28 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 1-21-16”

  1. Good morning ! I went to bed early last night because I had a migraine–so I’ve been up since 4:30…
    Just got off the phone with my sister in Kenya. We enjoyed an unusually long call… I miss her.

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  3. Good hours, day and night, to all!

    Today begins the marathon to April 15th. I am whooped already! Gotta try to help Art pace himself more than he ever has.

    It’s enough to encourage me to vote for the one who says, “You will be doing your income taxes by postcard!”

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  4. Ah, taxes. I am back to filing the long form and the schedule C. The joys of 1099 employment. I will need to figure out all the deductions again. Oh Joy, Oh Rapture. I don’t think we will ever go to a simplified tax. Too many jobs would be lost. I am sure Janice knows this, but the rest of us might not. The IRS revamps its computer system every year and for the first 10 days nothing gets done. I know this because I wrote an offer for someone who filed their taxes late and we need a 4506T from the IRS as the last stipulation on the mortgage. We were supposed to close the first week of January. Now we are hoping for next week.
    I also have to get a new driver’s license at some point today. Mine expired on January 6th. I was gone for a week, Monday was a holiday, and I forgot on Tuesday and looked like death warmed over yesterday. Yes. Today is the day I will do something with myself appearance wise and drag myself to the courthouse.

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  5. Good Morning…Annie Oakley!!
    I was awake at 2….Paul went to work at 4….I fell back to sleep around 6…woke again at 7….another long day! Winter seems to bring on weird sleep patterns in our household…but I am so blessed to be awake to see some amazing Colorado sunrises…it certainly was a beauty to behold this morning!

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  6. I’ve been to the gym and back but left early. This detox is killing me! I’m walking with my prayer partner in an hour, but she’ll go slow around the lake if I ask!

    Here’s an article about my nephew’s fiancee who works for homeland security: http://peoplewithcooljobs.com/2016/01/20/claire-woolf-digital-director-at-u-s-house-committee-on-homeland-security/

    Claire is lovely. We probably don’t deserve her in our family . . . 🙂

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  7. Harris Teeter is a humongous local grocery chain in this area.
    I went to Harris teeter to pick up a few things.
    It’s amazing how helpful people are when they see a man in a grocery store who obviously is out of his element.
    OTOH. Maybe everybody gets that treatment. They were helpful.
    but I never did figure out how to get a cup of coffee.

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  8. I gladly fork over $180 every year to have my taxes done by my former (childhood era) neighbor. With my math skills and low patience levels, I’d never file taxes on my own. 😉 I promised myself I’d get to it earlier this year, we were told yesterday that our W2’s were in the mail. I just have to wait for a couple more things and I’ll be good to go.

    No shower for me today, the calking in the tub/shower is still drying.

    Trying to do a story today on a 47-year-old homeless guy who built his personal encampment in a tree! A homeless treehouse. They are getting creative.

    Annms, we’re enjoying our amazingly low gas prices but I guess this is kind of bad news for you guys? I seem to remember your income is tied to oil.

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  9. I always know it’s tax season when I see the people dressed up in Lady Liberty costumes with signs on the street corners.

    The year they slashed our pay, I remember seriously wondering how much I could get for doing that on weekends … Hmmm. Plus it would be exercise, right?

    On the newspaper front, we’re actually now bidding to buy another newspaper which seems crazy to us — but it does explain why we’ve been literally at a dead standstill for so long, hiring no one to fill a growing number of job openings. I think we have fewer people in our newsroom now than at the little Culver City community weekly I started at so many years ago.

    We’re bankrupt, the paper we’re trying to buy is bankrupt. We’d combine our bankruptcies, I suppose. Double the misery? The news business as a whole is just one big mess.

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  10. It’s Brave New World out there. My driver’s license does not have the detailed background check on it–that would have been a different line—that will eventually be what allows me into Federal buildings or onto flights, although I can fly with a passport. The woman also had to take my photo about 4 times before the facial recognition software would accept the photo because last time I smiled bigger than I did the first few times AND she had to zoom in on my face.

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  13. Up here, one is not supposed to smile for one’s ID photos – “a neutral expression” is how the instructions phrase it. Nobody likes their ID photos.

    My tax forms are pretty easy – no income to tax 🙂 My parents find it worth their while to get an tax filing company to do their forms, but for those with less complicated incomes (pensions are very complicated) there are computer programs. The programs do all the calculations for you and prompt you to do other forms depending on the lines which you enter amounts on. I’ve always found them very easy and straightforward.

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  16. Sorry, Kim, I know this isn’t the answer you wanted, but it sounds like just one more person wanting to be offended by something to me. Mind you, I *don’t* mean that about the racism of families removing their children from daycare, but that wasn’t the thrust of her article. Her point was that she is “offended” by stereotypes and I would suggest she just get over it.

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  17. What I identified with is people hearing my accent and deducting IQ points. They think they are being clever and funny when they ask if we wear shoes down here. In 1984 I was asked if we had indoor plumbing yet. In 1994-1996 time period I was asked if we wore shoes. I have been accused as being a racist simply because I am from the South and it is inherit in me–“bless my heart I can’t see it”. Even on our old blog I was told by Victoria that because I was from the South I couldn’t understand how the African American had suffered. SHE KNEW because she had studied it. Never mind that I have lived my life in the South and had a degree in history with a specialization from 1870 to Present.
    Telling someone that they are inferior because of the region where they were born and grew up is a stereotype and it does cause feelings of inferiority. I remember watching One Day at a Time as a child and the girl who was giving Barbara trouble was from Maw-BEEL Alllah Bammah. I thought, I don’t sound like that, What happened is that you will very seldom hear my voice in a recording because when I hear my voice I cringe. All the movies and TV shows I saw and what I experienced living in Maryland for college made fun of the way I sound.

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  18. And this is what we get for TV shows about our area where there are no doctors and the New Yorker has to come down here and offer her services. Never mind that the former Surgeon General was a (black) woman from Mobile, AL and when I wrote to the network that produced this show, I sent them a list of over 1,000 doctors specializing in everything from cancer to cardiac care and that we have close to 10 hospitals within 40 miles of me.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart_of_Dixie

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  20. Praises for the drought being over. The produce in market was finally back to normal, which means that their gardens are doing well. Got a large broccoli and some nice, large carrots, things that you could not find there in the last few months.

    Of course, now we are getting daily rain, hard rain. The roads can be quite muddy. So spoiled to have a car.

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  22. We get our share of stereotyping (think Fargo). I suspect every area and cultural group does. Speaking out about it helps us THINK about what we are doing to each other.

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  24. I have had had Youtube playing in the background while I got some work done. I “discovered” a song by The Coasters that I hadn’t heard before. It is along the lines of I Walk the Line.

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  25. Kim- As you know, i grew up in Arizona. When my older brother was a senior in high school, he treated himself to a trip to New York to visit a cousin. He went to school with her one day and her social studies teacher told the students they had a treat in that someone from out West was visiting. They asked him questions about Arizona and showed their ignorance based on what they saw on TV. This was the early 70s, and about all you saw on TV about the Southwest was the old westerns. So naturally their questions were things like “What kind of horse do you have?” or “Do you have to fight Indians?” They were surprised we drove cars and din’t have to fight Indians. In fact, some of them were shocked we had Indians in our school!

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