Tax return season is well underway now.

Marked by the way a task I intended to do on Monday has only JUST been completed. By Thursday.

It’s these Alice in Wonderland rabbit holes that make life so stressful and unpredictable at this time of year.

Mind you, I did pass up the opportunity for Donizetti’s opera seria “Anna Bolena” while writing this for some peaceful music on a theme of mindfulness.

Max Richter “On the Nature of Daylight” (which apparently was used in the film “Arrival” but sounds as if it should have been in “Schindler’s List”) and Philip Glass “Satyagraha” are much more relaxing.

If potentially a little toooooooooooo relaxing from the yawns emanating from me.

Tax return season. Sigh.

Still.

I wrote this next bit last week but ran out of day and have only just got back to it…

I was going to call this post ‘New decade, same dickhead’ but I wasn’t sure whether a semi-punned UK insult would carry well. Guess I’ll never know…

How was the Xmas/New Year break for you?

You probably won’t be surprised to hear ours wasn’t as smooth as one might hope.

• All three of us went down with various versions of man flu
• I had to port all the data and programmes from my old laptop to a new one. Old one uses Windows 7, soon to be unsupported, new one Windows 10 which I dislike immensely. More of which later
• And just to make life really exciting, my email host goes down with a ransomware attack. There are times where I would WELCOME ten days without my main email account. But there are times when I would not.

So Windows 10

A few things are an improvement over Windows 7, a lot is not.

That’s why it’s taken me months to get round to doing the transfer.

I have to suspect that, if 7 was still to be supported, it might have never got done.

I was fortunate (?) enough that, when the free Windows 10 upgrade was released a few years ago, something on the old laptop was incompatible and it failed three successive attempts to run.

This was, of course, no bad deal as it’s meant I could continue using the old operating system complete with proper definition on the displays and so on.

Maybe it’s the company I keep but I’ve no one in my immediate circle with a good word to say for 10…

And it’s like throwing away that old comfy pair of slippers, no matter HOW tatty they’ve become.

Even if the old laptop has been getting slower and slower as new versions of programmes take up more and more RAM.

So eventually the bullet has been bitten and everything-ish is on the new laptop and I don’t have an effing clue where half the functions I use are now.

Amazingly “effing” IS in the spellchecker – but keep this snippet to yourself…

What else have I got to say about 10?

I’m slowly but surely finding how to personalise the ribbons as I had on 7.

Half the time it’s only when you want to do something a little off the beaten track that you realise you’ve no idea where the smegging (not in the spellchecker, strangely enough – courtesy of a very funny sci-fi comedy called “Red Dwarf”) command might be.

(returning to this week)

There are some odd issues that still need to be addressed.

Like the docking station not quite working as expected.

I can have the screen or one of the printers but not both.

I can have the screen and the internal speakers or not and the docking station speakers.

This leads to the somewhat disconcerting situation of the sound emanating from somewhere near my knees if I use the BBC iPlayer for instance.

But we will cope.

As long as I can find someone with sufficient skills and daft enough to help.

Or I see if I’m still doing make do a year down the line…

Back to the grindstone. Tax return season is underway.

My fantasy world where everyone has done their tax returns… Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay