved for the weekly version, it was a temptation too great to resist. There's a section of each page devoted to appointments and even a to do list at the top for each day with space for ten things and nice little ticky boxes for each one.

So today was a most auspicious occasion for the big switch. Just to get into the spirit of things, even devoted the first blank pages to listing a bunch of "New Year's Resolutions" all devoted to goblin business.

Also been busy setting up a new Scrivener file for July Camp Nano and playing around with Evernote. Very happy to find that it is possible to write notes and save as you go offline. It solves the problem of not being able to copy and paste using the tablet. It's even possible to take pictures and store them as notes or to draw scrawling scribbles. It would be wonderful if the software could actually decipher serpent squiggles since one finger typing is such a pain.
Since there seems to be not an advert to be seen, still trying to work out how Evernote manages to make money. Here's guessing some folks sign up for the premium service. Not sure what extras they get since the basic version seems to have lots of useful fun stuff.

Maybe they have secret sponsors at the CIA and NSA.

In any case it is still a never ending source of amazement all the useful free stuff that is out there these days. MOOCs, books and apps are just the tip of the online iceberg. So many toys. So little time.

Today was the big day for the long dormant inner goblin. A big fat 3 hour taxation exam. Needing to get a minimum of 80% to get a job with the goblins. And even with 80% it’s not guaranteed. Guess they need an out clause to avoid employing fat frumpy freaks like Izzie. Unless you are a complete geek who can do a tax return perfectly in five minutes they only need people for the peak tax season which runs from early July to the end of October

Was supposed to spend the afternoon pottering about in the garden and sorting out stuff inside the Lair. Ended up doing bugger all. Just sort of crashed and transformed into a brain dead zombie.
All those good intentions didn’t get very far. It’s not like there’s any shortage of stuff to be done. Now that the list of 50 things to be finished in 2 years officially started about two weeks ago there’s no excuse not to be getting on with a whole pile of things. It’s just finding some sneaky tricks to get motivated to do any of it.
Got no Coursera classes on at the moment and there’s no longer any need to spend two hours several times a week slaving over a hot abacus doing depreciation and capital gains work sheets although it might be a good idea to keep going with the serpent tax return. Wondering if those worthless goblins will remember to send out the annual pay certificate. For the last 17 years used to pick them up at work from the pay clerk. Those days are obviously over.
Wondering what company name will be on the certificate at the end of the next financial year.