Man! When we say it‘s one of those days, we ain’t kiddin’!
The latest news to crash on our skulls: The Wonder-Accountants are freakin’ RETIRING!
And for an innumerate old bat like me, that is a freakin’ CATASTROPHE.
Because…in case you can’t imagine, eh?…my son is NOT innumerate. Not at all. Quite to the contrary. And…as with his grand-dad — my fierce and chronically angry father — my own inability to deal with numbers drives him up the wall. The frustration of having to watch an idiot like me try to figure out the simplest operations…well…it must be just awful for him.
It’s damned awful for me, that’s for sure.
Well. I can NOT figure my taxes: must have an accountant for that task, even when its stages are fairly simple. Tax prep is so far over my head, I have no hope of doing it right. Or doing it at all. And because my understanding of what the heck I’m supposed to be doing in said task hovers near the ZERO level, trying to connect brains with a new accountant is gonna be… Well…gawdawful, that’s what.
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In other sylvan vales: Mygawd, it is hotter than the proverbial hubs outside.
Went out for a quick walk around our part of the hood, mostly to try to run off some of the stress and worry. No dog with me, of course: the pavement is so hot it would scorch her furry feet right off her legs.
It’s such a pretty little neighborhood. Nothing really special, to tell the truth: 1970s tract houses, by and large. But everything is neatly cared for and handsomely painted and tidy and clean…I love this place.
Ideally, I’d like to stay here until I die.
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That, alas, is no longer the American Way. Nowadays, we who lurk in the aging middle class are consigned to prisons for old folks, where we’re locked up and fed bad food until we finally get out of our family’s hair.
So about the best you can hope for, when you come unto my age, is a stroke or a heart attack that will carry you away forthwith.
Not the custom in my family, alas. My mother died horribly of a gut cancer, allegedly brought on by her incessant smoking but more likely spurred by the hideous, gawdawful treatment she had for the amoebic dysentery she picked up in Arabia. It was a slow and ugly death.
My father wasted away in the excruciating company of the woman he unwisely married after my mother died. Took a good two years for him to die. Horrible.
My maternal grandmother supposedly died fairly young of cancer, apparently brought on by her flamboyant promiscuity. However, it appears that this story, as told to (or by…) my mother, was not true; in fact she lived to be 88 years old. Well…that’s if you believe the figures in Ancestry.com….a site that appears to be less than fully reliable.
The grandfather…well, if they’re facts, they’re pretty vague. If you believe the scanty data on Ancestry.com, he died at the age of 65. Or not…who knows?
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Oh, well…. When we say side-tracked, we mean sidetracked, eh?
The reality of the day is the WonderAccountants’ decision to retire. A hair-raising contemporary reality that has nary a thing to do with all that historical, ancestral babble. 😀