Been out and about this morning paying bills. In fact my wallet is now so light I should be floating. Fortunately my bulging credit card is ensuring my feet are still firmly anchored to the earth! Monique’s car was serviced yesterday and we had to pick it up this morning and that cost enough but I then had to sure up my bill with the plastic surgeon who is cutting the skin cancer out of my arm next week, Dr Vlad! Of course they can’t just send you a bill after it’s done, they want their money first or they cancel your procedure but you can’t claim it back through a health fund until the job is done. Needless to say it cost me quite a bit and I’m not looking forward to my next Mastercard bill. I use to live well within my means but just lately I have been treading water when it comes to saving money. Just breaking even. Tax accountant fees, car registration, rates etc, and of course the other things in life which you want rather than need yet can’t help yourself and buy. For me that is mainly books. I have a kindle and although the books I download are cheap the cost soon adds up. Add on the books I physically buy and again the price starts to get a little vicious. But as my niece once said to me, money on books is never wasted and I like to think of her sentiment everytime I hear a new book calling my name. As I sit here I can see twenty books I have recently bought but haven’t yet read. I flick through most of them and read parts that interest me but sometimes I don’t read them cover to cover at all. I just check parts which I like and “graze” so to speak. The books I download on my kindle I always read from start to finish. Then again, it is a bit hard to flick through an e-reader! On my shelf now sit such titles as “5th Infantry Brigade in the Falklands”, “Howzat”, “Lost Voices of the Titanic” numerous books on how to write a novel and a cheap tome on alien encounters(!). There is also a book on battlescapes, basically modern photos of ancient battlefields, a book on Ireland and another on Irish freedom fighter Michael Collins and yet another which is an anthology of his letters and articles which survived him. Another book is the collected works of Jules Verne, seven novels in all and another is collected stories of Charles Dickens, another five novels in that. I definitely want to get around to reading at least some of those literary classics. Rounding out this particular shelf is “Aussie Rules for Dummies”, “Fiasco, the American Military Adventure in Iraq”, and biographies of Henry V and Henry VI, father and son and both very different kings of England. Finishing off the table is a biography of Jefferson Davis, the only President of the Confederate States of America, a book about the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain, a very good book about the history of Australian stamps which was given to me by my manager and a book investigating the disappearance of Sir John Franklin and his party of 300 or so in the northern climes in the mid 1800’s. And those are just the books I have bought this year! The rest of my collection runs into the hundreds and I have given serious consideration lately to donating many of them to second hand book shops. Many of the rest are books I will never read again and it is merely sentimental value that keeps me from giving them away. I can’t bear to part with them. And so I guess one can’t complain about being unable to save when I keep buying books at such a rate. At the moment, if I was a corporation I would be wound up such is the amount of money I’m haemorrhaging. But no need to worry. Once my bills are paid and procedures designed to cut bits out of me done, I’m sure my finances will be back on an even keel. Either that or I need to find a job which pays more. It is however a beautiful day which is a salve for my soul and is giving me the strength to endure the trial which awaits me this evening. And so, wherever you are, I hope you have are having a good day and if you find yourself with half an hour to spare, why not read a book, there are worse ways in life to spend your time. Just a note to finish; Blogger has changed it’s setup and I don’t really like it and it appears in my final published post that sentences are running onto each other without paragraphs being inserted. Please don’t think poorly of my editing, it’s merely teething problems with the “new” Blogger which I hope will be fixed soon. Ciao for now.
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 