I’ve been in a seminar all week and haven’t really had much to say worth posting. Hopefully next week will be back to normal.
In Closing: looks like a great way to drown; doesn’t everyone need one; wealth gap; “you people“; is the media going to let them get away with an outright lie?; an odd proposal with interesting connotations (Zoolander Zoolander Zoolander); and you don’t normally find something this cute in a wrecking yard.
Sad news today. Andy Griffith has passed away. Maybe you knew him from television? The man only had two monstrous TV hits and 6 decades of acting credits! What I didn’t realize is that he had a degree in music.
Rest in Peace.
In Closing: it’s more than a “sex” scandal; the bad idea of a national ID card is back; common sense on diet selection; hmm; let’s not confuse the issues with a bunch of facts; free ebooks; the very idea of stranger danger is dangerous; turns out drivers have to pay attention when driving a stick shift; I’d like to see this poster hanging in every high school in America; Reagan; racism and food stamps; they needed a study to say “gluten free doesn’t necessarily mean healthy”; sounds like a neat place; what’s illegal in Vegas stays in Macau; not a bad idea; and I thought I’d seen a bunch of these around town (just think if the dealership weren’t so teeny and there weren’t construction out front for most of the last year).
My wallet needs a little cleaning out. It’s got a little cash, a couple credit cards, some loyalty cards for various businesses, an ATM card, a couple business cards, some old receipts, and a drivers license.*
You know what it doesn’t contain?
Proof that I am a United States Citizen, legally entitled to work in and be in this country.
And let’s get technical now, even if I were to stuff my short form birth certificate in there, it might not be good enough.**
Sure, I’m not worried if I go to Arizona. First of all if I’m in Arizona that means I’m at SkyHarbor with my passport waiting on a flight. Second, I’m a middle aged, middle class white woman. Supreme Court rulings aside, the odds of some random cop deciding I might not be a citizen are rather small! People of color and poor people are much more likely to find themselves trying to prove they are citizens.
I heard an interview with an ACLU representative this week and they are already on the lookout for profiling. Be sure to give them a call if you are a person of color targeted by Arizona cops.
Heh, not that cops in Maricopa County give a damn about the ACLU or court rulings.
In closing: not a bad idea; eminent domain and censorship; elitism; and apparently in Mexico it’s ok to arrest somebody for something his dad did.
* A drivers license shows that I can drive a car (legally and safely, one would hope). Technically it is also proof of identity. It is not proof of citizenship.
**And that’s why birther ramblings are dangerous to all of us. If the President can’t prove he’s an American, neither can you.
Ok, let’s talk about these damned flavored vodkas. I’m not talking about old fashioned infusions you might find lovingly prepared at better bars, I’m talking about the artificially colored/flavored junk cluttering up the shelves at my local liquor store. It’s getting stupid out there. Many of the fruit ones taste like freakin cough syrup (I’m talking to you, Absolut!). But now we’ve got crap flavors like cake, marshmallow, and whipped cream.
Listen kids, if you don’t like how real vodka tastes, don’t drink it!
In closing: Princess; turns out the so-called pro-life nuts were wrong about Plan B; unintended side effect; unprepared; gold; he’s baaaaaack; maybe I spoke too soon about hope.
Ok, let me start by saying that I’m as outraged as anybody that we have JUDGES in this country that can’t seem to use good JUDGEment.
The story of the 17 year old honor student jailed overnight for truancy has made the rounds. It’s very sympathetic. She works a full time job and a part time job to support her siblings and still manages to pull down good grades. The judge felt he had to make an example out of her. Wow, what a heartless judge, right?
Some people think this is a travesty because “how is putting her in jail going to put her in school.” Some say it’s a travesty just because the situation is ludicrous — after all she’s an honor student, not some gang-banger. Some say it’s a travesty because she’s old enough to drop out of school with her parents‘ written consent.
And, you see, that’s the real problem that everybody seems to have missed, including the judge. Her parents are gone. Split up, one no longer even in the state and the other only occasionally around, not really in her life. She shouldn’t have to work 2 jobs to support her siblings and herself. No 17 year old should have to do that. When the judge realized that she was a minor and her parents were not there, he should have adjourned to call Child Protective Services. You know, the government agency that protects children. She and the younger sister should be with a foster family today, she should be able to at the very least quit one of her jobs, and her truancy problems should be over.
