The desk you see above is what a desk that belongs to someone in the final stages of a long quest looks like.

On April 9, 2015, I purchased accounting software for the first time. Up until that point in my business career, I had always used a spreadsheet in Excel. However, my increasingly-complex bookkeeping needs were making that no longer viable. (Really, I should have invested in Quickbooks years ago.)

After playing with it for a bit and quickly realizing that my normal strategy for becoming acquainted with new software was not going to cut it this time, I ordered a book about it from Amazon and waited.

The book came in early May, and I began the herculean task of learning how to do double-entry accounting and entering all my book keeping data from the beginning of 2014. I knew that I would be late with my taxes again. I just hoped that finally, finally, it would be for the last time.

Oh, I've been caught up on my books before. Once. At the end of... 2011, I think. For about 3 days. :-)

Well, In June, our lives were turned upside down. While I did sometimes make progress on the backlog of data entry last summer, I considered it a victory that I actually began entering current data for the first. time. ever.

And now? I only have one month to go, and it'll all be in there. April 2015. That's the pile in front of my monitor. I'm so close, I can feel it. Then, there will be some other bookkeeping chores to finish (which seem minor by comparison to entering 2 1/3 years of data in only one super-horrible year) and I will, for the first time in history, be all caught up!

I'm so excited about that, I'm barely breathing.

Last year, I was either given some yellow pansies as a bereavement gift, or maybe I purchased them just before Levi died. I don't remember which, as one of my last trips with him was to the greenhouse, and I know I bought stuff, but I don't remember what I bought. After they got nearly scorched in their pots on my deck, I quickly threw them into a hole in my front garden, tossed some water on them and said, "Good luck."

They proceeded to get laid on by the dog, dug up by the cats, and sunshine-starved by the rhubarb. (I never thought it would get so big.)

One of the two groups of pansies didn't make it. But yesterday, when I went outside, there were three little yellow flowers peeking up at me from a horribly-bedraggled patch of greens being swallowed by encroaching grass. These little guys? They're fighters.

I stopped a moment to be thankful for this small sign that out of the chaos of 2015, something good survived. Other than some quack-grass and my rhubarb (which I think has some kind of super-florian genomes, it's doing so well), they are almost the only green in that garden.

Between my books and these pansies, I can't help but have a little hope that good things are coming.