Monday

This was a typical Busy Season Monday. Numerous calls on the office line and on the cell, meetings, emails and document requests. It will be more of the same over the next couple of weeks. Not a lot of fun.

1 reports that things are going well in PHX. This is the last week of Spring Training and the teams are trimming rosters and getting their line-ups set for next week's Opening Days. I think I made a couple of Cubs' Opening Days way back when in my C-town lifetime. Is there anything quite like the fresh start of baseball's new season? At Oh and Oh, every team has a chance.

The Cyclone women were over-matched tonight against Stanford. The Cardinal's inside players dominated the way-too-nice (and too-small) girls from Ames. ISU got as much out of their team as they could, and they represented the school admirably. Props to the 'Clones regardless of tonight's score.

I have mixed emotions about the White House engineering the departure of the GM head guy. On the one hand, I don't favor pouring money down the Detroit bailout cesspool. And GM has been an under-performing company for almost forever. On the other hand, (isn't that the title of a country song?), having the government making management decisions like this for specific companies is the top of the veritable slippery slope. I've said this before: the government can screw up anything.

Finally, I have another example of the limitations of my basic 21st century skills. I had a client send me by email a spreadsheet earlier this month detailing almost two hundred stock transactions. When I opened the attachment, there were more ####'s in the columns than actual numbers. The client was a new one who had literally bought into very a sophisticated, wizz-bang, can't-miss securities trading platform (that came with a 9 page instruction booklet for tax preparers). So I figured there was some mysterious message in the coded columns of the spreadsheet. So like all good CPA's with a full plate, I put the project aside for another day.

The client finally called Friday asking for his returns, so I had to dive into the spreadsheet. Which I had planned to do over the weekend. But that didn't happen. So late this afternoon, I finally pulled up the spreadsheet and did the thing I usually do when I'm stumped; I yelled over across the way to my pal Bill.

Bill took one look at the screen, said, "Whoa, what happened here?" He then did a few key strokes, widened the columns on the spreadsheet, and Wallah!!, numbers appeared! A couple more quick key strokes, and the columns were totaled and PC was in bid'ness.

I'm pathetic. Whatever I once knew in spreadsheet analysis, I have long ago forgotten.

So to bed and rest for those frazzled neurons in my cranium.

BCOT