58 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 5-17-16”

  1. Morning, AJ. The threads are up early with the birds catching worms. I hear a lot of birds. Rain is off and on so they may be singing in the rain. So, how many cliches can you use in one post?

    Rain is heavy now and the singing stopped. Now I hear thunder and pounding rain.A symphony of natural sounds.

    Good evening, Jo. Wake up the rest of y’all, and smell the coffee!

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  4. Well it’s been nearly 10 months, but Cheryl is making her first appearance back at the office today. The doctor has cleared her to return for 2 non-consecutive days a week. She’ll do Mon, Wed, Fri at home, and Tues and Thurs at the office. We’ll see tonight how it went. I’ll have ice and epsom salts waiting when she gets home, just in case. 🙂

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  6. So glad that Cheryl is ready to get a bit of her life back. Another change in your home, but a slow adjustment will be good.
    What a cute chipmunk. I have had them jump in my car to steal food before.

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  8. Good Morning…thick icy fog with snow on the ground and on the pine branches….oh spring where art thou?!
    Cute chipmunk….up in the mountains they will eat right out of your hand….and they have been known to scurry up your torso and sit atop your head!!
    AJ I read your post too quickly…I thought it said you would have ice cream waiting for her…not a bad idea though….prayers for her first day back…. ❤

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  9. I almost asked on the prayer thread last night, “How are Cheryl and AJ doing?” It was late so I did not post my question, but then I got the answer just now. That is good news, especially making the slow adjustment. 😊

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  12. I had sent AJ a photo of BG’s graduation announcement/invitation to share with all of you. The photo must not have been good enough for him to post. She didn’t want to send out invitations but Nana made her last Friday. I had always intended to share one with all of you, because you have known of her and prayed for her for 10 or 12 years, so all of you have known her over half her life and have prayed us to this point.
    Graduation will be outside at the local stadium. It is where I graduated. There is a chance of rain. If it rains they will move it to First Baptist and we only 4 rain tickets. We really don’t want rain.

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  13. Kim, she (and you!) made it through! Congratulations! (And no, parenting doesn’t end with high school graduation. Four and six years past, here, and I can attest to that!)

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  14. Kim, I am so happy that she is making it through this phase in her life. On to bigger and better things.

    AJ, belated Happy Birthday. I had the computer off all weekend and did not even turn it on to check email until last night. My family tends to live long, 90s-103. I figure you are entering middle age. Wishing you many blessings in your next 50.

    My oldest daughter graduated, with honors, with her bachelor’s in social work this past weekend. It was very nice to have all the girls together for a few hours. I am very proud of her. She is a wife, mother, and works full time. She has applied for the director position at the women’s shelter where she did her internship.

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  15. So good to hear about Cheryl heading back to work.

    Yay for BG — what do the grads do for grad night there? All the high schools here spend the whole night at Disneyland. (Not even sure that’s the tradition anymore though — those were more innocent times.)

    And what an adorable chipmunk — has Janice eaten him yet?

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  18. Ah, there’s the grad announcement.

    High school graduation seemed kind of surreal to me at that time — but then going on the endless loop of rides at Disneyland all night long can do that to you. 🙂 And I went to two grad nights, one as a junior (as a date with the boy down the street and his other senior friends) and then to my own the next year.

    As I recall the first time we came home on the bus, exhausted, and went straight home & slept for several hours, then all met up again and headed out to the beach where we sat around a fire pit and roast hot dogs.

    My own grad night the next year wasn’t that much fun — my dad was pretty sick by then so there was that constant cloud and stress to deal with (along with not really having much of a clue what I’d be doing once I was out of high school & as of yet hadn’t planned to attend college — I wound up getting an office job which I hated).

    And I’d ‘been there, done that’ (all night at Disneyland), so I really just wanted it to be over with so I could go home and sleep. The news about my dad’s illness became even more dire just a month or so after that, so not a very happy time all the way around. I quit the miserable job and enrolled in community college in the fall, just to try it out, and I wound up loving it a lot more than I did high school.

    I had some genuinely fun times in high school, but those years were definitely not the “best” times of my life (as all the adults seemed to tell me it would be when it began!).

