Unusual or Infrequent Items

If you're not an accountant or frequent user of financial statements, you probably just looked at my subject line and said Wha...? It's a phrase that cost me at least an hour of confusion Sunday night, because of two nearly identical questions in a CPA review module in which I missed the fact that one said "unusual or infrequent" and the other said "unusual and infrequent," and my unfamiliarity with the way the module shows you where you went wrong. If it's both unusual and infrequent, it's called an "extraordinary item." If it's only one or the other, by GAAP criteria, it's not extraordinary.

By those standards, I guess today wasn't extraordinary.

Starting this entry with the above is what's known in an entirely different profession as "burying the lede." But I have my reasons.

I got a job today. I wish I were more happy about it.

As per my usual ethical stance on discussing my job online, I'm not going to say too much about it. I can tell you that it's a seasonal position doing income taxes, something I haven't been applying for because my only income tax experience consists of one class 3 1/2 years ago, doing my own taxes using TurboTax, messing around with TaxCut, and doing my mom's 1040EZ exactly once circa 2001. I figured I wasn't qualified, not without some training, at least.

I start this job at ten o'clock MST tomorrow morning, pretty much the exact time Barack Obama starts his new job on the East Coast. I may or may not get some training when I arrive at work. Otherwise, I'll have to refer people to another location or ask them to come back later in the week or something. Don't worry; I won't do anyone's taxes tomorrow morning on unfamiliar software while someone sits at my desk. Probably. The good news is that I'm very good at learning new software, the venue is expected to have mostly people with very simple returns, and I'll be referring anything tricky to a CPA offsite.

The money isn't terribly good, but it beats the heck out of McDonald's or unemployment payments. And tax accounting is a good skill to pick up for future employability.

Why am I not thrilled to finally get a job? One is that I'll be paid a lower wage than I would have considered four months ago. Two is that it's another temp thing, so I'm still not secure. Three I'm not prepared to discuss. I'm hoping that it will all be worth it, though, good experience and a good bridge to a better job when the economy starts recovering.

Meanwhile, it's led me to a decision I hadn't even considered until about half an hour ago. As you may know, I've been spending many hours at this computer the last few days, struggling through an assignment for an online seminar. The first assignment, emailed Saturday night at 11PM MST, was to complete all the reading and get a score of at least 90% on all the online tests for the following modules:

1. Environment of Financial Accounting
2. Financial Accounting
3. FASB's Conceptual Framework 1
4. FASB's Conceptual Framework 2
5. The Balance Sheet and Disclosures
6. Related Party and Subsequent Events
7. Income Statement
8. Discontinued Operations
9. Extraordinary Items
10. Comprehensive Income
11. Earnings Per Share 1
12. Earnings Per Share 2
13. Statement of Cash Flows 1
14. Statement of Cash Flows 2
15. Statement of Cash Flows 3

I had already done the first two when the email arrived, but that left me with 13 more to do in approximately two days. Since the grading is Tuesday and no time was listed, I was shooting for having it all done by 9AM Tuesday, which would leave me all day to watch the inauguration, visit my 103-year-old friend Eva, give blood, and get a jump on the next assignment before it arrived.

I have started using my old textbook to help with concepts I've forgotten.

Only I'll now be working 10-7 tomorrow. And as of tonight, after hours or struggle with Earnings Per Share I, I still have four modules to get through by morning, none of which have anything to do with reviewing personal income tax concepts. I'm taking much longer than the average student on many of these things, probably because my original coursework was in 2003 and 2004 and I'm getting a little distracted at times. (A little? Ha!) I could get it all done by tomorrow morning, but only if I start a new job on three or four hours of sleep. And how do I complete another 15 modules every two or three days once I'm working full time?

Dug out my income tax textbook, too!

Fortunately, I have an alternative. The course is set up so that I can add or drop a seminar at any time. So I just dropped the January 18, 41-day seminar, and picked up the 61-day one that starts January 29. This means I've already put a dent in the coursework for the later course, which will give me a little time to get even farther ahead, and see if there are any modules that will help me develop a better conceptual basis for the new job.