Who is the adult here? Sadly, the 17 year old truant who can’t even sign a binding legal document is.
In Closing: consumer lack of confidence; easy ways to end up in indefinite detention; and a list of keywords that the Department of Homeland Security is watching for. If this list is correct, the DHS must spend a lot of time looking for secret messages in newspapers and blogs.
Seriously, happy thoughts for all moms everywhere.
In Closing: Duhpartment of Research says training employees is important; negative net worth; Seriously? W called Alberto Gonzales “Fredo?; Duhpartment of Research also finds “you are what you read“; buried in student loans; and 86,000,000 uncounted unemployed.
So Kansas wants to make it perfectly legal for a doctor to lie to a dumb bitch pregnant woman. Let me provide my own commentary on the ACLU’s points:
It would provide legal protection to a doctor who discovers that a baby will be born with a devastating condition and deliberately withholds that information from his patient because he doesn’t want her to seek an abortion. That means a doctor could decide to lie about the results of a woman’s prenatal test so that she won’t have information that she needs to make the best decision for her circumstances.
In other words, a doctor can make a woman give birth to a baby with birth defects that she can’t provide for financially or emotionally. Sorry, the days of “put the abomination in an institution” are long over. I’ve already discussed that this is fraud.
The bill attempts to scare women by forcing doctors to tell patients about a supposed link between abortion and breast cancer — a risk that the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and other medical experts roundly reject .
Doctors are not only allowed to lie to patients, they are forced to lie to patients.
This bill would also require public hospitals to turn away a woman who desperately needs an abortion to prevent serious harm to her health. The extremists pushing this bill would have a hospital tell a very sick woman that she should come back when her pregnancy is about to kill her, even if that risks her future fertility or causes organ failure.
I’m not sure what the definition of “public hospital” is here: hospitals owned by government entities (rather than corporations or charitable organizations) or just hospitals open to the public. Nevertheless, this is like telling someone with chest pains to come back when they are sure it’s a heart attack.
Now here’s the thing. Where are the doctors on this? Why aren’t doctors screaming that this law puts women in danger? Why aren’t doctors pointing out that this bill requires them to lie to patients? Why am I the one pointing out that even with this fig leaf of a bill it’s going to bite doctors on the ass to tell a patient that everything is fine when it isn’t?
AMA? AOA? ACOG? This is the second state that wants to say it’s acceptable to conceal important medical information. I don’t even know how many states require doctors to lie about breast cancer. At least one state requires expensive, medically unnecessary procedures before an abortion, and more states are considering it. Where’s your statement on this? How does this square with your legal and ethical requirements to do the right thing for patients?
How long before employers decide they just can’t do business in a state where their female employees face obstacles to sometimes (regrettably) medically necessary care, and where a routine pregnancy can mean losing employees who must become full time caregivers for a baby with severe birth defects?
In Closing: Ninja; that resume can go in the trash; on J.P. Morgan; how did we get to a lunch revolution?; and NAFTA vs. China.
This week’s Life Well Lived question is:
How do you organize paperwork both online and off? Share your tip(s) to managing physical and digital clutter!
Be sure to visit BlogHer’s main post on the topic and add your comments. While you’re in the area, don’t forget to enter the current Life Well Lived sweepstakes.
I will be honest. Stuff tends to pile up on my desk. Thankfully, my brokerage has a really great digital document storage system to help me keep that stuff organized properly.
File folders are great things. Heck, folders in general are great things. It makes it a lot easier to keep related items together: bills to be paid, receipts, tax documents, Christmas cards, appliance manuals, whatever. When you’re done, it goes into a filing cabinet where it’s easy to find right up until the day you don’t need it any more and can shred it. Pro-tip: label folders with a fine point marker or permanent ink pen and do your best to make it easy to read.
This still leaves a pile on the corner of my desk that I must go through and ruthlessly prune about once a month.
I organize email with folders too. A folder called “Receipts 2012” contains exactly what you think it does. Maybe there’s one called “Smith” that has all my correspondence with a client named Mr. Smith. It also contains scans of his documents and emails back and forth to the title company. And once my transaction with Mr. Smith is done, the whole folder gets archived.
I’d like to say my hard drive is that well organized. Thank goodness OSX does a lot of this stuff automatically: apps end up in the “Applications” folder without too much effort on my part. “Downloads” go into the right folder unless I specifically save it elsewhere — and yes I periodically have to purge that folder.
