jessteronimo

Lazy Day

Yesterday, when I woke up around 11:30 a.m., I felt wiped out. I pulled on my sweats and slippers and made my way into the living room, where I plopped down on the couch and didn't move. All. Day. Long. Ben, the girls, and I watched a marathon of the TV show House all day long.  I didn't shower. I ate whatever the girls brought in. I think my mind needed the break as much as my body did. Too bad I have to push back into full throttle again first thing tomorrow morning. I hope you all had a great holiday too!

Kinky

My neck is all kinked out today. Unbelievably sore. Can't turn my head side to side or look up or down well without shooting pain all over my head and down my back. I must've slept on it wrong, and I've taken more ibuprofen in the last twelve hours than in the whole of last month. It's still no good. Causing me no end of troubles. I'm hoping to perform an unkinking process in my sleep tonight. Or I just might go crazy tomorrow. I really don't wanna OD on pain killers over a kinkified neck.

Fuel Surcharges

In the last several months, several of the companies to whom I pay money monthly, either personally or for my work, have added "fuel surcharges" of anywhere between $1.00 to $12 per month to their bills "to cover the rising cost of gas," they claim. The problem is, gas is back to under $2.00 per gallon, yet these companies aren't retracting their monthly fuel surcharges. Shame on them! Has anyone else noticed this? I think I'll start including notes in my payments asking when they'll remove their gas surcharges--and if I get ignored and start feeling really bold, I'll start deducting the surcharge from my payments.

Lost and Found

The silver Lincoln Towncar was all over the road, going about 2 mph in the 45 mph zone. Traffic was starting to back up as people tried to figure out how to deal with the out-of-control driver on a 3-lane strip of highway on the way into the confusing, twisting airport maze. My nightly ritual includes visiting my friends at the United States Post Office depot located by the Salt Lake International Airport to drop of the firm's consistently substantial stack of time-sensitive outbound mail after hours. I'm a regular now. They all know my name, and I theirs. So it's safe to say that I've figured that maze out. The Towncar driver obviously had not--either that or someone was sick, drunk, or too old to be driving.

Just my luck, the car took my turn--and then again, and again! I couldn't get around him, and I couldn't get him to go any faster. I just had to be patient with the other people stuck in line behind him and wait until he pulled out of the way in the post office parking lot. Then I quickly parked and carried my mail bin inside, only to practice more patience in a longish line. While I waited, an older woman came in and started asking people if they knew where a particular road was. I recognized her. She was the passenger of the silver Towncar. Lost.

No one seemed to know the road. But I did. So when she got near me, I tried to explain the route to her, and her eyes glazed over. (The airport maze is not forgiving, especially when you're trying to get out.) So I told her to wait, dropped off my mail, and followed her to her car and tried to explain to her husband. His eyes glazed over. I had a vision of the silver Towncar wandering the streets of west-side Salt Lake City, Utah, at midnight. Not fun. So I ended up having them follow me through the maze and to the freeway, then guided them to their destination. So I was a little late getting home. No biggie. What I found was more important.

Checkbook Battles

Everything was going along fine. I was faithfully entering my deposits and credits into the company Quickbooks registry each day, reconciling to zero discrepancies almost every day without incident. And then came September 2nd, that fateful day when, to my horror, the reconciliation balance said I was off by $85. Off?! How could I be off? I reviewed the previous day's transactions. No $85. Reviewed the discrepancy reports. Nothing. Reviewed other possible sources of income or expenses that I might have missed. Nada. Since that cold day in September, I have been fighting to reconcile the company checkbook, a growing, nagging beast of a problem.

Lest you think I've been ignoring the problem, I assure you that I've been hunting for the cause of the discrepancy daily ever since. My books have fluctuated between $12,000 over (that was an easy one to find) and $47.26 under, never hitting zero. Well, last week my boss was out of town. I vowed to find the answer while he was gone. I almost made it. I even spent five hours with my accountant friend chewing on the problem Saturday afternoon. She helped me identify the culprit--by backing out every single cleared transaction through August!! But it wasn't until Monday afternoon when I was finally able to reconcile the books to the current date. Whew! That was a hard fight with some terrific lessons built in! Now to get to the mountain of chores that piled up during the fight. No rest for the weary.

Disappointment

I relearned an old lesson recently--the hard way. Absolutely everyone you know will disappoint you sometime sooner or later. It's what you do after that time that shows who you are and what kind of relationship you'll have with that person in the future. Your move.