Showing posts with label Asian buffet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Asian buffet. Show all posts

Thursday, December 9, 2021

NOT FINISHED YET WITH THE TAX PAPERWORK AND ERRANDS TO RUN ALSO

 Have spent two more days working on the tax exemption paperwork – though to be honest, “a day” around here runs 3-5 hours and is really just an afternoon.  

When I left off the first day all was basically done except the hard part – getting copies of all the bills for my accounting practice – some of which are split bills with personal, club, etc expenses.  Some expenses even need to be split several ways.  When I left off at end of this first day I was missing several bills for car expenses – I actually went to a client once last year and also drove the car to post mail to clients, to pick up same from our USPS PO box and for some needed supplies.  As I panicked over the missing bills – one was found and I felt better.

Today I found and made copies of the missing bills – except one which remains missing. It is for less then $30 and I will not go crazy looking for it.  

Tomorrow we plan to go to the bank to make deposits.  In addition we used to go weekly and would replenish the cash which we had used during the week – since we collect checks to deposit and go less than a once a month (don't get a lot of checks these days) we have not been going to the bank a regular basis and he has used the cash he had.  We don't like to be cashless in general and he needs singles to leave a tip for Friday night dinner at an Asian buffet.  

I plan to work Friday on finishing the paperwork for the exemption.  I needed to write covers for some section as well as summary explanation of what I have for them.  And the form – I still have to fill in the actual form.  I wait until the last to do so to make sure that numbers on it are correct and match the paperwork.  Then we can go next week to drop it off and get a receipt from them for it.  

Then back to work on taking exams so I can prepare tax returns next year.  

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -

Small steps planned out make a big job easier to do.  





Thursday, July 1, 2021

NICE WHEN A WEEK ACTUALLY GOES RIGHT

A better week.  

Day after I wrote last week's post I was surprised to receive the renewal for our van – since it was suppose to take until sometime next week to reach us.  Weather has been terribly hot and we are not going anywhere, so we have not changed the window sticker yet.  (Van parked on our driveway so not a problem that the old sticker is still in the window.)

And – after being told that I could not renew that prescription both by our pharmacy and our medical insurance – we received a call Monday asking why we had not picked up the prescription yet and we only had 2 more days to pick it up before it went back into stock!  We went in to pick it up – I was sure that they were going to charge the full price for it – after all, it was the only insurance saying it would not pay for it yet that stopped it from being filled – and if that was that was the case – I would say to put back into stock for now.  Surprise!  It was charged at the usual co-payment.  Not exactly sure how this happened, but it did.  

When we went food shopping last week we stopped at a Wendys near the supermarket for lunch.  This particular Wendys has never been the best, but it is greatly lacking right now – not sure if change of management or if we just never had lunch there before – we used to go for dinner on some Saturday nights.  

How nice it was to go in the supermarket, make only one trip into it, and do our entire food shopping and not even have a problem fitting all the bags in the cart after we shopped.  We have not shopped for a normal sized shopping order in over 15 months.

And then, also on Thursday, we did something else we have not done in over 15 months – we went out for dinner!   Back in the normal times we would go to an Asian buffet for dinner on Friday nights.  We went on Thursday night as we figured it would be a lot emptier than it would be on Friday night.  Very pleased that they handed us large gloves to use when going to the food bar and masks were required for same.  A number of unused serving trays on the food bars  – but not sure if this is due to it being now or if this was always the case on Thursday nights, though we presume the former.  

Everything we do these days continues to involve being organized.  We have to remember to bring our masks (no longer required by state or local government, but often required by the various businesses we are going to  - plus we feel safer with them on.  I carry at least two plastic sandwich bags in my pocket when we go anywhere – we can open doors (at stores without automatic doors) etc with them on our hands instead of touching the doors with our bare hands.  The Corona virus counts here may be very low and we may be fully vaccinated, but I know of too many people who will not the vaccine and feel safer not touching doors that everyone else is touching.  

When food shopping to prevent needing to continuously up and down the same aisles or need to go back to the store in a day or two as we forgot something – we make sure to shop with a list.  I have a strip of paper on the refrigerator for us to list items we are going to run out of – try to do this in time not to run out.  Unless we are going for less  than 10 or so items I write them into a computer spreadsheet.  On one of our early trips into the supermarket during the pandemic I listed by type items that we might use by aisle number – though it is my numbering system – the first aisle we go to in the store I have as aisle one, the next one as aisle two and so on through the food items.  After food is listed non-food items -  cleaning, vitamins and such.  Next on my list is refrigerated items – which involves walking back to the far end of the store, followed by meat items and lastly frozen items.  As we walk through the store we can pick easily find the items we need to buy.  I try to keep each section of the list to match the order in each aisle.  Putting them in this list also helps as my handwriting is terrible and I can always read what I printed out – while I cannot always figure out what I hand wrote on a list. While we are a bit more comfortable walking around in the store, we don't want to be in it longer than we need to be.  I am packing the cold items in different bags than the non-cold items as I am still wiping everything down with alcohol when we come home and want to make sure that I get to all the cold items quickly.  

