Seemed like a very long day today. Money was the biggest concern of the day. I hate thinking about money. I prefer just to have it and spend it. 🙂 But given my extravagant lifestyle, I need to generate it at some point or another. Sunday’s as good a day as any. I stayed up until 3 last night doing computer stuff… things that I didn’t have time to do during the week and during the day yesterday. Then, this morning I had an appointment to do some server maintenance and consulting with one of my big clients. They’re planning a major expansion and since I’ve been working with them for a long time now, they chose to deal with me instead of approaching Dell or Compaq or one of the big providers. I’m kind of commited to helping them with the equipment acquisitions and network setup. The contract is potentially worth a couple hundred thousand dollars, which would be the biggest deal I’ve ever put together. It’s intimidating, since the offices will potentially be all across Canada. Anyway, today was a strategy meeting to plan a zero-downtime policy. It’s going to involve weekly schedules for maintenance, setting up redundant services in different cities so there’s no dependence on one location, setting up servers and user accounts to keep users from messing up their own computers, and a ton of new workstations. I’ve never implemented anything so complicated before, so it’s a little intimidating. There may be some travel involved, but not enough to actually enjoy the places I’m visiting. I’ll be flying in, checking everything, flying out. It’s funny how as soon as I start to distance myself from this business, it sucks me back in again.

After the meeting I had to rush around to collect all the stuff I needed to do my taxes. Next week looks to be crazy, and taxes are due on Friday. I didn’t anticipate having the energy to do them after tonight. I brought everything over to my dad’s and did them there using Quicktax. That’s some seriously amazing software. It only took me about an hour and a half to get it done. I had been fearing that I’d have to pay a huge amount of taxes on top of what was already taken off of my paycheque automatically, but I managed to scrape up enough expenses to keep it at a reasonable level. If I really looked hard enough, I could probably bring it down to $0 owing, but that tends to attract unwelcome attention from the government. Today’s lesson: writeoffs make a huge difference. Now although I don’t get a refund, I’m paying at least $2000 less than I expected. It’s almost like having a refund. Is this the excuse I need to buy a new stereo for my car? Hmmmm…. 😛

On tomorrow’s agenda: straightening out the mess with Bell and my phone services, cancelling office insurance, two medium-sized network jobs in Oakville, a steering committee meeting with a non-profit/charity organization I do some work for, and a photo shoot with the Scrambled Leggs. I hope I still have some creativity left after all of this seriously business-y stuff.