Import, Export II

It's been a busy few months, what with the tax year ending and have to sort out the rebate we'll be getting this year from the IRS. Thanks to the financial wizardry of my accountant this is the third year we'll have received money back from the government instead of having to pay any to them, but I know it can't last forever. I've got my contingency plans in place, and although my accountant thinks he's going to drop me in it and skip the country to South America, I know better than him. But it's business, and that's all part of the fun.

We had a bit of scare earlier in the week though when a clockwork penguin waddled into the loading yard and stood there, rocking from one webbed foot to the other, buzzing and clicking to itself. I immediately suspected that one of the zoos we'd been shipping 'giraffes' to had sent me a warning message so I sent a kamikaze nun out to check it over for bombs. Neither of them exploded, and a routine EMP failed to disable it (although due to an accident of positioning we did fry all the electronics in a nearby tax office; I sent them a commiseratory bunch of dead daffodils). I have the penguin securely locked in a bomb-proof safe for the moment while I try to figure out what its purpose is.

My secretary is looking no better than last time I wrote, though I have now found out what the issue is -- she's been diagnosed with cancer of jaw. As I've said before, I can't afford to lose her really, so I've made provisions to assist her treatment, but so far it's not looking great. I did manage to catch her in the EMP when we checked the penguin out, but that doesn't seem to have helped.

Business is looking up though: we're processing low-level nuclear waste into luminous paint for childrens' toys and shipping the end product out to China, complete with the faulty Geiger counters that I picked up for a song at a recent 'auction.' Since we're getting paid for everything but the Geiger counters, we're turning a healthy profit there. We're using the same facility to irradiate food intended for nursing homes as well, which is even more profitable now we've worked out that we can cut the slaughter houses out of the loop by using sufficient irradiation! This has co-incidentally caused a drop in our line of boil-in-the-colostomy-bag pre-digested foods, but that's a job for sales and marketing now.

Things are looking up!