Tag: Carol

Crummy, we feel

This may shock you, but people related to me have actually suggested that I might be just a touch cranky when I’m sick.

sickIt started with the Daughter a week before Halloween, sluggish going to school, going to her team’s soccer match that Saturday but too weak to play, tired on Sunday, then home sick from school on Monday. She went to school late on Tuesday, but too fatigued for gym.

The Wife, who is never sick – just ask her – was feeling off on Wednesday, stayed home from work on Thursday, and still recovering on Friday.

There’s something unfortunate about being ill on Halloween. The night before, I slept extremely poorly. The Wife, when she’s ill, wheezes audibly so that I can’t sleep. I went down to the sofa, but the cats running around made that not a viable option. Finally, at about 3:20 a.m., I went to live down on the floor in the Daughter’s room. I literally crawled back to bed one minute before the alarm went off at 6 a.m. I thought when I went to work that I was just tired, but realized by midday that I too was becoming ill.

This may shock you, but people related to me have actually suggested that I might be just a touch cranky when I’m sick. When I got home, I schlepped furniture from the front porch to the shed, because The Wife had asked me days earlier to move them, lest the trick-or-treaters use them in their pranks. I was spent after that and could put on a happy face briefly as I handed out the candy before the others took over the task. Home all weekend with various ailments: sore throat, headache, congestion, body aches, and vivid dreams.

The result of which is that I can’t write a cleverly coherent post here, though I wrote TWO posts for my usually neglected TU blog, one on the NYS ballot proposals and Albany School Board election, and one on the governor’s race, which was time-sensitive.

I did watch about a half of (US) football on Sunday, Cardinals over Cowboys – YES! I also saw this unfortunate gaffe on NBC News Saturday night in real time.

Back to work today, but just muddling through…

This shall pass. I hope so.
**
My friend Dan’s story on how fear, nastiness and dirty tricks sideline public discussion of the Albany City budget.

The yard sale

Another thing I hate about yard sales: dealers, who come an hour before the stated time, then harrumph when the stuff you have doesn’t meet their needs.

yardsaleLet me state that I generally hate yard sales, garage sales, and the like. Specifically:
*I don’t like going to other people’s sales, especially when they put out things that are, to quote Oscar the Grouch, everything “ragged and rotten and rusty.”
*I don’t like having our own sale, because it involved going through lots of our own stuff. It’s time-consuming and enervating.
And most of all:
*I HATE bringing back into the house the stuff we decided to sell, but it didn’t.

Yet we (OK, the Wife and the Daughter) agreed (and I accepted the decision) to have a yard sale on September 6. The logic of that date was that it would be after school began, but before the fall got going in earnest. Soccer began the following week, as were her tryout for the Nutcracker and rehearsal for the church play about the Beatles.

To make it better, we thought we’d get our neighbors to do the same, and two of them agreed. But we didn’t do much advertising, since we were busy with prep. In fact no ads or posters, until three days before the sale, when I placed a free ad on timesunion.com.

The Daughter was particularly motivated. Her room was not as tidy as it could be, because she had so much stuff she had never gotten rid of. Tantalized by making money, she suddenly found books and stuffed animals she no longer wanted; indeed, a few of the books I kept myself. She also sorted out clothes that no longer fit her.

That Saturday morning, one of the neighbors pulled out. They looked at the forecast, which suggested that it would rain in the middle of our 9-3 sale, and that wasn’t going to be viable. Sigh.

Another thing I hate about yard sales: dealers, who come an hour before the stated time, then harrumph when the stuff you have doesn’t meet their needs; we had three of them, one especially rude.

In the first half-hour, we had no one. In the first hour, we made about $1.50. But as the day went on, we did better. This was improved by the addition of my brother-in-law’s family driving nearly an hour to add their stuff to ours. Separate accounting, but still: more stuff makes it better.

I got rid of both of my old CD holders, which I never liked; they opened like accordions and took up too much floor space.

At the end of it all, we made close to $100. More importantly, we got rid of stuff, and the Daughter’s room is far cleaner. And while the Daughter was disappointed that almost none of her clothes sold, we’ll be giving them to someone who can use them, so it’s all good.

Still, it will be a LONG time before we have another one unless I can hire Eddie Mitchell to run it.

The 9/11 Memorial

The waterfalls, the memorial pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, are quite beautiful, especially at night

Memorial-PoolAfter 9/11/2001, I had only been in Manhattan once that wasn’t in passing (train station to Charlotte, e.g.) and that was seeing a musical in 2003. I had never been particularly close geographically to Ground Zero, despite living less than 160 miles away.