I kind of feel as though I've been defeated by the 41-day course, and I'm being a quitter. But I know better. I'm basically adding 11+15=26 days to my preparation time for an exam I haven't even applied to take yet. And it gives me a much more rational schedule to accomplish things in, given my unusual or infrequent (but not both) new job circumstance. I can even use the lag time to get through more modules of the AUD (Auditing) course, which is 8% completed already.

But for tonight, I'm saying goodbye to earnings per share. I'm going to look up info on the tax software I'll be using, study income tax in general a little bit, watch a little Doctor Who, and try for a good night's sleep.

My last weekday sunset at the dog park for a while.

Yeah. I feel better already.

Karen

EMPS: Ah, Youth! Back When They Were Youthier!

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #21: Youngins', Carly wants to see photos of something young, as in babies, kids, etc. of any species. I'm kind of stuck in the house today with two adult dogs and a fridge full of aged food, so I'm going to the archives, looking for photos I haven't posted before.

There are actually quite a few pictures of kids that I took in 2005 and never posted until now, out of concerns about security and privacy and all that. But now I figure these are fair game. The kids won't look the same by now, and they won't be in the same places, and I'm not giving names or personal details. And frankly, many of these shots are too far away and out of focus to really show kids' faces. Nevertheless, some of this shots are particular favorites of mine. Let's see what we've got!

Kids at the Park Place Mall play area, April 2005

From my Picasa album EMPS

Back in April 2005 I photographed kids in the hospital-sponsored play area at Park Place Mall. (This was years before a security guard told me that photography at the mall wasn't allowed without written permission.) I posted two shots at the time, but these are some of the also-rans. I like the play area: it's full of colorful, oversize representations of desert critters, and there are pretty much always lots of kids running around on the padded carpeting, watched by adults along the sidelines.

The second shot of this other set is one of my favorite photos ever. These adorable little girls were at the English Tea put on by ECW (Episcopal Church Women) at the English Faire at St. Michael's Episcopal Church in September 2005. I assume they're the grandchildren of the two parishioners who brought them. One of the little girls had never been to a church before, and thought St. Michael was a fairy because of the wings.

I'm chafing a little here about the National Day of Service on this Martin Luther King Day - I really want to help out, but I have eight more modules to get through on my FAR homework. I think I'll grab my FAR textbook and head over to the Red Cross. I stopped giving blood months ago due to a nagging cough, but that's pretty much gone now. What are you doing today?

Be sure to check Carly's blog Ellipsis every Monday for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot topic, and for links to the previous week's participants! As for me, I'll make the rounds when I can.

Karen

Busy, Busy

"I went to your blog this morning," John said as I was about to leave for church, "expecting to read that you were about to be terribly busy and wouldn't be blogging much." Obviously, what he saw instead was last night's entry about all the time I put in yesterday on the two web sites. Why didn't I write about how busy I was about to be? Simple. I've been so busy that I hadn't gotten around to this entry yet. If you're keeping track, this is my Saturday night entry, being posted on Sunday afternoon.

Last night, as I went through those pages about Father Smith's pilgrimage over and over, fixing old links and unhelpful font sizes and adding links to the new page I built, four things happened.

One, I put in a little time trying to reassure and motivate a friend, something I was happy to do - and I hope it helped a little.

Two, during a break, I refreshed a page tracking a package from Amazon on the USPS web site. It said the package had been delivered! What? I'd been outside earlier, taking the dogs to the park and later going off to buy groceries, and there were no boxes by the front door. But on getting this notice, I got my shoes on and went outside. Both of my boxes from Amazon were in our mailbox, which was a neat trick. The larger of the two boxes was nine inches with, and so is our mailbox! It took quite a bit of work to extricate the box; it was really wedged in there.

So now I've got the Series Four soundtrack from Doctor Who, finally, which I'll probably be playing on a continuous loop for a while, judging from the previous two soundtracks. I also received The Joys of Love by Madeleine L'Engle, an early, rejected novel of hers, published posthumously. Much as I love L'Engle's fiction, her early books have an odd writing style I've always found a little offputting. It's too soon to say whether this book has that same style, exactly, but it's clearly not her best work. The back cover excerpt is awkwardly romantic: "Elizabeth's heart winged with happiness as it always did when Kurt spoke to her in that gentle, loving way." If that sentence is typical of the book, I don't blame the publisher for saying no to it. Still, "new" L'Engle fiction, more than a year after her death, is to be treasured.

