Excellent. Just got off the phone with the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore. Seems as though I was taxed at a much higher rate when I left my teaching job in June, and now that I've been in Singapore more than 183 days, will qualify for a refund. This is amazing news! Taxes here are incredibly reasonable - especially given that public transportation and the postal services are both completely reliable, and civil service workers are actually helpful and polite.

Bike no more. Took the train back to the station yesterday where I had left my bike in the morning, and it was gone. Someone cut through the lock in broad daylight in the middle of a heavy pedestrian area, and in Singapore no less. I can't remember what brand it was, so I haven't reported it to the police. It was only S$35, but it was nice to have. Someone needs a caning.

Esch. I somehow ended up sharing my politics at a staff meeting today. I think it's okay, most of the people I know are fairly like minded politically, but still, I really need to learn to censor myself during some discussions.

Tax mystery solved. I complained earlier about the Singapore tax form not having any place to fill in how much you actually owe in taxes. I called their hotline today, and found out why: you just give them the numbers, and they send a form back telling you how much you owe. Now that I think about it, it makes more sense that way.

Frustrating. Last night I spent at least an hour typing up a big long screed to post to a mailing list I'm on. When finished, I clicked "Post", and poof, it just went away. I'm usually good about backups, auto-saves, and archiving of outgoing messages so this doesn't happen. But I was typing it through a web interface this time, and now it all vanished into the mists of time.

I know I'm not the only person this has ever happened to. Why isn't there an operating-system-level feature that just records your last 10000 or so keystrokes? It could save you, regardless of your application. Something you could turn on and off, obviously, for security reasons.

My personal theory is that aliens monitor us by stealing every fiftieth email and tenth printout, which explains why some things just never make it through when you click on "send" or "print".

A little off the top, please. Inspired by the recent Foxtrot comic strips, tonight we gave ourselves virtual makeovers just for grins. It's a pretty cool program they have to do it, but a lot of hairstyle choices look unreal, and there aren't a lot of choices for dudes. Still, we may have found me a new look.

Sunday's match report from the coach. (Hey, you know I only post these things when I score! That's happening probably more than it should lately, considering I'm supposed to be playing defense. And actually, their first goal was an own goal by me that I had to redeem myself for...)

Ventz PM were caught in a mixup as our game was rained off at the last minute. We shifted fields but there was now 3 teams in 1 game! Therefore it was decided we play a half against each teams and I decided to let the other two teams play first. In the first halve/game against Poser Utd , we went down early when they broke thru to slot pass pur keeper. We took control after that and pressurised them for the equalizer. Close to the end , after much presure , Mark S cut in from the left to unleash an unstoppable shot pass the keeper.

In the 2nd half/game , over confidence and fatigue allowed our opponents to take the lead. We huffed and puffed to bring the game back and scored thru a Steven A volley from 20m at the stroke of full time!

Ah ahhhh, Mr. Heath. You'd think a one page tax form, when we have no extra income or reliefs (deductions) would be a piece of cake. But it has confounded us utterly. After big sections for listing your income and reliefs, there seems to be no place AT ALL to list how much you actually owe. The formula for computing the tax is hidden away on a separate worksheet, but what do we do with the numbers?

From what we can tell, though, we don't have a lot to complain about, amount-wise; tax rate seems VERY low here, at least comparatively.

Chicken Surprise: This afternoon I bought a whole chicken from the supermarket, thinking that I'd cut the chicken into two breasts, and save a little money as the whole chicken is $5 and two chicken breasts would be $6. So, I get the chicken home and I'm expecting it to be a little gross; I'm expecting a bag of guts as you'd find in a turkey. But instead, it's much, much grosser -- the chicken still has it's head, and yuk, yuk, yuk, it's feet! There was no bag of guts however. So, I see the head and the feet and I think "okay you're a big girl, if you eat meat you need to deal with this" and I get out my scissors and start to work. But, ew, yuk, shudder... Dinner was tasty, but would have been much better if I'd just purchased the pre-cut chicken breast.