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  19. Lots of milestones shared here today. Congratulations to BG, to RKessler’s oldest daughter, and to AJ’s Cheryl on her return to her workplace today.

    QoD: What’s that question mark for under BG’s invitation? 😉

    OK, just kidding. Here’s what I was really thinking of for a QoD:

    What’s the first job you got after graduating from high school?

    I was hired as a music typographer for Hal Leonard Publishing. I typed music notes and such with a special, manual typewriter that had quarter notes, half notes, articulation markings, etc. I had to draw in by hand things like beams on eighth and sixteenth notes, crescendos and the like. I had that job my first year of college, then started giving piano lessons at a music store, at my next-door grandparents’ house next door (I never had a piano at home, growing up), and I traveled to the homes of some of my students, too.

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  22. “next-door grandparents’ house next door…”

    Hmm, as opposed to my next-door grandparents’ house who didn’t live next door…I suppose. 🙂

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  23. My office job was with a calibration lab — I had to type columns and columns of NUMBERS all day long.

    I was a really fast and good typist, but the company purposely used a buff colored paper (so that NO corrections or changes could be made, giving assurance to the customers who received the paperwork).

    How many times I’d get almost to the end when OUCH, ARGH, AAK, I’d hit the wrong number and have to start over. It all drove me batty and I left there nearly in tears every day.

    And with the added stress at home over my dad’s terminal illness (my mom was really stressed, working full time and trying to navigate very scary family issues ahead) … I was pretty much an emotional mess that summer.

    I think I lasted a month, maybe 5 or 6 weeks only, at that horrible job — then asked my parents (since I still lived at home) if I could sign up at community college and get a part-time job (which I did, at the local Sears). A co-worker kept talking about registering at the school for fall and I figured it had to be better than this horrible job … 😦

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  25. My job during and after high school was at the corner drug store…clerk, pharmacist assistant, soda jerk (yes, we had the old fashioned soda fountain, with ice cream sundaes, phosphates, and fountain sodas….how I loved that job! I then went on to Ohio Casualty Insuance to work as a keypunch operator….my kids still think I made keys 🙂

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  27. My first job was selling produce at a stand on Market Street (Now Assembly St.) in Columbia, SC. My second job was a private in the Air Force.
    That job lasted 3.5 years, and I moved up to S/Sgt. I made lots of money by my standards.

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  28. After the dentist finished with me, I went to Burger King for a sausage & egg biscuit and a cup of coffee. I forgot how much it cost, but while eating, I looked at the bill. Something I seldom do.. I noticed that they subtracted $0.41 from my bill because I have grey hair and wrinkles around the eyes.
    Has to be some advantage in getting old.
    Small comfort.
    But it’s something.

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  29. They didn’t card you?

    At Sears I worked in jewelry — and then ‘floated, wherever they needed someone for an evening. I eventually landed in the snack bar as my steady gig, making hot dogs, shakes and ice cream sodas and freezes.

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  30. I am at the library so will probably appear as Anon. This is Janice.

    I think the summer between high school and entering college in the fall, I probably continued with babysitting jobs and also working part-time as needed at the IRS service center which was about a mile from my home. I remember working maybe two weeks at the service center testing out the new machine used for sorting mail. I think I have mentioned before that I was at the end of the machine with another fellow, and we received all the rejects that did not fit any other slot according to envelope coding. So it was really hysterical at times, rather like Lucy and Ethel on that candy production line. While in high school I had worked at the service center on the weekends during the high season at a desk opening mail and sorting the forms. The machine was suppose to streamline the ordeal. So you see, from early on, I have been in taxing situations, LOL. For the machine trial, we had to go in at 6:30 a.m. which seemed awfully early for a teenager. But I did it. The pay was decent.

    Another rather unusual job I had was for a short while a man had a job I could do at home with friends putting little straws into plastic and using a sealing machine to close them. This was just like those little plastic packs attached to juice boxes. I think we got paid by the batch. That job did not last for very long, but filled some time during the summer. I need to ask my friend if she remembers that job. I also helped a neighbor who did marketing research on chocolate candy being developed. We were taste testers and got paid for trying two versions and putting our answers down on a survey. I thought that was cool, getting paid to eat chocolate candy! I guess my jobs were a little bit out of the ordinary, LOL!

