I got a bill from the state revenue department almost $600. I forgot to file my annual sales tax form. I actually didn’t sell anything last year. It’s not the first time. It’s not even the first time I’ve forgotten. And I used to work for them processing returns.

That was the last job I worked. I was already retired from my regular gig as a slacker for a university library. Actually, no. I wasn’t a slacker until my last 60 days. I just did my job until I noticed that my completed re-classification work was being trashed – quite literally. The shelves of materials I had redone were being emptied.

My second part of my job was digitizing 19th century medical theses. The scanning project was not cancelled but was never going to be completed as the person responsible for creating the meta data for the image uploads decided not to do it and our boss decided that was fine. (They were long-time friends)

The third part of my job was searching for articles published by our faculty and creating reports for a campus library committee. In theory, I was only searching for medical results, but ultimately wound up doing various allied health publications as well. I attended the first two committee meetings before my boss decided it would look better for a professional librarian to present my results.

That led to my early retirement. My little 1000 day retirement calendar changed to 90 days after being yelled at by the woman who had been my supervisor that she was no longer my supervisor and I should have known that! No one told me that my supervisor has changed and for months I had been leaving my timesheets in her mailbox.

After being yelled at for not knowing who my supervisor was, and since I was doing what I considered basically make-work because I couldn’t be fired without cause, I figured I could do similar activities at home with having to get out of my pajamas. So what does that have to do with sales tax? Absolutely nothing.

Yet here I am mumbling and bumbling. I make books. I do book binding and give classes in book binding. I’ve done a few sales but randomly and I’ve always sent off my sale tax forms and a check. But last year, was a bad year mentally. I didn’t do any sales. I did do classes but nothing was sold. I hope to take part in a couple of small local sales this year, but not more than two.

Here, have a cat. That’s Gingersnap. She was once feral. She loves regular meals and soft warm places to sleep. She’s not much for cuddling, but occasionally likes a scratch between her ears.