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Incidents and Accidents....
Aug. 17th, 2021 03:41 pmAt least one of these, we never saw, but did see the aftermath of, pretty late on Sunday evening. We live in a fairly recessed section of a subdivision off the intersection of two state highways. There are only two streets that come in from the north-south arterial (North Forest), and two others entering from the much busier east-west one (Sheridan). Only two of the four intersect at all, and, as we found when first moving here, the twists and turns of the streets are illogical and a nightmare for those who don't know their way around.
GPS helps visitors and delivery trucks find us, but they at least have an address. What happened the other night happens a few times a year: Sheridan or North Forest has a bad accident, and drivers bail onto one of those four entry points in hopes of coming out on the other state highway, or all the way down to Main Street to our south. They wind up forming a parade of gridlock that we get to watch from our living room, as some try to navigate the maze by turning away from our house, and just as many fail even worse by turning toward us, beginning an endless loop around the three streets including ours that form a very large oval back here.
The cars themselves aren't all that distracting to us, but they certainly are to any dogs who might be out. And our neighbors' purebred stud muffin of a black lab, Harley, was whining like a baby the whole time. (Despite the name, we've discovered he's even more afraid when motorcycles go by.) We both tried getting him to shut up, me while occasionally coming over to the stuck cars to try to help guide them out. It was an end to a long day that we really didn't need, but finally things got quiet enough to get some sleep so we could move on to the next accident,.... this one of bookkeeping.
----
As I've mentioned here, we've been trying to improve both finances and communication about them, including getting a financial planner involved. One cause of that was my not being fast enough on the draw to adjust my budget to realities of taxes. About this time three years ago, a major client of mine shifted from the part-time position I get a paycheck from (and taxes withheld on) to my primary practice where I just draw funds with no withholding. Long story short, in 2019 it resulted in our 2018 tax bill going unpaid long enough for the IRS to send each of us a certified letter. That scared Eleanor to death (turns out her sister lost a house to the IRS years ago), and she'd been equally annoyed when the 2019 taxes, filed in July of 2020, resulted in an earlier-stage notice from them. Those are now all paid, but some of it was done by putting the remaining balance on a no-interest credit account that has to be paid off by February 2022 to avoid any interest payment. To keep my eyes on that as the prize, I divided the amount by the 18 months until it has to be paid off, and promised Eleanor I would write a check every month and let her hold that accumulating fund until it all has to be paid in a year and a half.
I wrote, and handed her, that fiirst check first thing Friday morning, right before we drove off to her colonoscopy. It wasn't until yesterday morning that I realized that check might very well have bounced. It wasn't for lack of funds, but in their placement: I have two separate cards with one credit card company. Card A is a small one for personal use that we paid off out of the last refi, and it has a zero balance right now, but I pay what little is on it from my personal checking account every month. Card B is one I use for some business purchases, and I pay that in full from my business checking account on a slightly later date every month.
Or rather, I thought that's where I paid it from. When I was checking something else yesterday morning, I discovered that I'd made the much larger Card B payment for business from my personal checking account. That didn't leave enough to cover the check I'd written to Eleanor. The website defaults to the last payment method used, and since I'd paid the Card A from personal funds earlier in the month, it assumed I wanted to pay Card B from there, too.
Fortunately, I noticed this early enough in the day yesterday, and was able to make an immediate transfer of the amount of the Card B payment from where I should've paid it from over to where I did. This morning confirmed it: I'd beaten my own check to the bank, and no bounced check fees were incurred on either her end or mine.
Yet here's the strange part: when I gave her that check first thing Friday morning? She stopped at an ATM to deposit it, and after two tries it spat it back to her undeposited. To avoid her being late for her procedure, we bailed on depositing it then, and I wound up taking it myself to another one of their branches and it wound up being deposited late in the day on Friday. I'll never know, but it's likely that if that check had gone in earlier in the day on Friday, it would have bounced. The fees would have been bad enough, but the ill will it would have caused? Whatever the opposite of priceless is.
There may or may not be a God, but if there is, I think He was inhabiting an ATM on Sheridan Drive Friday morning. Either that or He was just getting lost in our subdivision.
----
A final coincidence that may or may not have been one, but worked out well anyway:
Eleanor's procedure went fine on Friday, but it was delayed a bit in starting, so Eleanor suggested I make a run over to our local library to pick up a DVD she'd read about, The Bookshop. We watched that one on Friday and Saturday nights; it's the third, now, we've seen directed by Spanish film director Isabel Coixet, and stars Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy. On the way down the library shelf to pick that one up, a different film title also jumped out to my eye from the dozens shelved there:
GUN HILL ROAD
I took a total flyer on it and added it to the checkout. Why? It reminded me of my late sister Sandy; when she first got married just over 50 years ago, she and her husband had a fourth-floor apartment on a Bronx street just off that artery's intersection with the Bronx River Parkway. It was near the Montefiore Hospital that she worked at back then, and it's where my older niece first came home to live after her Manhattan birth in 1969.