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  31. Which Sears store? We always went to Del Amo.

    I worked for Kiesub in Accounts Receivables. It was an electronics parts store and I probably drove the men craz that summer with my short skirts and hair to my waist!

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  32. Janice: “So you see, from early on, I have been in taxing situations, LOL.”

    🙂

    I’ve got a tax situation that is taxing my patience today. At the end of February, both our federal and state refunds were direct-deposited into our checking account. I noticed that both deposits were more than what our tax preparer told us we would be getting back, so I called the tax office in March, inquiring about the reason for the discrepancies.

    The receptionist told me she would relay the message to our preparer, who would get back to us with an answer, but it might be a while before we’d here from her.

    No problem, I thought, since I’m sure that gets to be a very busy time in the tax season.

    By the time April 15 had passed, I’d forgotten about it, and didn’t think of it again until over this past weekend, when a Bible study friend mentioned something about the IRS on Sunday.

    So I called the office again yesterday morning, with the same questions, and the receptionist told me my preparer was on the phone with someone else, and she’d call me late afternoon.

    Huh? How long was she planning on being on the phone, I wondered but didn’t ask.

    Anyway, by 7:00 last night, I figured I wasn’t going to be hearing from her, and I didn’t, and not yet today, either.

    Do I really need to call a THIRD time? Sheesh. I’d like to know what’s going on, and get a corrected copy of my tax forms if my preparer made the adjustment after I left the office. Or if the IRS made the adjustments, they haven’t sent me anything showing what changed.

    I don’t really want to call and deal directly with them, because, frankly, after paying a tax preparer, I don’t think it’s my responsibility to contact the IRS — it’s the preparer’s, right?

    But she’s not returning my calls, and I don’t know if she’s not getting my messages through the receptionist, or where the breakdown in communication is.

    Frustrating. I want to know what needs to happen with that extra money, so I’m not caught paying a penalty or something for an amount that maybe I’m not entitled to.

    Is this still a busy season for tax preparers? If people file for extensions, when are those due?

    Thanks for letting me rant.

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  33. michelle, the Sears in Inglewood, my home town still at that time. I was the only white girl in many departments where I worked (as well as the only white girl on the snack bar’s bowling team one year 🙂 )

    I was so sad when they tore the store down (probably in the 1980s?) to make way for a gigantic Vons. I drove by before the bulldozers started taking it down, for ‘old-time’s’ sake.

    And of course I also baby sat during high school, usually for LA King’s families who typically relocated from Canada for the season and stayed in an big apartment building next to the Forum (which also was near the Sears). I still drive through that area on my way to and from my veterinarian’s office — I am glad to see the Forum back up and offering popular music and other programming again.

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  34. My first memories of that Sears store go back to when my uncle worked in the auto shop connected to the store — and also of seeing National Guardsmen on the store’s roof during the Watts riots in the early/mid 1960s.

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  35. For the last few years I’ve ordered from the senior menu at restaurants. I’ve often heard that I don’t look my age, so I’ve been hoping some server will card me and make me prove I really am 55, but so far nobody has.

    I was not interested in getting a job the summer after high school and my parents didn’t particularly encourage me to, so I was a lazy bum that summer. My first job was the next summer, after freshman year of college. I did grunt technician work and a little bit of computer programming for an engineer at the electronics manufacturer my father worked for. It was about 40 minutes from home. Driving back and forth every weekday for the summer was a great way to spend lots of time with my dad.

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  36. We lived way out of town, an hour bus ride to school. So I went to the employment agency. They found me a job in Squaw Valley at a place that hosted sports and cheerleading camps. I worked in the kitchen and serving.

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  37. This looks like an interesting website for ordering dresses (you can customize with your choice of neckline, length, sleeve length, etc. and many of them have pockets). My daughter ended up choosing bridesmaid dresses from them, letting each girl customize it as she will, but the same length. http://www.eshakti.com/product/CL0039893 (This isn’t the dress they ordered, just a link to get to the site.)

