February 29, 1996
Dear Everyone:
Winter came
back!
After nearly a week of lovely, warm days and soft nights, when
the furnace wouldn’t even come on because the temperature hadn’t dropped
low enough, Mother Nature made an abrupt about-face, dropping a load of
snow on Mt Diablo on her way back.
It’s raining. It’s
cold. Getting your keys out
of your pocket while wearing gloves is a real pain.
And didn’t we go through this same silliness last year?
After gloating that
upgrading to Windows 95 went without a hitch, I discovered a hitch.
Oberon suddenly didn’t seem to know his right from his left.
More specifically, when I tried to print the envelopes for last
week’s Letter, they wouldn’t print.
At first I blamed the ink cartridge.
But, when I ran a test, the printer was fine.
It took a while to realize that Puck, following Oberon’s
instructions, was merrily non-printing the envelopes on the left side of
the printer. The envelopes
only go into the printer from the right side.
Oberon was sending “mixed” signals.
By then, it was
getting late, so I just printed the addresses and taped them to the
envelopes, intending to straighten everything out on the weekend.
Which I did. And it
only took five separate tries, all of which looked identical to me, to
get a set of envelopes printed the right (correct) way.
Although, there still appear to be a few bugs in the system.
(Possible operator error in feeding the envelopes in the first
place. Maybe I should try
pre-fed envelopes.)
“Jeannie” has
decided to use Oberon to organize her financial records for her tax
accountant. She announced
this last week, with my enthusiastic support since the more work Oberon
has to do, the better I can justify what I spent on him.
After all, there’s more to life than looking up how many movies
have been scored by
John Barry.
“Jeannie’s” original
plan to bring all her boxes and envelopes over to my place on Saturday
had to be altered because “Marshall” came up from Fresno to pick out
some ties in San Francisco, there being, apparently, no acceptable ties
available in Fresno.
“Jeannie” actually showed up, with boxes, around 3:00 Sunday afternoon.
Since she clearly wasn’t ready for Oberon yet, I decided to put
the time to good use, rotating my files.
Rotating files
means, going through all the four-year-old records, just in case there’s
anything that shouldn’t be thrown out.
I once almost sent the registration on my car to the dumpster
before I realized that it was still in the pocket marked “Auto”.
Now I’m a little more careful.
In this case, I found the original warranty on the last battery I
had put in my car, which guaranteed the battery until 1997.
I carefully set it aside, until I remembered that I had traded
that car in on the new one.
Once I’d tossed the
four-year-olds out, I could move the three-year-old records (the
IRS requires you to keep
records for three years) into the box I’d just emptied.
This left me with just the desk drawers.
The right-hand drawer always contains the current year and the
left-hand drawer has the previous year.
First, I pull both drawers out.
I put the right-hand drawer (which now contains last year’s
files) in the left side of the desk.
I move the files from what was the left-hand drawer into the box
and place the now empty folders from three years ago into this drawer
and it becomes the right-hand drawer for this year’s records.
This whole operation
takes about 20 minutes and I get to keep using the same three sets of
folders year after year. In
the meantime, “Jeannie” sat on the living room floor, going through her
cancelled checks, one...at...a...time.
Then she started on a box of what I would call “miscellaneous
documents”. Some she would
put in this pile, or that one.
Others, she carefully set into a sorter.
When she had the box emptied, she turned the sorter over and
dumped everything back into the box.
So much for records management.
(All this time, of
course, my organizing genes were just screaming to get at that pile of
paper.)
After 4-½ hours,
“Jeannie” determined that
Rome wasn’t built in a day and she wasn’t going to finish that
night. She returned Monday
to work some more, then called on Tuesday to say that she had found some
more records that need going through and that she’d gotten a reprieve
from her tax man. She
doesn’t have to see him until next Thursday, which means we have all
this weekend to get everything in order.
(Maybe I can send
her out to rent a movie and do a little organizing while she’s not
looking.)
Love, as always,
Pete
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