Daily Archives: April 1, 2009

Enough Tax Stuff For The Day

I declare the tax stuff half-done. Everything got sorted, and all but three of the ten stacks of receipts have been calculated. My calculator doesn’t have an ‘erase current input without erasing the ongoing total’ function and the decimal button is finicky, so if I make a mistake I have to begin all over again. As a result it feels as if I’ve actually calculated about twenty-seven stacks of receipts so far. I really, really wish there was wine in the house.

I only made half of what I made in 2007, which isn’t surprising as I didn’t work in-house for three months with a major local game design company. All I did was write one book, and do the freelance evaluation gig. Which means I’m anticipating some kind of return, the only question being how much (or little!) of one. Money coming back is always good.

Tomorrow I’ll calculate the utilities and such, and go through my credit card statements for the correct conversion from USD to CDN amounts on research book orders from the first half of the year when I was writing the hedge witch book. As I sorted I was actually impressed to see that on half of them I’d noted down the Canadian conversion as the credit card statements came in, so go me; it’s not going to be as much of a nightmare doing it as last year’s was. (Yes, I can learn from my past mistakes.) I think we need one more receipt, and then HRH can call our awesome tax guy.

And In Completely Unrelated News…

This morning, while I was composing the very-difficult-to-write post about my newfound chocolate sensitivity, I received word that I won a year’s subscription to Strings magazine plus a $100 gift basket from an LA luthier for a 250-word contest entry I wrote on Emily Wright’s online teaching technique via her cello blog.

Whee!

This was especially nice, because I didn’t do it for the prize; I did it because Emily was looking for an idea of how readers interpret her lessons and approach. Of course, the prize is really quite nice too, because who wouldn’t want a goodie bag of cello-related stuff? (Er. Anyone who is a cellist, that is. I have no idea what most of you would do with such a thing. No, wait, yes I do: You’d give it to me!) The subscription is timely because I was going to have to let my subscription to Strings lapse this fall; it’s too expensive for me right now.

So. Yes. What a lovely surprise.

And I really need to get back to the taxes. I hadn’t made much of a start when I came back for a break, and then the chocolate post took longer than I expected.

In Which She Makes A Regretful Revelation

I’m working on the taxes today. I hate it. I hate sorting receipts and adding things up and inputting them into appropriate columns. Bah.

So I’m taking a break to share something very sad with you. I figure this is timely, what with Easter coming up.

Over the past two months, I have developed a sensitivity to chocolate. The darker the chocolate is, the worse my reaction.

Yes, you read that right. I can no longer eat dark chocolate.

No, this is not an April Fool’s joke.

You have no idea how much this has upset me. Chocolate is my reward to myself for finishing a task, my encouragement for making it through part of the day or a project. Instead of being able to enjoy it, my tongue and hard palate burn. It’s no fun at all, I assure you. This has really depressed me, and it’s been one of the things I’ve been struggling with behind the scenes.

It’s not just one brand, either. I’ve experimented with various kinds from my stash. Same result every time. The higher the cocoa content, the worse it is. Chocolate chips in cookies, chocolatines, chocolate-covered butter cookies; they’re all culprits. Those double-the-cocoa cupcakes I made last week? Bad. But the regular chocolate cake I made earlier in the month was fine. Go figure.

The reaction I get from milk chocolate is almost non-existent, so I’ve nibbled what little I had of that with caution. So far, so good.

Then this morning I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, and fifteen minutes after I finished it my tongue and throat were prickling. It’s not an additives thing, either; we use natural peanut butter (as in, the ingredient list reads: “Peanuts, The End”). I suspect my body, slyly encouraged by spring and the general sap/growth thing that used to turn me into a mess as a child and teen, is now manifesting allergies to things it hasn’t previously needed to in a new and exciting way thanks to a ramped-up sensitivity level. Ten years ago the new symptom was random skin itch and contact dermatitis with pretty much everything, so I wouldn’t put it past my body to have developed a new symptom. I haven’t yet experimented with diphenhydramine hydrochloride (like Bendryl, one of the common food-sensitivity-friendly antihistamines) to see if it’s my body releasing histamine in an attempt to fight off what it perceives as an invading chemical of some kind. (Dear body, you know I love you, but really, dark chocolate? Is this some kind of amped-up immune system thing connected to the fibro? Do we need to talk about ongoing medication again?)

Sigh.

You know what this means, of course. It means I have to go shopping to replace all my dark chocolate with creamy good-quality milk chocolate. In small amounts, of course, in case I develop a more intense sensitivity to that as well. And yes, it also means I’ll be careful, and will speak to my doctor about it at my upcoming appointment.