CYA

CYA - Cover Your A$$

This little acronymn was around long before texting existed. It's a pretty good rule to go by since there have been shysters in the world long before texting too. Also, it should apply to the punks who walk around with their pants hanging below their butts. Buy a belt and CYA!!!

Speaking of punks & shysters, I was visiting the County Assessor's website this morning to see if they had updated the value (or de-value) of our house for 2011. (Actually, I don't know if the County Assessor is a shyster or a punk, that was just in reference to government in general.)

Even though evaluations were supposedly done as of January 1st, there isn't any sign of an update almost three months later. Oh, the speed of government.

Anywho, I took notice of the message on the assessors front page. Apparently, there are even more features and search functions for people to use to nose around in my business.

Yah, if you know my address, you can look up how big my house is, how much I paid for it, what the layout is, how much my taxes are, and a plethora of other busy body information that really isn't any anyone else's business. But in the interest of the "public" at large and people doing their own research before hiring a real estate agent, this is made available for all to see. Remember when you could only get that information from a real estate agent? Then, it was because you had a legitimate reason to know so you could make a decision on whether or not to buy the property. Now, anyone, ANYONE can poke around.

But I did get a little chuckle out of the last part of the message. The part where you can sent them a note about how they're doing or what features you would like to see (click on the pic if you can't see what the arrow is pointing to):



CYA! They even spell it out for you in case you forgot what the A stood for! And they're making sure they cover more than one - Go County Assessor for watching out for your peeps!

Silver Lining:

1. When our valuation doesn't come it at a rock bottom value, I'll be able to look at my neighbors valuations and recent sale prices to fight back. In that regard, I appreciate being part of the public.


2. I wonder if "belts" are part of the official dress code of the County Assessor's office. That makes me chuckle.

Things I Don't Get

• Why do women do the front of their hair and not the back? Like when they pull their hair back in a ponytail or a banana clip, but pull out enough of the sides to still curl and frame their face.



• Banana clips.



• Little girls wearing clothes more appropriate for today's teenagers. Not that teenagers always wear appropriate clothing, but still I should see a seven year old in short, short skirts and shirts that are little too short. And sometimes make up??



• Candles littering the house. Really? I know they smell good, but wouldn't one or two be enough? The collect dust in my house and they're a pain to clean. I've got those fake on my dining room sconces - the ones with a battery to light them up. They have a partially melted look and they flicker - cool, huh?



• Those pop-ups on Foxnews.com or MSN.com. The kind where you barely mouse over a word and they bring up addition information, but usually unrelated to the article. If I want to know more information, I'll click on it! At the very least, it should wait until I've paused on it for a couple of seconds. Geez.



• In Farmville, you can't rotate the buildings.



• In Farmville, you don't get to keep your own mystery eggs or the animals that wander onto your farm. They're your gosh darn chickens, you should be able to keep at least one! And if an animal wanders onto my farm, I think the "Finders, Keepers" rule should apply.



• Mafia Wars.



• Democrats.



• People who feel the need to have the make of their car across the top of their windsheild. Dude, I can see that you drive a Subaru.



• Pink hair. Or purple. Or blaze orange.



• My daughter having a week off of school for quarter break and another week off for Easter break. She's off this week and again the first or second week of April. WTF??? That costs me a lot of money when it comes to daycare.



• Building a new elementary school and only sending K-2 to it and leaving 3-5 in the old school. You'd think they would just divide the school district. I know a lot of parents who are being forced to pick up their kids at two different schools, 12 miles apart, that get out at the same time. All the schools are currently on the same campus surrounded by corn fields. Buying additional land for another school building from the farmer wasn't an option?



• People who don't delete the forwarding e-mail junk before the real message. Especially when it's a joke - I'm bored before I get there and then it isn't as funny.



• Junk e-mail.



• Spam.



• Ballpoint pens that ooze.



• Why people still buy and use regular pencils when mechanical ones are so much more efficient. Who wants to walk all the way to a pencil sharpener? Or hunt around for one? Or empty it when it's full of shavings - those carbon shavings can make a mess similar to when toner gets out of the container on the copier or printer.



• People who don't replenish paper in the copier or printer.



• People who walk away from a jam in the copier or printer.



• People who regularly send 300 page documents to the printer in the middle of the day. Wait until early morning or late afternoon people!



• Bloggers who don't post anything for two weeks. Oops, that's me. Sorry.

Well, I guess this post would be better suited for Random Tuesday Thoughts, but I don't get these things today. Tomorrow it may be all better, and therefore, not as timely. So there you go.

Silver Lining:

1. I'm sure I have readers out there who can explain these things to me so I get them.


2. There are lots of things I do get. Like why my kids are so smart and so stinkin' cute (not that I'm biased or anything), how Mary Kay is the best skin care routine for the best value, cars need gas to run, you have to work instead of blogging in order to keep your job, etc.

Jury Duty . . .

You get the summons in the mail and groan.

Nobody really wants to serve on a jury, but it’s something almost all of us with a driver’s license will have to suffer through one day. It’s our “civic duty” – gag me!

I got my first summons and had to report to the court house yesterday. It’s amazing how many people think they are way more important than everyone else so they should be excused.

First off, I was Juror 206 out of ???. All that mattered was Jurors 1 thru 210 had to report, unless you had already been excused. Apparently, 114 people had come up with good excuses when the summons first showed up in their mailboxes because of the 210, only 96 of us had to report. I should have put something on the form – what’s the most outrageous, hardly believable, but somewhat probable excuse I could have come up with?

Request for excuse: I can not report for jury duty on October 20th because I’m sure my parents are coming to get me on that day. I was left on the door step of the local Walgreen’s with a broken locket inscribed with 1020 W. From what I understand, there was a flash of light in the sky and a shiny disk flew away after I was placed in a plastic basket that had been left outside. Each year on October 20th, I sit patiently at the Walgreen’s, waiting for their return. I’ll know it’s them because they will have the other half of the locket with the rest of my real name on it. You see, “1020” must refer to October 20th & the “W” is the first letter of my first name, which is really “Weglesnar”. I have a spooky feeling this is going to be the year. The courts certainly would not want to be responsible for me missing out on this once in a lifetime event.

You think they would buy it?

Of the people who didn’t have written excuses and had to show up, three stood out:

One lady showed up with her baby in a stroller. She claimed her sitter had an emergency so she had to bring her son with her. For all I know, she borrowed a kid from a neighbor. Good gig – I’ll have to remember that for next time. Can you just imagine me dragging in Cupie? I’m sure I could train her to annoy everyone with a bunch of silly kid questions until they offered to pay me to take her away. Wait a minute, she is pretty good at that silly kid question thing. It wouldn’t take much to crank it up to REALLY annoying.

Another guy lamented about the fact that he was leaving for an “executive conference” on Tuesday. If he got picked for jury duty, he would be the only executive in his company not in attendance. Wah, wah, wah. “All the other kids got to go!” It was probably some motivational pow-wow where they all go boating, deep sea fishing, or some other unnecessary executive perk-ing.

A nurse in a chemo-therapy office said her boss was probably just going nuts today. “I don’t know how they are going to make it through the day without me” – can you say “DIVA!” Apparently, she asked for an excuse letter, but her employer would not provide one because they feel it is a person’s civic duty to serve. If her absence was really going to put them in some kind of terrible bind, surely, they would have made an exception. Anybody who thinks they are irreplaceable is in for a rude awakening one day.

Sure, I did my share of complaining. Who wouldn’t? I sat there all day and never saw the inside of a courtroom. I complained about what I could have done instead of sitting there, but I knew I didn’t have a real excuse so I sucked it up. I certainly did not make comments that would insinuate that my time was more important than anyone else’s.

Life is life – get on with it!

Silver lining:
I got to read the first couple chapters of a new book – I didn’t even have to sneak away to the bathroom for peace & quiet.
I discovered my electronic “Sudoku” game needed new batteries because it had been left on last time someone (probably me) played with it. I’ll know to check it next time.
I now know how long I can sit in a metal chair before my butt goes numb – it’s about 1 ½ hours, in case you were wondering.