Friday, April 27, 2007

Sorted. Well, kinda...

I'm going through this weird transition at the moment. I'm trying to morph from spendthrift to scrooge, and it's a painful process. It's also a very necessary process. My business has done well, but I've dipped into the old business account far too often and haven't left enough to pay the government their share of my earnings. This has left me with a massive debt and the only way I can pay it off is to change the way I've been living and cut back my expenses. It's been nice having money (when my kids were little I was really really poor) and I've been a little irresponsible. It's taken a while to come to the realisation that I have to change my attitude towards money and become responsible. Oh hell, am I finally becoming a proper grown-up?

The first step was to meet with my accountants and establish the debt - how much was owed. Then I worked out a realistic budget for myself. I used a really great website to do this - www.sorted.org.nz. I loaded in the actual amounts I've been spending. It exceeded the amount I'm meant to be paying myself from the business by more than I'm going to divulge here. It's embrarrassing to see how much I was spending. Then I plugged in some realistic targets. The next step is to set up an electronic budget so I can track everything and see how much I can spend.

I thought this process was going to be scary and unpleasant, as well as difficult, but now I have my head around it, it's actually quite fun.

I now have three to five years ahead of me to get my financial situation back to a healthier situtation. Yikes!

Friday, April 20, 2007

Phallic or vulval?

My office mate has started a blog concerning vulval design in the world around us. It's fun. It will make you see the world in a different way. Is it phallic? Is it vulval? Maybe that building down the road is closer to hermaphrodite... Oh my. You can see how much fun life in my office is. Tra la la.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

what i've been up to...

Listening to: Colossal Youth, Young Marble Giants

I urge you all to revisit this album!!

I've got a new way of living going on that means, unfortunately, less blogging. Now that I'm working from an office I'm living a bit more like the rest of the population, but that means leaving my Mac at work and doing things in the evening that do not involve the computer. I realised that I had been filling in the empty evenings since Dave left with work work work. NO more! I'm now being much more efficient with my time. This does, however, mean that blogging is happening less and less often. So be it. My life is a lot healthier these days since my decision to leave the computer behind at the end of the day.

I've been to some fun gigs lately. Hightlights have been twee pop Glaswegians Camera Obscura, pysch rockers Comets on Fire (supported in the most wonderful way by our own Birchville Cat Motel - I couldn't believe how magnificent this was), old school Flying Nun boys The Clean and noise legends, Dead C (see them here on YouTube).

On the movie front, World Cinema Showcase has just started and I have managed three films in the past week. The best so far has been Rampage, a doco about life in the "war zones" of Miami, focusing on the lives of a family stuck in the midst of gang warfare in "Brown Sub". Pretty shocking and depressing but so worth seeing. All I can say is, US gun laws are really really stupid.

On eccentricty

Eccentricity has always abounded where and when strength of character has abounded: and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.

John Stuart Mill