So that’s my tip. No fancy organizers beyond a vertical file holder on my desk and a filing cabinet in my home office. Cheap and easy to implement.
In Closing: Jon Lovitz 3, anti-Semite teenagers 0; 6000 Japanese vocabulary words; War on Drugs is a failure; drone on; life in space may have come from Earth; security theatre; no kidding; follow up on unlicensed doctors; tornado alley is bigger, climate change deniers blame almost anything but climate change; over 1 in 5 health care dollars spent is because of obesity; and no, it’s not illegal to use a cell phone while driving in Nevada! It’s illegal to use one without a hands free device.
One of the things I like about being involved with projects like Life Well Lived is that it forces me to stretch a little bit out of my comfort zone and write about rather irregular topics: things I otherwise would never dream of writing about. So today’s post won’t be about economics or politics or strange stuff from the news or even funny pictures. Today I’ll be answering a serious question:
What are your favorite spring cleaning tips? Do you have any to add to Alicia’s 10-minutes-or-less list?
Ok, Who’s Alicia? Fair question. Alicia wrote this post on 10 Minute Spring Cleaning Tips. She’s got some interesting points that might work well for a family, but probably aren’t as helpful to people who live alone (or just plain end up doing all the housework themselves for whatever reason).
Ironically, guests at my office meeting this week included a cleaning company, whose advice for Spring Cleaning was simple: Hire us!
Now it’s worth confessing that I don’t do Spring Cleaning beyond opening windows whenever the weather is nice. Nope. The one thing I do that comes close is “Oh nuts we have guests who will be staying with us” cleaning. This involves making sure the guest room is clean with fresh sheets on the bed, putting out towels where guests cannot help but find them, and making sure that bathrooms are squeaky-clean.
I just simply don’t think that saving up the cleaning for Spring is a good idea. Most of the stuff that falls onto the list are things we should be attending to regularly in small doses rather than one marathon session. Sure, sometimes clutter builds up and needs to be swept away. “I can’t find a damn thing in this drawer” is a better excuse to clean a junk drawer than “It’s SPRINGTIME!!” Sane people clean out the fridge when they get home from the grocery store with more stuff, because otherwise the new stuff won’t fit! Sure, sometimes something falls through the cracks and gets forgotten. There’s no need to wait until Spring to take care of it.
In short, if you spent 10 minutes a day doing cleaning and maintenance around your home, you won’t have to make a big deal out of Spring Cleaning: it will already be done.
Like many people, I’ve got stuff that must be done: bills to pay, people to see, floors to clean, you know the drill. And like many people, I find it’s easy to let things slip away if I don’t stay organized. I’m a big believer in “to do lists,” because it’s easy to see what you’ve done and what needs to be done. However, it’s easy to let the chaos of your everyday life spill over into your list.
I’ve got two main methods for keeping a to do list. The first is the “4 boxes” method. I take a piece of notebook paper and divide it into quarters. The first box is labeled Personal, and here’s where I write stuff I have to do for myself:
Box two is for things I do for my family:
Box 3 and 4 are flexible, and you can do with them what you like. Perhaps yours are Work and School or Charity. If your job is pretty much the same thing every day, you probably won’t need a box for it. I’m my own business, so I need two! My third box is Client Service, things I do for my existing clients:
That leaves box 4 for Lead Generation/Follow-Up:
Go ahead and write it all down, but pay particular attention to stuff you don’t do everyday — unless you’re trying to build a new good habit or it’s something you tend to forget. Happily put small things down for the express purpose of crossing it off and feeling good about it.
On the other hand, if you get overwhelmed by a large list like this, I’ve got a new trick that seems to be working well. A motivational speaker came to my office and suggested writing down only the top 5 things that absolutely have to be done today. Well, it occurred to me that not much more than 5 items will fit on a sticky-note. You can stick it to your phone, inside your date book, to the sun visor of your car, to your desk, or pretty much any other place you’ll see it a dozen times a day. Ok, sometimes I cram 6 or even 7 items onto that note. They get done, and that’s the important part.
Ok, ready for In Closing?: resume; clear your search history; and we pay the bill; fat is not the enemy; inflation; the agenda; if they’re following the rules, they have nothing to worry about; and Occupy is still out there.