Mark Carroll's Journal

My job continues to keep me busy. It does feel more under control these days than it did for my first couple of months. I am still on the first project, which I picked up partway, it is now much more nearer the finish line. Today we have a round of testing. At least I get to write plenty of Rust and will probably get to try out Yew soon. Slowly, I am learning more about cryptocurrency, a curious world indeed.

My previous employer's liquidation is about done, it's clear there will be nothing left for all that they owe me. Thinking back on my brief unemployment, I noticed the contrast that, while Jobseeker's Allowance here pays up to £84.80 per week, back in Massachusetts (where I was last made redundant, again I was among the last employees before my employer's bankruptcy) I could have claimed up to $1,033 per week while finding new work. Each may be claimed for around six months. Many of the ways in which the US (or parts thereof) is nicer than the UK, I'd not have guessed without having lived there.

My taxes are becoming simpler again, last year was wholly in the UK. However, the IRS are holding my refund pending identity verification, which depends on a letter arriving, and for some reason IRS letters can take a long time to arrive here. There isn't much to be done. For dealing with e-filing, it is annoying that Mint Mobile have changed their international billing so that, rather than slowly using my pay-as-you-go international roaming balance, now one may buy only short-lived international passes. In short, to receive an SMS to confirm my US telephone number for doing my taxes online, I found myself paying $10 (for a day's various usage I don't need). Icing on the cake was that I found this out only by engaging Mint's customer support about why I was no longer receiving messages.

To my surprise, Historic Environment Scotland also annoyed me. In renewing our membership, the Gift Aid declaration expects me to promise to tell them if my tax status changes. (Gift Aid is a UK thing: instead of a donor to charity deducting it from their taxes, the charity claims the tax back after the donor declares that they paid from taxed income.) I reached out to them about this, pointing out that I wasn't signing up to an automatic subscription, they could offer language for one-off donations, and their covering letter could have pointed out this open-ended promise instead of burying it at the end of the small print. Despite some back and forth, they failed to acknowledge that they even had the option of not requiring the promise, or that their letter's phrasing left anything wanting.

Our dog L. continues to occupy time too. He's large for a Shih Tzu, now weighing 20lb at only eight months old. He's a good little guy but does need played with and taken out and suchlike so that is some of what I do these days. My own weight remains far higher than when I lived in Tennessee, I used to weigh under ten stone and am now around fourteen. That still very much needs addressing. I have been thinking back to how I used to eat.

A further thing keeping me busy has been that we are looking to move, just locally. Our flat is located well for the city centre but we can't bring our dog L. into many of the places there. Near our flat, there isn't a park. The nearest patches of grass turn swampy after rain and the pavements are full of litter for L. to try to eat. So, we did a lot of decluttering, moving much into a rented container. Then, plenty of DIY, especially filling and painting. We've listed the flat for sale and had some viewings but no movement yet. Quite a few other flats in the neighbourhood have come onto the market, which may not be helping. We hope to move a little south, into a more residential neighborhood, nearer a park and our youngest's school.

I am not managing to read others' journals anywhere near as completely as I once did. Perhaps if I post rather more briefly, I will get around to posting at all. It's been very many weeks. I will try to mention the occasional random things, even if the picture of things as a whole is left even more incomplete than before.