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Originally posted by pleasancefamily
Happiness comes in 3s to the Pleasance family! Yesterday started pretty well, my wife phoned the tax office for the umpteenth time and finally got the good news: tax refund heading our way! This is a saga that has been dragging on since 1998 - we overpaid purchase tax on a piece of land (given dud advice by our useless solicitor) and have been trying to claim it back ever since. Round here, you pay 2.5% on agricultural land and 10% on building plots - our land was zoned as 'orchard' when we got it so we should have protested the 10% tax demand when it arrived instead of following our solicitor's advice and paying it. Tax offices are the same everywhere - very bureaucratic and extremely reluctant to give back tax when you've overpaid. So my tenacious wife has had a real struggle for the past few years involving increasingly higher levels of officialdom, solicitor's letters, inspections of the land etc - and now it looks like we'll get 7.5% refunded! (I'll believe it when we see the money, but today they want my wife to go in to their office to give them her bank account details which must be a good sign.)

Then yesterday mid-morning my little bro phoned to say he's finally become a father - great news. Little girl, all's well. He was the last of the 5 Pleasance siblings to become a parent and indeed I think that his first marriage broke down largely becauase of the tensions arising from his first wife not wanting children. Nice one, bro!

But ultimately the day was spoilt because when my wife collected little Don #1 from the kindergarten, she somehow managed to lose one of his sandals. Don't ask me how she managed this - she told me he was barefoot so she threw his sandals into the back of the car - and evidently missed with one. Going a bit batty, I reckon. Anyway, by the time we realised it was missing, it was too late to go back and look because she had an appointment elsewhere. She did go back in the evening but couldn't find anything. So this morning I went myself to have a look, armed with plan of exactly where my wife had parked. Once I had packed little Don on his way, I started hunting in all the bushes and trees - round here if a kid loses a scarf or glove etc they tend to put it on a prominent branch. No joy. After about 15 minutes I went up to some old dears and in my best Central European asked them if anyone had seen a lost sandal. Result! Someone had indeed picked it up and hung it on a branch. We went over to look again, but still no sandal. The old dear gave up but this time I was the tenacious one. There is 25% of stingy Scot blood in me but it wasn't really the 20 quid those sandals cost - I will always, aways stoop to pick up even a penny if I find one because for me it's a big principle not to waste things, eg money or food. After scrabbling around for another 10 minutes and getting lots of funny looks (wierdo in the bushes!) I finally spotted a bit of sandal, it was poked right in the middle of a hedge and only just visible. Hooray! This time I'm the hero for real.

I know I'm going a bit stir crazy in this heat and waiting for the plane to NZ in September, but I hope I'm not getting things too much out of proportion to think that finding that sandal was better than the tax refund or my bro's great news. ;)

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Originally posted by pleasancefamily
Happiness comes in 3s to the Pleasance family! Yesterday started pretty well, my wife phoned the tax office for the umpteenth time and finally got the good news: tax refund heading our way! This is a saga that has been dragging on since 1998 - we overpaid purchase tax on a piece of land (given dud advice by our useless solicitor) and have been trying to claim it back ever since. Round here, you pay 2.5% on agricultural land and 10% on building plots - our land was zoned as 'orchard' when we got it so we should have protested the 10% tax demand when it arrived instead of following our solicitor's advice and paying it. Tax offices are the same everywhere - very bureaucratic and extremely reluctant to give back tax when you've overpaid. So my tenacious wife has had a real struggle for the past few years involving increasingly higher levels of officialdom, solicitor's letters, inspections of the land etc - and now it looks like we'll get 7.5% refunded! (I'll believe it when we see the money, but today they want my wife to go in to their office to give them her bank account details which must be a good sign.)

Then yesterday mid-morning my little bro phoned to say he's finally become a father - great news. Little girl, all's well. He was the last of the 5 Pleasance siblings to become a parent and indeed I think that his first marriage broke down largely becauase of the tensions arising from his first wife not wanting children. Nice one, bro!