When we go out food or other shopping we have to remember to bring bags with us these days.  Just as our area went into the pandemic last March, it became illegal for stores to provide plastic shopping bags and either a county or large city could impose a fee for paper bags or the stores in area which did not do so were allowed to charge up to 10 cents a bag for paper bags.  Our areas does not have the fee so it is up to stores if they are going to charge and whether they charge the entire 10 cents (plus a penny a bag in sales tax) or not.  Most, of course, are charging the full 10 cents.  One dollar store which is location of a chain store will automatically put one's items in a paper bag and charge for it – not ask if one wants a bag, even if one is buying one item.  They got me once with this.  The two times we have back I quickly say that we have our own bag.  What we have been going is carrying some of the old plastic shopping bags with us into stores other than when going into the supermarket for more than a couple of items when we bring double bagged paper bags with us.  If the plastic shopping bags are folded down correctly I can fit 4 of them (maybe even more) in each of my two back pockets leaving my hands free until we are done shopping and I am bagging the items we bought after we ring them up.    So, I have to organize our bags also.  When I first read a book about organizing the author said that one does not keep bags - “Have you ever walked into a store and they did not have bags available?”  I still went on keeping most of the bags we got which were normal sized or larger.  Husband made the same comment to me as the author had printed and I replied “you never know”  Up until this law went into effect I had been using those plastic shopping bags as free garbage bags for our bathroom and bedroom little garbage pails.  I now still use them – but dump them into (upstairs) the office pail and (downstairs) the kitchen pail and put the shopping bag into the little pails to use again unless they are messy.  My stash of bags that I would “never need as the stores always have them” will last us for years at the minimum, since they are being used over and over again.

What have you been doing differently to deal with all of these sorts of things this past year plus?

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK -
Who ever thought that going food shopping for just what one needs in the coming week would become something looked forward to.



Thursday, January 2, 2020

HAPPY NEW YEAR - I STILL DO NOT MAKE RESOLUTIONS

Well, another year gone by – they really do seem to go by faster and faster. 

As those of you who have been reading my posts for over a year (and I thank you for doing so) I don't believe in making resolutions.  I never kept them and felt guilty for not doing so.  Instead I just decide that what is past is past and the future is a clean slate.

We still are running behind on getting things in life done. 

The Saturday before Christmas I realized that there was no way that our extensive (okay, overly and ridiculously extensive) inside Christmas decorations would be put up before or during Christmas.  We were doing three nights with our reenactment unit at an 18th century house in a local restoration village.  The event is annual, with the days for it changing every year.  It is a candlelight night event – each house is lit as it would have been in the period it is displayed and the Christmas decorations also match the period.  The other houses in the village are set in the 1800s; the one we interpret is set in the late 1700s – we say to the guests coming in that it is 1775, the year that our unit generally “is in”.  While it is an evening event husband and I have to start dressing by 3 pm to drive there and have the set up on time and by the time we shut the house down (a lot of candles to blow out and we have to make sure that no one in our unit left anything behind) , lock it up, drive home and change back to modern clothing it is around 11 pm and we are making dinner and sitting down to eat it.  So basically the days we do this event – we do almost nothing else.  So I would not getting to work on decorating the house on Saturday or Sunday night.   I had to take 2 more (online) exams for my professional education to work next year and I would have left – Monday before Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve, Thursday after Christmas, and Monday before New Year's Eve to take the classes.  Not being completely crazy I knew that I had to take them Sunday after the event and Monday nights, so that on the extremely, extremely rare chance I did not pass both exams and had to take one (or the other) class again, I had a chance to do so.  Hence, there would no time to put up the decorations, especially since our living room was not cleared up from husband's weaving due to a recent sales event we went to, the dining room still had stuff for the RV in it (I tried to take same out the week before – but it was COLD and husband did not want me to open the RV door as it would make it cold inside(?).)  Plus reenacting stuff that stores in the box/benches that we bring to event and they are kept along the dining room walls – and they needed “straightening up”.  So as all this hit while at the reenactment event, I fought back a couple of tears and decided that even if 80 or 90% of our Christmas is the decorations, it just would not be this year.  Since we were married the only year we have not decorated for Christmas in the house was the year we had the bed bugs – oh, well, 2 years of 40 is not a bed record. 

