Get That Chair Out of the Way

Lion tamer, Clyde Beatty was the first person to bring a chair into the circus ring to tame lions and other large cats.  A whip is just for show but a chair has a real purpose. the lion gets confused when confronted by the four legs of the chair all at once and rather than attack, it sits and waits. Likewise, when you have too many tasks in front of you confusion will set in and you won't accomplish much of anything.

Spring is such an incredibly busy time of year for me. Not only do I attempt spring cleaning indoors but the gardens need to be cleaned up too. A bit of early planting wouldn't hurt either. On top of that, I do taxes for everyone in this family and am grateful that is finally out of the way.

Mother Nature has discouraged me from doing much outside work so far, but I did manage to haul some rocks from a neighbour's house to my rock river last week.  I do need a few more though. This week promises better weather. I have a lot of dead stuff to cut down yet, as I left some of it over winter for the birds. It will be harder to rake the leaves out of the flower beds as it's been left so late this year and all my millions of bulb are growing well, and many are even flowering.

Spring cleaning got off to a good start but has now stalled as I got busy doing other things. Oh, and once again I'm adding fuel to my fire by doing various art projects. I've just finished a five-day course on drawing facial features and started another face drawing course this week with a different teacher. I'm also trying to at least watch the videos for a Sketchbook Revival course, and wishing I could find the time to do at least some of the class work along with the others involved. The card making course I started before Christmas still has not been completed as I keep getting involved in card exchanges with other students throughout the world.  I'm just finishing one of those now. So much to do, so little time, and it's easy to get confused as to where to turn next.

 Many people don't have trouble focusing on a task once they get started but they do have trouble deciding on what to do.  We all have to learn to get the chair out of the way and choose a task. Today I chose to finally post to this blog. Next, I will do my month end accounting for my business, and then I will get out to mail the latest batch of cards and do some garden work while I'm out there. At noon I'll watch a live presentation on attacking how to draw a face while I have my lunch. After doing some housework, or perhaps more gardening, I'll do my homework for that course. Supper is already made, thank goodness.  I'm sure I'll get distracted along the way, but I have a course of action and am bound to succeed at accomplishing some of it today.  I can already check the blog post off the list, eh.

The Furniture Story -- The Final Chapter

As I've told you before, I bought new furniture in March, but there were a few problems with both the original delivery and the replacement set 

The third time they sent a truck, they just brought me a chair and a loveseat, as I had accepted the replacement couch from the second set they delivered.  The guy came in, checked to see what kind of problem I had with the pieces he was about to replace,  then he went out to the truck and proceeded to pull the plastic off the furniture right there, instead of bringing it indoors first. Good thing he did that too, as he found the same kind of damage. In fact one of the pieces was actually split right up one side.  This means that the store had sent a truck, with two men, to my house three times, delivering a total of eight pieces of furniture, and only one of those was undamaged. (well, there is a flaw with that one too, but it was of a different nature and I didn't notice it for the first couple of weeks).

The store phoned and was prepared to give us a further discount on the loveseat, but they were going to send a man out to repair the chair.  Apparently he had to find the fabric first.  I wasn't sure how they thought he could repair this problem here, and I was somewhat worried that he would make it worse, or more noticeable, especially since I knew they would have a hard time replacing the piece I had. And why did they think they could repair one piece, and not the other, when they both have the same problem?  After some thought, I suggested that hubby tell them we would accept the same amount of discount towards the chair as they were willing to give us for the loveseat.  They immediately claimed they couldn't do that, and offered a much smaller amount. Hubby pointed out that it would likely cost them more than we were asking to send the man and material out here to do the job.  After only a brief hesitation, he agreed, and we were given the added discount. 

When we went in to get the credit card adjusted once again, my hubby looked at the receipt they tried to give him and saw that they had split the amount so that it included the taxes.  He objected, and said they promised us a certain amount and that he wanted the taxes on that amount, not included in it. He pointed out that if someone something back to where he works, they would get back the original purchase price plus the taxes and that this should work that way too.  He must have had enough of this nonsense to have tried for this extra bit, but hey, it worked. 

The fellow took another two weeks to get here to put the protective spray on though, since the phone number we were originally given was for someone who has not covered this area in over two years.  

So, now I have new furniture that is actually mine, and protected, even if it is not in perfect shape. For what we ended up paying for it, when all is said and done, we made out better than the store did, I'm sure.

Enough Already!

Last year I told you all about my string of good luck.  Well, the planets must have shifted positions because now things are just not going all that well in my world.

The computer I normally do the taxes on is very old, and temperamental so I decided to load the tax software onto my hubby's machine this year. I do taxes for most of my family, and managed to get three out of the five done before I got the paperwork for the other two. There are things missing for those, so I have to wait. Meanwhile hubby was on Kijiji the other day and picked up a virus on his machine.  So far, I've only printed off one of the three completed taxes.  Now we have this virus to contend with before I can proceed. Time is quickly running out.

I believe I mentioned that we had recently purchased some new furniture.  We thought we had lucked out finding something so comfortable on a day when it happened to be 50% off.  But they managed to damage all 3 pieces somewhere along the way. It's like they took it off the truck, set it down on one corner and pivoted it before picking up that end. There is one worn corner on each piece, and we are hoping to get it all replaced.

The assessor was supposed to show up on Thursday, but he never came.  Hubby even took the day off to deal with him. Meanwhile, the tags remain on the furniture, and we are being overly protective of it, so they can't say we did any further damage.  We had a 4 year old here a week ago, for the day. I covered everything with blankets and was amazed he didn't decide it was time to make forts!


Today, I went to my exercise class, and before leaving I went off to visit the washroom.  I found myself stuck in the stall. The lock wouldn't release.  I ended up having to crawl out under the door.  That is not an easy task at my age, but I can't  help being a bit glad it was me, and not any of the others in the class. It's a seniors class, after all, with people in their 80's and  and others with bad hips, bad knees, and other problems. I was in there, and everyone else was leaving the building. One of the others could have been trapped for who knows how many days, until another group rented the hall and they were discovered and set free.  Scary thought. I stopped by the municipal office on the way home, to alert them to the locked door I had left behind. 

There have been a couple of other problems lately too, mostly related to one institution or another, so it would take much too long to fill you in on those. Suffice it to say that any operation with the power to screw you up is busy doing that to me these days, so you can relax.

I was going to go to the Fashion over 50 presentation at the Library this afternoon, but it's brewing up  a storm out there, and with my luck, some big branch would fall on my head as I walked across town.  I think I'll just stay here and read.