When Rebecca (niece #1), her husband Rico, and a couple of their friends came out from California to NYC around Thanksgiving 2013, one of them items on the Californians’ agenda was to see the 9/11 memorial.

The museum exterior was at the site, but not yet open. There was no charge to get to the plaza at the time, but one had to order tickets ahead of time. We were booked for 4:30 p.m., the last grouping, and we had to pick up tickets beforehand.

At least at that point, the key to the enterprise was patience, for we spent over a half-hour waiting in line on an unseasonably cold November afternoon-to-evening. Then we had to go through screening, not unlike what happens when one goes to the airport.

I will say that the waterfalls, the memorial pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, are quite beautiful, especially at night; wish I could find the pictures I took.

At the end, you end up, as all good museums do, in the gift shop. There was a constant barrage of videos about what happened “that day” and in the weeks thereafter. It was a bit numbing, actually, but not especially moving, oddly.

Only one of these pieces got me emotionally involved, and it was a cartoon – this cartoon from StoryCorps – that actually made me cry.

Now that the 9/11 Tribute Center is complete, I can’t imagine wanting to go back and relive the experience. The State Museum in Albany has some artifacts that I’ve seen, fairly often, and that’s enough for me, for now.

The techno learning curve

The Wife DID come up with the solution for fixing our printer that said it was jammed.

100_0210I know I go kicking and screaming over learning new technologies. But, sometimes, my (somewhat younger) wife is as old-fashioned as I am. Possibly more so.

I am on Twitter and Facebook, albeit grudgingly; she is not, though she plans to start with the latter. She is one of the few people I know who still has an AOL account; actually, I do too, but I seldom use it.

She’s still using her bank register to check for charitable contributions at the end of the year. I just go to the bank online. I’m not even sure she uses her ATM card.

However, she DID come up with the solution for fixing our printer that said it was jammed; rebooting actually did the trick. She’s clearly more mechanically inclined than I, since, if there are four possible ways of doing something, I will have tried the other three first, while she intuits that stuff a WHOLE lot better.

Since she’s a teacher, she has the summer off. (“Off” being a relative term, since she’s got to get the contractor to finish the bathroom, and to watch The Daughter on the weeks she’s not at summer camp, and do SOMETHING with that former pool area in the back yard…) Plus she has to sort through all the stuff in the home office to decide what would make good lesson plans for the fall, and what has become outdated.

But she’s also pegged this summer as a time for discovery. Perhaps by the end of the summer, she’ll be reading on that Kindle she got a while back.

Happy birthday, sweetheart.

The Wife and the tax compromise

I wasn’t giving to charity because it was deductible, I was giving because I was called to do so.

1040sc_Page_1I’m playing cards (hearts) the day after my birthday, and someone mentioned preparing taxes. I noted that the Wife and I get someone else to do it for us. My friend did not understand. “It’s EASY with TurboTax” or some other software. I repeated that we outsource our tax prep because it was best for us to do so. My reaction was perceived as passionate, maybe even heated, although it did not feel that way to me. It was just what we do to ensure domestic tranquility.

For one thing, I don’t think doing the taxes is that simple, like this post I came across notes. By the time you’ve gathered all the papers necessary to plug into some tax software, most of the crappy work that needs to be calculated has already been done.

The first year we filed together was a nightmare for me and a real irritant for her. Here’s why: I had NEVER filled out an itemized tax form in my life. I had used Form 1040A, or, often Form 1040EZ, which is, as it suggests, easy.

The Wife, conversely, had a rental property that involved filling out a Schedule C for income gain or loss on a business.

She also calculated her charitable deductions, including the value of the non-cash donations. Not only could I not be bothered to do that in the past, but I also had a philosophical aversion to it. I wasn’t giving to charity because it was deductible, I was giving because I was called to do so. There are a couple of friends of mine who run a Catholic charity which is, pointedly, NOT a 501(c) tax-deductible charity under IRS law, and they expect people to donate based on their heart, not as a tax haven. NOW I do it because my spouse thinks it’s fiscally prudent, and despite my antipathy for doing so, we do.

Those first two years of filing taxes, which took FOREVER, we got slapped with penalties for underpaying somehow. After that, we got someone else to do the work. Actually at least one of THOSE years, we paid too little again, but we were only responsible for the amount, NOT the penalty and interest, which came out of the pockets of the accountant.

The Wife and I are celebrating 15 years of marriage today, and one of the reasons is that we found a way not to make ourselves crazy each April.

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