December 1, 2017
Dear Everyone:
“Jeannie” now has two new cats.
The first is a lovely green-eyed calico tabby named Beatrice.
A couple of weekends ago, she was joined by a blue-eyed
black-and-white ball of fluff named Benedick.
(For those not familiar with the works of
William
Shakespeare, these are the two battling protagonists from
Much Ado
About Nothing.) Both
are better known as “Bea and Benny”.
Or, in the case of the latter, “Little Monster!”, usually just as he is
climbing up your jeans leg with his very sharp tiny, little claws.
Benny firmly believes in the adage:
“Claw your way to the top!
That’s what the drapes are for.”
At first, “Jeannie” attempted to keep them separated, with Bea in the
“Cat’s Room” and Benny in a borrowed pet cage in the living room.
Just until they had time to get used to each other, you
understand. This arrangement
worked until she was in a hurry to get to work and only realized later
that she had left them to their own devices for a full day.
When she got home, there were no immediately visible signs of World War
III, so now the cats have free reign throughout the house.
So far, everything seems to be working out OK.
“Marshall” came up for
Thanksgiving last week.
Originally, we had planned to have dinner at my place.
But then “Jeannie” couldn’t leave the cats alone for even a few
hours, regardless of the fact that she did it every day that she worked
outside the home. So, we
spent Thanksgiving Day at “Jeannie’s” place, watching football games on
TV and side-stepping curious kitties.
We enjoyed the traditional Dinner-In-A-Box, courtesy of a local gourmet
food store, complete with burned fingers and almost-forgotten
vegetables. And apple pie,
which I believe we didn’t actually break open until the next day.
Still, it was very good.
I even took home a substantial slice for a later snack.
The day after Thanksgiving, we wisely decided to stay away from the
shopping experience and instead opted for lunch and a daytrip to
Mount Diablo.
I’ve been up there a few times, but neither “Marshall” nor
“Jeannie” had ever visited it.
We took the road from the
Concord/Walnut
Creek side up to the North Gate and on up to the mountain.
It’s not far, as the crow flies.
But crows tend to fly straight, whereas the road took many, many
twists and turns. There were
lots of signs reminding drivers that bicycle riders are people, too; and
that the recommended speed was about 10 mph.
There were, indeed, many, many riders of bicycles.
The mountain is a favorite destination for serious cyclists.
They toil endlessly up, then enjoy coasting all the way back
down.
As for us, we never did make it to the Summit.
That would have required continuing down the North Peak and then
up the South Peak, with lots more twisting and turning on a very narrow
road with a significant drop on one side or the other.
After about an hour of inching along both “Marshall” and
“Jeannie” were in favor of using a convenient turnaround to go back
more-or-less the way we had arrived, so far.
We did get up high enough to glimpse some water in the far
distance. According to
experts, you can see the
Pacific Ocean
on a clear day. Maybe it was
just part of
San Francisco Bay, but we decided that it was enough.
In other news…
When I first started using a computer at home, one of the first ones
came with a free version of
Microsoft Money.
This was a simple financial application that I used to keep track
of my
checking account. Or as
much track as I was capable of.
Over time, Microsoft
abandoned the software and I moved on to another product which shall
remain nameless, but whose initials are “Quicken”.
Quicken always wanted to do far more than I did, energetically
attaching itself to my bank account and downloading a lot of information
that I really didn’t need.
Seriously, I just wanted to keep my checking account balanced, not get
continuous advice on stocks I would never own.
Nevertheless, each year I upgraded to the latest version of
Quicken at about $40 a pop.
Each time I migrated from one computer to the next, I would
conscientiously “restore from backup” to have the newest version
up-to-date. Not that it ever
completely agreed with the bank’s information, of course.
Things were always just a little bit off.
Then, about a month ago, Quicken suddenly stopped working.
It would launch the application, but resolutely refused to
display any information, or even let me shut the application down.
I tried looking up any helpful suggestions from various support
groups. Lots of advice to
download a “patch”,
which was apparently included in the last upgrade to the 2018 version.
So that didn’t work.
I also discovered, through some research, that the company that produced
Quicken has had such problems with their application that they finally
spun it off onto another company altogether.
They don’t even support it anymore.
At this point, I decided to just ignore the problem.
I used online banking to download a month’s worth of transactions
and started an
Excel spreadsheet of my own.
Created a template for each month, with all the necessary
formulae
for adding deposits and subtracting withdrawals.
And another with all the usual payees, including known amounts,
like the monthly mortgage payment, which I can easily highlight, copy
and paste into the appropriate month.
So far, it’s working pretty well.
After all, there’s no law or rule that says I have to keep years’ worth
of transactions on file.
That’s what the
bank statements are for.
It is helpful, from time to time, to look back and see when was the last
time I paid some company or other for something.
But that’s really just a convenience.
The other day, just out of curiosity, I launched Quicken again.
After a moment, the system demanded that I log into its online
version (yet another ID and password to keep track of!)
A few minutes later, up popped all my missing transactions, less
the ones I’d done in the past month in Excel.
So, Quicken is all better now.
And, for now, I’m leaving it that way.
My Excel version if working just fine, thank you very much.
Not to mention saving about $40 per year.
Which I can easily spend on cat toys.
Love, as always,
Pete
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