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Ah, that sinking feeling that I have too much left to do and not enough time left to do it in. I'm probably the only person who gets that feeling. I'd hate to think that it's common or ordinary, and not just special to me. It's mitigated somewhat by the fact that I'm usually wrong. Usually there is enough time, if I use it properly. (There's the rub.)
This was the day I'd planned to clean up the house and get it ready for the auditor tomorrow morning. He's due at the crack of dawn (by which I mean 9 am), so I obviously won't have any prep time in the morning. I'll be lucky to be out of the shower and halfway kempt by the time he knocks on the door. If he expects me to be fully kempt, he's rolling down the wrong driveway.
But at least the house should be a little tidier than I usually keep it. At the very, very least, I have to clear off a workspace for him on the dining table, where things tend to gather in piles and then just get spread into a soupy sea of files and folders and loose papers and enough paper clips to stretch to San Francisco and back. Maybe even Daly City.
But all the cleaning I planned to do got put aside when that sinking feeling told me that I'd forgotten to convert my payroll program to the new tax tables. And today being payroll day, I had no choice but to spend my morning and half the afternoon getting ready to write paychecks, and the rest of the afternoon actually writing them.
It turns out, by the way, that I took a pay cut on January 1, even though state withholding taxes went down slightly. That was more than offset by the increase in the state disability insurance rate, which rose by more than 30%. Why didn't I hear about this? I'd blame the governor, but I keep forgetting who that is. In California, it's usually a bad actor, and we have too many of those to pin it down from one week to the next.
Anyway, I'm taking home less out of my check than I did last year (or last week, for that matter). If I made a lot more money, or if I were married and had six or seven kids, I'd be taking home more than last year, because the tax cut is heavily weighted in favor of people in those categories. (However, it probably wouldn't be enough to feed those six or seven kids, so I doubt I'll be making any drastic lifestyle changes right away.)
Needless to say (or did I already say it anyway?) all this left little time for cleaning, so I did the usual. I scooped up all the debris off the table and stuck it in a box. I'll pull it all out again after the auditor leaves. I wiped all the built-up crud and used staples off the table and whisked the feather duster over the cobwebs that were at eye-level. I hope he's not tall enough to see the tops of the bookcases.
For some reason I also cleaned the bathroom. In fact, that's where I started, even though I don't expect him to go in there. No auditor has ever asked to use my bathroom, although the copier repair guy did once. I have to say, it needed cleaning, even if nobody goes in there but me. | 
