From a Window

John Scalzi did a photo challenge today, and from the alerts I got, it seems to have caught on quickly.  Here's my entry, from pictures taken mostly this morning. As usual, I overdid it.  Here are pictures of several views from several windows.

My office window at home:  Not much of a view, is it?  My office is an unfinished room outside the wall of the original house, with no duct work, just an inadequate room air conditioner.  To try to keep the room below 90 degrees in summer, I have most of the non-A/C side of the window blocked with a flattened FedEx box.  The only view of the actual outside is part of the "mostly dead" grapefruit tree in the back hard.  I wouldn't want to see the rest of the back yard anyway.  Yuck. Dirt and weeds, tangled wires, weather-damaged motorcycles and the mostly dead tree.

The sliding door to the back yard:  The foliage seen in silhouette here is actually inside the house.  Outside you mostly see the empty pool and some unfinished projects (such as fixing a window screen or getting stuff thrown away).  Somewhere out there (unless John's picked it up by now) is a hand towel that was still on Tuffy's back last week when she got excited as John was toweling her off and ran back out into the rain.  The fence is made of aluminum slats, strung through ordinary chain link.  Some of the slats are broken or twisted or missing.  They make a racket when it's windy.  You can just about make out the Catalina Mountains behind the fence and the neighbors' trees.  Tucson is surrounded by mountains, but houses and fences and trees at least partly block all the views from the house.

The front/side window: This window, on the north side of the front room (a mostly disused living room), looks out on the driveway.  The van out there is the one we drove around the US and eastern Canada in 1986, but it no longer runs.  The blue car is, of course, my Saturn. You can barely see the hot pink shag steering wheel cover inside my car, or the Catalinas (many miles) behind a neighbor's house.

The smudges on the window come from a certain dog's nose.  Tuffy spends much of her time on the sectional couch under this window, looking out.  If we've just arrived home, she'll jump down and meet us at the door, often with much whimpering and yelping and licking.  If someone drops off a package or a flyer, or tries to sell something, she takes her barking duties seriously.

My office window at work:  You can see from the photo in the entry below this one what the view is generally like from my "hermit cave."  My office window looks out into the office.  On the other side of the window is the fax machine, so I often get a close up view of one of my coworkers (such as Mal in the previous entry's photo).  Today's photo shows a little bit of what's beyond the fax machine: flags on the walls, from around the world.  This is a nod to the company name:  Worldwide Travel.  I don't actually get to see the world, only the flags. I have all the major Hunchback characters, Mickey and Minnie, a Hunchback grape chapstick and a Pez dispenser lined up on the sill.

Shut Window (AOL only)
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Done, Done, Done!

I dropped off the 2004 reconciliation at the CPA's office today.  This did not happen until after 4 PM, but it's done now.  Mal's happy, and so am I.  He was teasing me that the new deadline was noon today.  That kind of made me feel pressured, because I had all sorts of last minute problems with vendor and accrued payroll balances. 

Eventually I solved them, and spent the next two hours assembling the documents: one notebook for Decker, one for Worldwide Travel.  This was a little tricky.  I had printed some reports and spreadsheets several times over a period of ten days, and other things I'd only printed once, and only one copy at that! 

The CPA who took possession of the blue notebook and CD and my verbal instructions was a woman in a red power suit with piping.  She praised my nicely-organized documentation.  I told her about having just taken a degree in accounting, and she said that many of their clients are accountants, who nevertheless don't want to mess with taxes.  "School doesn't teach you anything about doing people's taxes," she said. 

I agreed that my one tax course wasn't much preparation for doing it as a career. 

"And the information changes all the time," she said.  "You have to keep up with it."

Maybe I won't apply to work at Decker's office.  Honestly, I don't really want to do people's taxes.

With all that done, I had to do the weekly ARC report to the airlines.  This turned out to be a pain, because SABRE (the computer reservation system through which I access the ARC report) was being glitchy.  At one point, I didn't think I'd be able to make the Tuesday filing deadline at all, but eventually the error message cleared itself and I got the darn report done.

Starting tomorrow, I have to play catch-up on my current work and start cleaning and filing and throwing stuff away.  Here are a couple of "Before" pictures.  Watch this space for the "After"!

Karen

P.S.  I found out why my computer asked me at 4 AM who was doing the dishes, just before I went to do the dishes. 

Over the weekend, I installed AIM at work, which, by the way, is NOT your invitation to IM me there.  It was a livesaver during those long nights at weekends as I was closing 2004, but I mostly just want to get my AOL Alerts, and occasionally IM a friend when things are relatively quiet and I'm supposedly at lunch or something.

Okay, you say, but what does that have to do with talk about dishes?  Well, my computer at work doesn't have a sound card, but of course the Compaq does.  In the course of tweaking my IM/AIM settings, I enabled the playing of sounds when someone signs in or out.  Evidently, someone with whom I've had email or IM contact sometime in the last several years has "Who's Doing the Dishes?" as a login sound.  How annoying!  But now I know it wasn't a deliberate freak-out.

And: Sara needs someone to break the tie on her reader partici(say it!)pation fantasy serial.  Howard, Paul, Vince and Carly, I'm looking at you!