The other book that arrived is The Mislaid Magician, or Ten Years After, the third novel by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevemer about those letter writing cousins, Cecy and Kate, which I've wanted rather badly since reading the second volume back in September. Think of Jane Austin, only funnier and with magic, and you've got a fair idea what these books are like. So far I've read one and a half letters at the beginning of the book, and there I must stop for now. Because...

Three, two emails arrived from my CPA review course folks at 11 PM last night. Today, Sunday January 18th, is the official start of the 41-day FAR (Financial Accounting and Reporting) seminar I signed up for 11 days ago. I had worked ahead since then, completing two FAR lessons and six AUD (Auditing) ones. Now I much set the AUD ones aside, because I've got fifteen FAR lessons due by Tuesday! Subtracking the two I've done, that 13 in two days! (Man, that's worse than I remembered it being when I first looked at the assignment last night.) It says three days, but it also says the work will be graded on Tuesday, so I figure I need to be done by 9 AM MST Tuesday, since these folks are also based in AZ.

Well, I can do it. The lessons so far have only been hard insofar as there's a bit of rote memorization of terms here and there, and a lot of reasoning out what the question is asking, which numbers are irrelevant, and whether certain numbers need to be added or subtracted. The assignment turns out to be doing exactly what I've been doing so far anyway: read the text, do two kinds of tests in study mode in order to learn the material and reason things through, and then take the tests again, with the questions in a different order, in test mode. The second test is mostly past CPA exam questions. Study mode usually explains why an answer is right or wrong, which helps a lot. Test mode replicates the environment of the actual CPA exams, which also helps a lot.

Bottom line for now: expect short entries of mostly photos for a next coulple of days. You don;t mind, do you? 'Cause that's the way it's got to be. I don't (completely) skip a day no matter what, but clearly I've got to give priority to the CPA stuff.

Oh, and the fourth thing that happened last night? That was my computer slowing down and nearly crashing under the burden of all those Firefox and SeaMonkey and MS Word and PhotoStudio and Windows windows. I did a reboot and backup this morning before going to bed, and will try to keep the number of open apps down today.

See you when I come up for air!

Karen

Confessions of an Inept Webmaster

Yes, I know I'm late with this blog entry; under the old schedule, when I always blogged before sleeping, this by rights would be my Friday night entry. But I'm here now, and I want to say a few words about webmastering.

I'm not very good at it.

Today, for example, I reloaded a Google Webmaster Tools page, and followed a link to something that told me about bad links Google has found. Having spent many hours over the past few weeks trying to eliminate such things, I was, shall we say, disappointed. So I fixed the ones that hadn't already been fixed (I hope!), and went on to work on something else I've been meaning to do: a custom 404 page. A 404 page, in case you don't know or have forgotten, is one of those annoying pages that tell you that the link you clicked or the web address you typed or pasted is wrong, wrong, wrong, and doesn't connect you to anything but an error message. If I can't completely eliminate such errors for all time on my site, I can at least have a 404 page with some personality, and helpful links.

Having struggled with font sizes and compatibility issues with all the other pages I've worked on recently, I thought about using one of the page building programs that come with my Yahoo web hosting service. I quickly discovered that I hate their Pagebuilder just as much in 2009 as I hated their Sitebuilder in 2002 (or whenever it was). The page comes with preformatted boxes that float on the page according to some fixed coordinates, rather than simply being centered. Maybe I'm a Luddite about this, but I'm much more comfortable putting a table in the center of the page, defining a certain number of pixels (I used to do percentages), and putting everything in there, knowing it will be centered (I hope) in any browser and screen resolution.

So I dumped the Pagebuilder window, and started my page in SeaMonkey, which has its own issues. The first part of that was fun: I went looking for a goofy picture of myself to go with the idea of being dismayed at getting a 404 page. I settled on the one above.

I'm going to publish this entry now and then keep working on it. Be right back!