But ultimately the day was spoilt because when my wife collected little Don #1 from the kindergarten, she somehow managed to lose one of his sandals. Don't ask me how she managed this - she told me he was barefoot so she threw his sandals into the back of the car - and evidently missed with one. Going a bit batty, I reckon. Anyway, by the time we realised it was missing, it was too late to go back and look because she had an appointment elsewhere. She did go back in the evening but couldn't find anything. So this morning I went myself to have a look, armed with plan of exactly where my wife had parked. Once I had packed little Don on his way, I started hunting in all the bushes and trees - round here if a kid loses a scarf or glove etc they tend to put it on a prominent branch. No joy. After about 15 minutes I went up to some old dears and in my best Central European asked them if anyone had seen a lost sandal. Result! Someone had indeed picked it up and hung it on a branch. We went over to look again, but still no sandal. The old dear gave up but this time I was the tenacious one. There is 25% of stingy Scot blood in me but it wasn't really the 20 quid those sandals cost - I will always, aways stoop to pick up even a penny if I find one because for me it's a big principle not to waste things, eg money or food. After scrabbling around for another 10 minutes and getting lots of funny looks (wierdo in the bushes!) I finally spotted a bit of sandal, it was poked right in the middle of a hedge and only just visible. Hooray! This time I'm the hero for real.

I know I'm going a bit stir crazy in this heat and waiting for the plane to NZ in September, but I hope I'm not getting things too much out of proportion to think that finding that sandal was better than the tax refund or my bro's great news. ;)

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Originally posted by pleasancefamily
Happiness comes in 3s to the Pleasance family! Yesterday started pretty well, my wife phoned the tax office for the umpteenth time and finally got the good news: tax refund heading our way! This is a saga that has been dragging on since 1998 - we overpaid purchase tax on a piece of land (given dud advice by our useless solicitor) and have been trying to claim it back ever since. Round here, you pay 2.5% on agricultural land and 10% on building plots - our land was zoned as 'orchard' when we got it so we should have protested the 10% tax demand when it arrived instead of following our solicitor's advice and paying it. Tax offices are the same everywhere - very bureaucratic and extremely reluctant to give back tax when you've overpaid. So my tenacious wife has had a real struggle for the past few years involving increasingly higher levels of officialdom, solicitor's letters, inspections of the land etc - and now it looks like we'll get 7.5% refunded! (I'll believe it when we see the money, but today they want my wife to go in to their office to give them her bank account details which must be a good sign.)

Then yesterday mid-morning my little bro phoned to say he's finally become a father - great news. Little girl, all's well. He was the last of the 5 Pleasance siblings to become a parent and indeed I think that his first marriage broke down largely becauase of the tensions arising from his first wife not wanting children. Nice one, bro!

But ultimately the day was spoilt because when my wife collected little Don #1 from the kindergarten, she somehow managed to lose one of his sandals. Don't ask me how she managed this - she told me he was barefoot so she threw his sandals into the back of the car - and evidently missed with one. Going a bit batty, I reckon. Anyway, by the time we realised it was missing, it was too late to go back and look because she had an appointment elsewhere. She did go back in the evening but couldn't find anything. So this morning I went myself to have a look, armed with plan of exactly where my wife had parked. Once I had packed little Don on his way, I started hunting in all the bushes and trees - round here if a kid loses a scarf or glove etc they tend to put it on a prominent branch. No joy. After about 15 minutes I went up to some old dears and in my best Central European asked them if anyone had seen a lost sandal. Result! Someone had indeed picked it up and hung it on a branch. We went over to look again, but still no sandal. The old dear gave up but this time I was the tenacious one. There is 25% of stingy Scot blood in me but it wasn't really the 20 quid those sandals cost - I will always, aways stoop to pick up even a penny if I find one because for me it's a big principle not to waste things, eg money or food. After scrabbling around for another 10 minutes and getting lots of funny looks (wierdo in the bushes!) I finally spotted a bit of sandal, it was poked right in the middle of a hedge and only just visible. Hooray! This time I'm the hero for real.

I know I'm going a bit stir crazy in this heat and waiting for the plane to NZ in September, but I hope I'm not getting things too much out of proportion to think that finding that sandal was better than the tax refund or my bro's great news. ;)

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Originally posted by whisky
ooooohhhhh, glad you didn't mean it when you said that you were going.

Whisky

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