The current state of the neighborhood, at least per the film, is very different. I've never gotten round to watching the film adaptation of LMM's In The Heights, but this covers much of the same territory without the homies spontaneously breaking into song-and-dance numbers in the middle of the street. Its nominal lead character is Enrique, a just-paroled husband and father who makes it back to the neighborhood to try to reclaim his life. A subplot follows the realities of his wife's having been unfaithful to him during (and to a lesser extent after) his imprisonment, but the real story of the film is the transitioning it shows of Vanessa. Born and now deadnamed Michael, Vanessa is played by a trans woman actress who captures the fear and frustration of how hard it is to come out and stay out, particularly in the face of resistance by her own father. Her scenes are amazing and touching, and her ending, if not her father's, is filled with hope. If you can find your way to Gun Hill Road, I don't think it will disappoint. Just don't get lost turning the wrong way in any streets in the neighborhood if there's an accident on the Bronx River Parkway;)
GPS helps visitors and delivery trucks find us, but they at least have an address. What happened the other night happens a few times a year: Sheridan or North Forest has a bad accident, and drivers bail onto one of those four entry points in hopes of coming out on the other state highway, or all the way down to Main Street to our south. They wind up forming a parade of gridlock that we get to watch from our living room, as some try to navigate the maze by turning away from our house, and just as many fail even worse by turning toward us, beginning an endless loop around the three streets including ours that form a very large oval back here.
The cars themselves aren't all that distracting to us, but they certainly are to any dogs who might be out. And our neighbors' purebred stud muffin of a black lab, Harley, was whining like a baby the whole time. (Despite the name, we've discovered he's even more afraid when motorcycles go by.) We both tried getting him to shut up, me while occasionally coming over to the stuck cars to try to help guide them out. It was an end to a long day that we really didn't need, but finally things got quiet enough to get some sleep so we could move on to the next accident,.... this one of bookkeeping.
----
As I've mentioned here, we've been trying to improve both finances and communication about them, including getting a financial planner involved. One cause of that was my not being fast enough on the draw to adjust my budget to realities of taxes. About this time three years ago, a major client of mine shifted from the part-time position I get a paycheck from (and taxes withheld on) to my primary practice where I just draw funds with no withholding. Long story short, in 2019 it resulted in our 2018 tax bill going unpaid long enough for the IRS to send each of us a certified letter. That scared Eleanor to death (turns out her sister lost a house to the IRS years ago), and she'd been equally annoyed when the 2019 taxes, filed in July of 2020, resulted in an earlier-stage notice from them. Those are now all paid, but some of it was done by putting the remaining balance on a no-interest credit account that has to be paid off by February 2022 to avoid any interest payment. To keep my eyes on that as the prize, I divided the amount by the 18 months until it has to be paid off, and promised Eleanor I would write a check every month and let her hold that accumulating fund until it all has to be paid in a year and a half.
I wrote, and handed her, that fiirst check first thing Friday morning, right before we drove off to her colonoscopy. It wasn't until yesterday morning that I realized that check might very well have bounced. It wasn't for lack of funds, but in their placement: I have two separate cards with one credit card company. Card A is a small one for personal use that we paid off out of the last refi, and it has a zero balance right now, but I pay what little is on it from my personal checking account every month. Card B is one I use for some business purchases, and I pay that in full from my business checking account on a slightly later date every month.
Or rather, I thought that's where I paid it from. When I was checking something else yesterday morning, I discovered that I'd made the much larger Card B payment for business from my personal checking account. That didn't leave enough to cover the check I'd written to Eleanor. The website defaults to the last payment method used, and since I'd paid the Card A from personal funds earlier in the month, it assumed I wanted to pay Card B from there, too.
Fortunately, I noticed this early enough in the day yesterday, and was able to make an immediate transfer of the amount of the Card B payment from where I should've paid it from over to where I did. This morning confirmed it: I'd beaten my own check to the bank, and no bounced check fees were incurred on either her end or mine.
Yet here's the strange part: when I gave her that check first thing Friday morning? She stopped at an ATM to deposit it, and after two tries it spat it back to her undeposited. To avoid her being late for her procedure, we bailed on depositing it then, and I wound up taking it myself to another one of their branches and it wound up being deposited late in the day on Friday. I'll never know, but it's likely that if that check had gone in earlier in the day on Friday, it would have bounced. The fees would have been bad enough, but the ill will it would have caused? Whatever the opposite of priceless is.
There may or may not be a God, but if there is, I think He was inhabiting an ATM on Sheridan Drive Friday morning. Either that or He was just getting lost in our subdivision.
----
A final coincidence that may or may not have been one, but worked out well anyway:
Eleanor's procedure went fine on Friday, but it was delayed a bit in starting, so Eleanor suggested I make a run over to our local library to pick up a DVD she'd read about, The Bookshop. We watched that one on Friday and Saturday nights; it's the third, now, we've seen directed by Spanish film director Isabel Coixet, and stars Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy. On the way down the library shelf to pick that one up, a different film title also jumped out to my eye from the dozens shelved there:
GUN HILL ROAD
I took a total flyer on it and added it to the checkout. Why? It reminded me of my late sister Sandy; when she first got married just over 50 years ago, she and her husband had a fourth-floor apartment on a Bronx street just off that artery's intersection with the Bronx River Parkway. It was near the Montefiore Hospital that she worked at back then, and it's where my older niece first came home to live after her Manhattan birth in 1969.
The current state of the neighborhood, at least per the film, is very different. I've never gotten round to watching the film adaptation of LMM's In The Heights, but this covers much of the same territory without the homies spontaneously breaking into song-and-dance numbers in the middle of the street. Its nominal lead character is Enrique, a just-paroled husband and father who makes it back to the neighborhood to try to reclaim his life. A subplot follows the realities of his wife's having been unfaithful to him during (and to a lesser extent after) his imprisonment, but the real story of the film is the transitioning it shows of Vanessa. Born and now deadnamed Michael, Vanessa is played by a trans woman actress who captures the fear and frustration of how hard it is to come out and stay out, particularly in the face of resistance by her own father. Her scenes are amazing and touching, and her ending, if not her father's, is filled with hope. If you can find your way to Gun Hill Road, I don't think it will disappoint. Just don't get lost turning the wrong way in any streets in the neighborhood if there's an accident on the Bronx River Parkway;)