I thought about what to do as an alternative.  I was concerned about telling husband about the no decorations – he looks forward to them.  I came up with I would set up the small tree that we normally set up in our studio covered with ornaments we have made, in the living room on a table and put a limited number of favored ornaments on it.  I approached husband about this and said to him “We are not going to have decorations this year.” His reaction was that he had already realized this and had been afraid to say anything to me about it as he did not want me to take it as a challenge. I told him of my plan about the small tree and he thought it a great idea. 

I set the tree up on Christmas Eve afternoon.  I also wrapped the gifts for his nieces and for him that afternoon.   We have most of the decorations in 6 large plastic boxes.  I store the boxes in a corner of our basement.  To make life easy when I put the house decorations on top of the pile, so I just took those boxes off the stack and put them aside (on matching boxes that hold the bear village Christmas stuff in a separate pile as the stack would be too tall otherwise for the room).  I store the ornaments in 4 boxes which are numbered so the nicest ones are in box 1 to be featured and get prime choice of locations, down to box 4 which has the fill in at the end decorations.  So I opened box 1 on the top of the pile and looked in – I made the angel we use on the tree and she has two friends that husband I also stitched – they came out.  Then I was looking at what else was there and convenient.  I took out more ornaments that we have made and went upstairs to set up the tree. 

I had planned to put the tree on an outdoor type of table with slats that husband uses for setting up his loom – but the feet of the stand did not match the slat positions.  I stood and tried to think where I could I find something to put on the tabletop – thought of a small table that we take to reenactment events and  the top of it was in the dining room.  It fit the table perfectly and even though there is hardware under it to attach the legs, it did not rock.  I was concerned the three might scratch it and that might upset husband so I went looking for something fabric to put on it.  I found two old, worn hand towels in green.  I covered the table, set up the tree, and then folded the towels over the stand to make a tree skirt – perfect.   

I put the ornaments I had brought upstairs on the tree.  Much too bare.  Back to box 1 in the basement.  Hmmm, ornaments dated with the year we got married – good, ornaments of Geo Washington and Thomas Jefferson and their houses, good.  What else?  Luckily I label the small (old gift) boxes that hold the ornaments as several are packed in each one and the only way to get them back in the boxes is to know what goes in each, so I was able to scan the outside of the boxes and find some ornaments from a Folk craft festival we have gone to since we started dating.  I left it at that – with actual blank space on the tree.  As I went through wrapping the gifts and such I found a new ornament we bought (crafts store going out of business $1 teddy bear ornament for 50c – had to buy same) and the membership one we received from Colonial Williamsburg for 2019 – both of them were added.  I did not have the on/off switched extension cord,which is stored with the large tree, so found a regular one and we plug and unplug the tree by hand. Oh, and there was a large light up teddy bear on the box stack, so I brought him upstairs and sat him on the bench husband uses when weaving.  Finished, such as it was to be.

We went out for Christmas Eve dinner to the Asian buffet we go to a weekend night.  When there we discussed the decorations.  Husband said to me “How hard would be it to get out the Christmas stockings also?” So they went out also when we got home.

As the week went alone we decided that we missed the Christmas and Chanukah teddy bears (and some stuffed friends of theirs.  New Year's Eve I managed to pull most if not all of them from their storage box and put them out.  I also decorated the tree in the Teddy Village the same night.  Right now it is New Year's Day night – I had planned to finish setting up the village with the bears “that come to the parade” today or tonight, but husband had plans to go out for dinner (Wendys) and then a movie so I did not have a chance – just got home from the movies and I am writing to all of you (will get them) out tomorrow.

So, we did what we felt was the minimum decorating  for the holidays that we felt comfortable with.  The walls of Jericho did not shake and fall.  Most people might even think it plenty of decorating.  I plan next year to make sure it all goes up on time.  Today when we shut off the RV from charging its batteries (plugged it in yesterday) I finally moved the rest of the stuff for it back into the RV for the winter and got my spare pair of warm socks out of it to wash and use during the winter.

Normally on Wednesdays I start laundry for the week - not this week, as we went to the movies.  The laundry will get done tomorrow and Friday, maybe even Saturday.  I write and send out the newsletter for my embroidery chapter the last Wednesday of the month as we meet the first Wednesday – since this month we are meeting the second Wednesday (a meeting on New Year's Day would not work), I started it before we went out for dinner – it will be a day late – hey, sometimes that happens, it will still be in plenty of time before the meeting. 

There is only so much time that I have use and I have to deal with that idea.  What can be done is done, what cannot, has to ignored and/ore delayed.  I hope over the next year in general to be better caught up on everything which has been slipping our fingers this past year plus and get life back to a normal level of unfinished things. 

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK -

You can only do what you can do with the time you have – try to let the small things go.  If you did make resolutions last year and did not keep them, see what is important and try to do better at one or two of them and don't make a long list of resolutions as then you will not keep any of them.  Just try to deal with one or two problem and see where you go from there.

A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL.