Inject this straight into my veins!
May. 28th, 2021 01:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I fell off the face of the (online) earth for over a week for various tedious and frustrating reasons, and I think I will have to leave unresponded the comments that have accumulated here, unfortunately. So apologies if you commented on previous posts or replied to my comments: I'm just feeling really weighed down at the moment.
In better news, however, I had my first vaccine dose! It was Pfizer (the UK was mainly giving everyone AstraZeneca, but then they abruptly withdrew it from use for the under-40s about a week before it was my age group's turn to be eligible, which then slowed everything down considerably), and the whole process went extremely smoothly.
I didn't have a very severe reaction: a sore arm at the injection site, and mild cold symptoms for about a day after the vaccine was administered, and that's it. I'm really really fortunate that the UK has a) hoarded vaccine doses and b) handled the vaccine rollout really well, and I don't take that lightly. (For comparison, my mother in Australia — aged 72 — only had her first dose on Tuesday this week.)
Other than vaccines, I've spent this week dealing with a particularly complicated and infuriating bit of Australian bureaucracy (a word of advice: don't leave the country at a time when all tax returns were done on paper rather than online, allow your only bank account to close in 2014, and just assume the authorities will be able to verify you easily over the phone!). It's not a tax thing — I've not worked in Australia since 2008, and of course always paid taxes correctly before that — but it's a thing that would have caused me to lose access to the small amount of superannuation I had accumulated while I worked there. Several extremely expensive phone conversations with the bureaucrats later and I think it's sorted out, and I'm genuinely stunned at how helpful and efficient the Australian tax authorities at the call centre are! (It also helps that my paranoia in dealing with the UK immigration system has led me to save every single document ever, meaning that although I have long since forgotten the details of my Australian bank account, I have electronic payslips saved in my email inbox from 2006 which have that bank's details on them, and can easily dig them out on request...)
In any case, with all that out of the way, the weekend is looking sunny in both a literal and metaphorical sense.
In better news, however, I had my first vaccine dose! It was Pfizer (the UK was mainly giving everyone AstraZeneca, but then they abruptly withdrew it from use for the under-40s about a week before it was my age group's turn to be eligible, which then slowed everything down considerably), and the whole process went extremely smoothly.
I didn't have a very severe reaction: a sore arm at the injection site, and mild cold symptoms for about a day after the vaccine was administered, and that's it. I'm really really fortunate that the UK has a) hoarded vaccine doses and b) handled the vaccine rollout really well, and I don't take that lightly. (For comparison, my mother in Australia — aged 72 — only had her first dose on Tuesday this week.)
Other than vaccines, I've spent this week dealing with a particularly complicated and infuriating bit of Australian bureaucracy (a word of advice: don't leave the country at a time when all tax returns were done on paper rather than online, allow your only bank account to close in 2014, and just assume the authorities will be able to verify you easily over the phone!). It's not a tax thing — I've not worked in Australia since 2008, and of course always paid taxes correctly before that — but it's a thing that would have caused me to lose access to the small amount of superannuation I had accumulated while I worked there. Several extremely expensive phone conversations with the bureaucrats later and I think it's sorted out, and I'm genuinely stunned at how helpful and efficient the Australian tax authorities at the call centre are! (It also helps that my paranoia in dealing with the UK immigration system has led me to save every single document ever, meaning that although I have long since forgotten the details of my Australian bank account, I have electronic payslips saved in my email inbox from 2006 which have that bank's details on them, and can easily dig them out on request...)
In any case, with all that out of the way, the weekend is looking sunny in both a literal and metaphorical sense.