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  38. We are in full blown melt down/panic mode over here. She has washed her face 3 times because her make up wasn’t perfect. She calls me into her room and then yells at me to get out. She has to be 2 miles from our house by 6 pm. It is 4 pm and she stressed that she is going to be late.

    Me? I brushed my teeth and hair this morning. I will be ready when the time comes.

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  39. When I was a kid, I picked blackberries and tried to sell them. I don’t remember how that went. In the summer, of 1941, I sold peanuts on the Battery in Charleston. I made $2.00 a night.
    I didn’t really do much in high school. I worked at a box factory one summer.
    I was fired from a job at a butcher shop. We didn’t have fast food joints in those days to keke teens looking for work.
    After the Air Force, I was trying to decide whether to look foe a job or go to summer school. My sister’s friend told me to go see Mr…… (her boss). I did and he put me to work testing asphalt when they were building Charleston AFB.
    I have a feeling I have told you this before.
    The boss never told me he liked my work, but when the summer ended, he told me to go see Mr. Heriot at he South Carolina HD testing lab. I did. He gave me a part time job which went full time over the summer. I worked there four years.
    Then I went to SWBTS. A friend from college told me to go see Mr. Jackson. Me Jackson gave me a job as a GS-2 in area measurement. I later got a job in cartographic drafting at the same place. This was because I had 2.5 years of civil engineering, including drafting, at Carolina.
    I once made $35.00 for preaching a sermon. That is the most I ever made preaching.
    Thought I did supply a lot in Spartanburg after I finished seminary. I worked for the UADA, same outfit as in Fort Worth. I transferred there, GS-3.

    After a year and a half in Spartanburg, I gave up on trying to be a preacher and took the FSEE (Federal Service Entrance Exam) I got five points for being a veteran, and I had some engineering, and drafting experience. I took a job at the Army Map Service in Washington working on top secret-special compartmented projects. AMS in now the National Geospatial Agencr, located at Ft. Belvoir, Va.

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  40. First job out of high school, other than babysitting: 1985, and employees had to be 18 (or older), which I was. Several of the suburbs around Phoenix had increased greatly since the 1980 census, while they knew some other towns had shrunk, and tax dollars to cities were based on population. So they sought a special census for a more fair distribution. (Peoria, for example, where I was living at the time, went from 12,200 in 1980 to more than 50,000 just ten years later, so obviously it had roughly doubled by 1985.)

    Hundreds of employees were hired to go door to door, noting every address we passed (sometimes recently constructed houses with no occupants yet–they gave us some criteria as to whether it was far enough along in construction to be counted), knocking on every door, and counting the residents. If we found no one home, we went back two or three times, and finally left a card asking the occupant(s) to call us so they could be counted.

    I was fairly shy and expected to hate the job, but as it turned out, I really loved it, and took over other enumerators’ routes when they quit. It only lasted a few weeks, but I enjoyed it. I counted about 400 people, total, roughly one for each day of the year–but found seven people with my birthday, seven people with July 4 (which is one week after my birthday).

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  41. My mom was a census taker in 1960. Most memorable insult she received (she generally didn’t like the job) was the woman who called out to her husband that the ‘senseless’ taker was at the door

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  42. Technically, I’ve never graduated from high school, but maybe getting my GED could count? Anyway, my first job was working as a waitress in the off-season at a Christian resort. I got the job because my siblings already had jobs there. Working in the off-season means serving conference groups. It was non-denominational and we encountered everything from Pentecostals speaking in tongues to Coptics who spoke very little English. One Pentecostal group had a prophetess as their special speaker, and she wore a flowing white robe with deep fringes.

    The people were interesting; the work was grueling. The board of directors of the resort had the attitude that the Lord’s work must be done as cheaply as possible, which meant there was only a skeleton staff running the place. Sometimes, two of my siblings and I set up, served (only beverages, thankfully, since it was a buffet), tore down, and cleaned a dining room for 200 people. There were few breaks; many times we would only finish the clean up from one meal to get ready for the next. When we said we needed more staff, they got elderly volunteers to help – which didn’t lighten the load for us at all, since they couldn’t do any heavy work. That board must have been awful to work with – we had about three or four different camp directors in the time we worked there.

