Day 160

I finally got my tax refund in the mail. Unfortunately, half of the money has already disappeared to pay my accountant for figuring out how much I was going to get back from the IRS in the first place. The other half? Well, it's gone too. I already spent it before I realized how much my accountant was going to charge me this year.

When I let the dogs out after lunch to dig holes in the yard and chase squirrels, I noticed several men wearing hard hats and doing something with a strange looking test instrument behind the house. Although the gizmo they were using looked straight out of Ghostbusters, I didn't think they were looking for ghosts. When I inquired about what they were doing, one of the men told me in a combination of English and Spanish that they were trying to find the source of a gas leak. "Is much gas leaking," I asked.  "Oh, quite a bit," said the other man.  Nice!  It's a good thing I wasn't going outside for a smoke or something.

I actually got quite a bit done today, despite a total lack of motivation. One of the hardest things about running your own business is that you don't have a boss to continually tell you what to do every day. Life seemed so much easier when I was an ad agency copywriter. I would just go into the office in the morning, pour myself a mug of coffee, eat a few donuts and then wait for the creative director to give me an assignment. Now, with nobody to tell me to keep working, it's easy to get sidetracked. There are temptations everywhere. When I was eating breakfast this morning, I noticed that there was an all-day Torchwood marathon on the BBC channel.  Although I would have liked to have grabbed a huge bag of Cheetos and watched TV all day, I didn't. I continued to work on my petrochemical article instead. You realize very quickly when you are running a small business that if you don't keep working, people don't keep paying you.

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