Time flies when you're busy. Too busy. Yesterday I was up to my eyeballs preparing to meet my Maker, that is, my accountant, for my Day Of Reckoning. The best thing about doing your taxes is that you don't have to do them again for a year.

I know the expression about the inexorability of time/fate and all that is "death and taxes", supposedly unavoidable for everyone. But it's life that runs in my head as I gather up the past 365 days, life and memories and sins of omission and commission and forgotten obligations and here and there, a few satisfactions for something well done. Time does not fly, it does not. Suddenly I was remembering something that happened last spring and it seems like forever ago. That can't have been just ten months ago. I guess shovelling up all the paper brings with it a clearing out of memories.

Ah, the dumpster of the mind! Tomorrow I'll start scavenging again.

-- and it's a good thing because it does add a little perspective. I have another source of perspective this week, not so comforting. I'm prepping my tax papers. I can't figure out the final presentation but I have to take a neat set of figures to my tax accountant and that takes time. I used to shove everything into a shoe box and sort it out at Reckoning Day. I actually made some money: I wrote a Shoe Box Guide for the Canadian Life & Health Insurance Association (that was in the days when I was a professional widow) and they paid me for it, also for the name. They published a Shoe Box Guide, with my byline. That was in the days before computers docketed one's life and business.

Ah, the days of shoe boxes and Carnation milk cases! That was before I owned a filing cabinet and long before Intuit and Mint. Things aren't that simple now, though. Heartbleed is making everyone suffer as they lose their identity and privacy. It costs a lot to be private these days. I guess it costs a lot not to be, too. Remember that line from Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning: "Oh for a holiday in a complete vacuum!"

Somehow, in a weird way, my blog provides that vacuum, if only for 20 minutes a day, some days longer, but even 20 minutes is a long time. Plus mop-up (predictive editing.)

Does anyone know what I'm talking about today? Don't tell me.