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  43. They all had to go to the high school and ride the buses to the stadium. We were stopped and they passed by us with a police escort and now here I sit cryong

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  48. Janice, I hope I didn’t offend with my “tax rant” at 3:51. Can you help inform me on whether I have unrealistic expectations under the circumstances I mentioned in that post? It seems so odd to me that my questions aren’t getting answered in a timely manner — that’s very unlike the wonderful customer service we’ve had in the past with our preparer. Am I missing something?

    I’m sure tax people must get plenty of rants, especially from those who have to pay in. They probably don’t want to hear it from people who got refunds, for goodness sakes!

    But I don’t want to be on the wrong side of the law, either, if some mistake was made and more money went to us than should have been.

    Is the taxpayer responsible, for example, in the case of a bigger refund than there should have been, if the situation isn’t rectified? What if we never noticed the difference between the tax refund line amount and the actual amount deposited in our account? Can we be held culpable for that?

    That’s what concerns me, especially because I did notice the discrepancy, and I can’t seem to get any answers about where to go from here.

    I’m pretty intimidated about contacting the IRS myself, because I’m not very confident that I won’t really screw something up about the whole thing. 😦

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  51. 6 Arrows, each tax\accounting firm is different. One I know shuts down during the off season. My husband’s business does not shut down because he has bookkeeping accounts and corporate accounts that have continuing deadlines for monthly reports, sales tax reporting, etc.Those accounts typically get behind during the main tax season. I don’t know what all your preparer’s business does. They cou!d very well still be busy if the temporary help for the main part of tax season are no longer at the office, and a skeleton crew is covering everything. You should keep calling or else pop into the office to see your preparer or the owner. The squeaky wheels get attention first. They need to be your advisors since you paid them. A regular preparer can’t represent a taxpayer to the IRS. The ones approved to represent taxpayers are CPAs, Attorneys, and Enrolled Agents.

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  52. 6 Arrows, I don’t know if this will help you any, but just to know that you aren’t alone in getting a puzzling response from the IRS. I’m going to make up the following numbers, but the anecdote is otherwise true except that I don’t remember the actual amounts.

    One year my tax refund came in large, say $1,832. Since I figured I was going to owe about $900 in estimated taxes April 15 and again June 15, I just marked it as refund me $32 (so that I’d be able to see that everything had been processed) and with the rest they should “pay toward next year’s taxes” (which was an actual option as to how I wanted my tax refund returned) and figured that way I wouldn’t have to worry about taxes until September. Somehow it took a few weeks for it all to get processed, but as I recall, about June 30 I received a check for $1,832 and a note that the taxpayer (me) had figured taxes wrong and this was the corrected refund. So now I suddenly hadn’t paid my estimated taxes for April and June, and the actual choice on the form to apply the funds to next year’s taxes had been totally ignored! I quickly sent a new check out, but I thought if they wanted to fine me for paying my taxes late, I was going to fuss, because I didn’t! (No such fine was forthcoming.)

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  53. Thanks for the information, Janice. That helps. The business has “Tax and Bookkeeping” listed as part of its name, so that would make sense that they’ve got other business going on, and I could see how they would get behind with some of that during the tax season. Never thought of that.

    I will keep trying to get a response, and I will be more patient than if I would have called again today, wondering why they didn’t get back to me yesterday. (The heart-rate trouble I was having today, too — see prayer thread — was making me more agitated than I probably would have been otherwise. Good thing I didn’t call today!) Thanks for putting up with me here, such as I was! 🙂 (I am feeling better tonight — the chocolate is beginning to leave my system, I guess. Thanks for prayers.)

    Cheryl, I’m glad you didn’t get any fine under those circumstances. I can see how all that could have happened, unfortunately. We had to pay estimated taxes for a while. (When I was teaching in a different state than the one I lived in — that messes up taxes, it seems to me, as Peter L can probably attest.)

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