Taxes and brakes

At the moment I am trying to be positive about my little car, since the brakes have been squeaking over the past couple of weeks, and I am hoping that this doesn't mean the pads need to be replaced. My friend has offered to take the wheels off at the weekend and check for dirt in the mechanism, and though I can't help feeling that this is rather beyond the call of duty, it would be nice to know that I will just have to spend $17 on some brake fluid rather than $120 a piece on brake pads. And to add to the trauma, I got a hefty tax bill yesterday, since the government apparently feel that they have the right to screw you over when you come back into the country after having been away for a long time, by taking away nearly all of your personal tax-free allowance. However, I then went and cried on an H&R Block advisor, who looked rather alarmed and recalculated my tax assessment for me, cunningly finding about $450 that hadn't been taken off my net income. And although I think they are meant to charge you for this service, he didn't do this either, probably because he didn't want me to burst into tears again. So today I sent off my reassessment, along with a begging letter asking them to take the new calculation into account, though I don't really have much hope for this.

Yesterday Denise and I went to the Convention Centre downtown to collect my marathon pack, and get some free stuff from the Health & Wellness exhibition. I also bought a water bottle and zipped pocket thing that attaches round your waist, so I can store my inhaler in case I die halfway round the course. After picking up my pack of crap, I came home to discover that the marathon t-shirt you automatically get when you sign up (size guaranteed if you sign up before January 1st, which I did) is in fact not an XS, as I ordered, but an M. Some cheeky bastard has cut out an XS label and glued it over the M label, as I discovered when I peeled it off slightly. Cue a rude e-mail to the organisers, asking what the point is of signing up for a t-shirt if you can't wear the damn thing without looking like a beached whale. Obviously they haven't got back to me yet.....

On the good side, the weather is still continuing to be sunny and hot. Today and tomorrow is the Kerrisdale Carnival, where all the shops bring their wares onto the streets and sell them at half the price (in England the racks would be stolen in seconds), people walk around with balloons, bands play, and there is a big procession through the streets (tomorrow at 10am). It also marks the beginning of the kids' little league baseball season. And tomorrow I have to sit at a desk for the ESS group I'm with and pretend that I know what we do for two hours, so that should be fun!

I have also finally managed to get all my shit together to send to the POW/MIA command centre in Hawaii, asking them for an internship. Now I have to hope that my three referees get their shit together in turn, write me references and send them to America. This could be dicey. Even if they do send off their assessments of me (and I am assuming that they will be good, because they all like me) I still have to fight off a load of other people who are American, since the command centre doesn't really like taking people who don't have US citizenship. I also have to fight off graduates of anthropology degrees, whereas I only have a couple of modules of anthropology and a broad psychology background. It's not going to be easy. But it would be cool to get an internship for a year, move down to Hawaii, get paid to do some fab forensic work and go to places like Laos and Vietnam. I think I argued quite convincingly on the application that they should give me a job, but it just depends whether they want the hassle of having to arrange visas, transport documents, accommodation etc. for someone who isn't American :o( - I wouldn't!