Busy as a bee

Today was a busy day. I'm all out of steam. Luckily, it's almost weekend.

We went grocery shopping early today because then the shop's are not so crowded. We always try to buy for a whole week. It's a lot of carrying, takes certainly some planning from Virpi, but it is definitely worth it if we only need to go there only once a week. On arrival I checked the post but didn't find anything from the tax office (Finanzamt). I need to get a tax number urgently.

Our counselor arrived to explain accounting basics and some other office stuff to Virpi so I suddenly noticed that I wasn't needed. I decided to use the time for good and went out on business. I headed to the tax office with the intention of getting the tax number in person. I knew that the office closes at noon (and it was almost 2pm) but I tried my luck. I didn't get quite far enough before I was stopped by a stern gentleman who explained that nobody there would be able to help me. That I would have to come back tomorrow morning. He gave me a secret envelope addressed to "Für ihre Unternehmensgründung" ("For your company founding").

I continued to the business where I want my training material printed and laminated. I gave them my pdf-files (five of them) and naturally forgot the memory stick. Well, I'll just have to remember to get it back. Otherwise Mistick will be lost. There were some problems with the printing and the size of the cards and the fact that they have color all the way around. And I had to agree to cut the laminated cards to shape myself. Cutting a thousand cards will be a lot of work, but it needs to get done. I'm guessing next Thursday will be a day on the cutting edge of technology...

Next, I went to the Gravis Store that sells Mac software. I wanted to get an accounting software and I had seen advertisements for MacKonto X. The clerk in the store didn't know anything about accounting software and admitted it right off the bat. I asked for a certain interface good accounting software has and we went on the internet to search for it. Googling a bit brought up a forum where the people were deprecating MacKonto X and recommending Monkey Bilanz Kasse, which is a freeware application. So I didn't buy anything from the store. Instead I returned home and downloaded the freeware tool for Virpi.

The rest of the evening was used learning to use Pages (the text processing for Mac in the iWork package) and writing offer templates in Finnish, English and German.

Tomorrow, I need to get my tax number, get some cash for the printer, change my PIN code on my new bank card, close a couple of insurances and maybe have a beer at Mandra. Stefan, are you coming?