Stuff, Thoughts, Cleaning - Maybe Cleaning the World Again?

Looking at my computer desk, I think Wednesday will require a serious clean-off of the top of the desk. When my stacks of papers and projects and "stuff" gets higher than three inches, it's time for a serious clean. However ... Wednesday night is also our night for personal income taxes with our accountant, and I will be making sure our bills, etc are in order and ready for whatever he asks when I get to the shop today. That's another hour or two, but at least at the shop I have counter tops - lots of counter tops upon which to spread and stack invoices, grouped by kind. 

Our personal income taxes are far more complicated 
than our corporate taxes. DH actually keeps the corporate 
stuff under control, but personal stuff is a hodge podge of 
my charity gifts and donations, various other stuff, and 
investment statements. I'm not sure I have the year-end 
statements from my two brokers, so I'll have to double-check 
that today. 

It must have been easier in past times when all you had was word-of-mouth. Of course, given the "flexibility" of memory, inaccuracies were built in to that system. But, the "taxes" were demanded by the property owner, the town Mayor, the provincial Governor and the King. If you were at the bottom of the stack, you just did what you were told to do - easy, peasy, and lots of room for complaint - silent complaint, since you didn't want to be whipped, imprisoned, or conscripted into the armed forces for whatever war was then current. 

Medieval peasants had it quite a bit easier in many respects, 
than we have today. We have the conveniences, and central 
heating and high levels of cleanliness are wonderful things, 
but they didn't have the world-wide issues that we're facing 
now. They might have had megalomaniacs, but they didn't 
have nuclear armament to back those idiots up. They could 
destroy a small part of the world, but not the world as a whole. 

Isn't that the way of humanity? Times of peace followed by oppression and times of war? We're on a precipice in the USA now - so many, many things can go wrong and plunge us into the darkness that is spreading across the world right now. All I can do is think about the dinosaurs - the most successful species Mother Nature has ever come up with. Dinosaurs managed to make it a LONG time. If you include birds, they ruled the earth for 233.3 MILLION years, knock the birds out, and it's only 167.3 million years. Humans ... well, we're not doing as well. Even if you include the ancestors to humanity, we've only been around for 3 million years, and if you're just including Homo Sapiens, it's actually 200,000 to 300,000 years. We're babies, and we're destroying our planet so good on us? Not really. Mother Nature really needs to step in and start again. She needs another success story. Maybe the cockroaches? 

Dinosaurs were incredibly successful, appearing on 
EVERY continent and landmass throughout the world. 
We're also spreading, but we're nowhere as successful 
at living within our environments. We want to change 
everything to suit us, rather than learn to live easily within 
the land we're inhabiting. We're also extremely 
warlike and aggressive towards our own kind. That's 
not a recipe for species survival. 

So, I'm heading off to the pool. I think I need a swim to clear my head of all of this extraneous junk. After all, it's not very uplifting to realize that the new kids on the block are bringing in the heavy equipment and getting ready to raze every structure on the block to the ground. I think I need a swim after that mental image. Have an excellent Tuesday and I'll be back tomorrow. Slava Ukraini and חיים למען ישראל.