Sunday, June 7, 2020

Taxes are done and on the knitting front...

Our French tax declaration is due on June 11. It's all done on line, with most of the lines, for most people pre-filled. All you have to do is check they are correct and modify if they are not. We have non-pension, non-salary income that we have to enter manually. The instructions are pretty clear and almost everything get automatically updated in the main form. Except, not everything. And that's where I had a problem, which I think I managed to correct. There's a zone at the end of the procedure to write a note and or questions, so I wanted to detail what I did, what information I couldn't get on to the form, and the fact that I am an Americans and the treaty allows.....
The directions on the text zone specify that one should not copy/paste. You have to type out everything and I had a lot to type. It wouldn't accept it. The message said no special characters and no tabs, so I got rid of the tabs and the € sign and typed in EUR. No go. I took out the =, the ( and ), and even the -. Still no go. I kept making the whole thing less and less legible in French. Still no go.
In the end I deleted my text and wrote that I was sending an email with the details. Even that got rejected until I switched all accented letters for unaccented ones and removed the apostrophe in "J'ai".
I can't imagine how the French administration created a site that refuses to accept standard French punctuation.
At the end of procedure, once the declaration is submitted, there's a prompt to do a survey and make a remark. I did. Then, I sent the email with all the details I couldn't put into the online form. But it's done.
And my US tax declaration went off last month. I have to have all the French info, which is sent to us or put on line in May, in order to prepare the US taxes.
Taxes are done!
I have made my first yoke sweater on the knitting machine. Usually a yoke is made on circular needles in one piece. On a knitting machine, it's in two pieces. Fortunately, the pattern I was using (by Irene Woods, in the Facebook group Machine Knitting Round Yokes) is calculated so that the seam joins are not noticeable. 
I used left over self-striping sock yarn for the fair-isle pattern, making sure that I started each piece at the same point of the pattern repeat. I really like the effect. 
I love this blue merino yarn from Yeoman's. It's for next winter for S. I hope it's not too big, then. I'm sure it's too big now. It'll look great with his eyes!
In May, I made a sweater for C, 15. (There are too many names in the family that begin with C and Ch!) It's a lovely cotton/acrylic blend in a nice shade of green. It did require hand manipulation on the front and sleeves for the lace and lines of purl stitches. I sent it off to her along with all the things we had in stock to take to the UK on our cancelled March trip.
The work on the bathroom is almost finished -- yes it has taken 3 weeks, so far! There's still some finishing touches -- like sealing the bathtub, hooking up the sink and sealing. And the toilet we ordered is now delayed until mid-August!
France started de-confinement on May 11. The second phase started on June 2. We are no longer restricted to a 100 km radius from home. Restaurants in the green zones (everything except the Paris area for mainland France) could reopen and so on. Restaurants in Paris could serve outside. There are strict distance rules, but whereas some countries recommend being 2 meters (6 ft) apart, in France, it's 1 meter. I've had my hair cut and I've been to some delayed medical appointments in the neighborhood. Other than that, though, I still haven't gone out much. Tomorrow, though, I have an appointment in Paris. Of course, I'll be masked up. In the neighborhood, though, there's no point in putting on a mask until I get to the boulevard. People are just not out.
I would have gone to Paris, yesterday, for the sit-in that was planned near/in front of the US embassy, but the organizers did not get the permit. I imagine there are plenty of reasons for that, but the one mentioned in the news report I read, was that outdoor crowds of more than 5000 were currently not allowed because of Covid-19. I'm pretty sure that the location was also a factor. I don't know if it went ahead, anyway. There was an unauthorized demonstration earlier in the week about a French case of police brutality and racism. It's not an exclusively American problem. I am wary of unauthorized manifs (demonstrations) because there's more risk of them being infiltrated by troublemakers. Look what happened to the Gilets Jaune demonstrations last year.
We've gone ahead and made our reservation for the hotel in Najac for mid-July with the grandchildren.