I'm back. Anyway, I plopped a table on the new 404 page, added the photo on the top left, wrote an intro, and started listing links in a "Real Links" list. To make that link part easier, I opened the sitemap page I sent Google in the last day or two, and promptly discovered that it's not as complete as I thought. As I understand it, a sitemap is supposed to list every page on a website, along with data on how important the page is and how often Google should check it for updates. After much work, I'd gotten a third party sitemap generator to list 37 pages with no obvious bad links. Sound like a lot for a personal website, yes? But it doesn't list my Madeleine L'Engle pages, or the old church website, which forwards to the new church website. And on top of that, there are a handful of oddball web pages on the mavarin.com version of the church site that I'd never copied into the new church site. They weren't a sitemap for either site.

Passing Lourdes on the train from Toulouse to San Jean Pied du Port. Photo by Rev. John R. Smith, 2005.

From Father Smith's Pilgrimage 2005

So I spent several hours compiling the 404 page, and then got sidetracked with the MIA church pages. They're from Father Smith's 2005 pilgrimage along El Camino de Santiago de Compostela. He took a bunch of seriously cool pictures on his long walk through (mostly) Spain, and I posted them at the time. But I only ever linked to them from the church's news blog and schedule page, so it's been years since anything current linked to them at all.

To import the pages into smallangelstucson.org, I started a subdirectory (a folder) called "camino," found an FTP (file transfer protocol) tool, and located the photos on my hard drive. I eventually figured out how to transfer a bunch of them at once. But then I had to update the pages themselves, which still pointed to mavarin.com. Eventually I started copying the HTML into Word, doing a bunch of search and replace, and then pasting the result into the html of the online version of each page. Hours and hours later, I'm still at it. It's not just the links that were outdated; I also have to fix font formatting in many cases, because the old html those pages were written in often translates into something very wrong when the GoDaddy page editor (GoDaddy being the host for the church site) gets hold of it.

And I've just discovered that although I uploaded all the photos, I never finished building the pages to display them. My very favorite photo of Father Smith on that trip isn't even on the pages I built. Grr. Argh.

So that's what I've been up to all day and all night, except for the required trip to the dog park. And I'm going to get back to it now. I'll check in with you later tonight, with my scheduled Saturday night entry.

Karen

Much later (4:56 AM): Okay, I got those pages uploaded and in acceptable shape, but it's way too late to blog tonight, considering I have church in the morning. Catch you Sunday afternoon (MST)!

Weekend Assignment #251: Fantasy Sabbatical

Hooray! This week, two of you finally took pity on me after weeks and weeks of me begging for suggestions for future topics. Please welcome our first guest "professor," Florinda, assigner of today's Weekend Assignment. (The extra credit is mine.)

Weekend Assignment #251: You have a six-month paid sabbatical, and you can spend it anywhere you like EXCEPT on a beach drinking margaritas. Where do you go, and what do you do while you're there?

Extra Credit: In real life, have you ever gone anywhere enjoyable at an employer's expense?

Not being fond of either margaritas or lying on the beach, I have no problem at all with Florinda's limitations here. I suppose my own answer to this depends on whether I'm assuming the entity paying my way has employed me as an accountant or as a writer. I would throw in "church webmaster" as a third possibility, but to imagine such largess for so small a service stretches credulity a bit too far. So let's just take the other two paths, and see where they lead us...er, me.

Would researching amusement park accounting in Florida
or UK accounting practices constitute a "Jolly Holiday?"

Okay, then, as an accountant, where could I usefully go on sabbatical? Aside from back to school, there are numerous possibilities, depending on what sort of employer I have. If, for example, I worked for Disneyland (yes, I'd relocate for a high-paying job with them), I could take a sabbatical to Orlando, to observe accounting practices at Walt Disney World and related entities, and research best practices at other Florida attractions. If I worked for an accounting firm, I could conceivably go intern at FASB, the Federal Accounting Standards Board, in Norwalk, CT. Or I could go to London, and research international accounting standards there. Yes, I think I'd like that better!

Or if I were working for a governmental entity, I could go to Washington DC, and observe the new administration's efforts to get the economy back on track, and the accounting implications for various government agencies. The GAO would no doubt be the key component of my researches.

Now, if I could get a publisher to pay me an advance to research a book for six months, that would really be something. I'd definitely try to go to London for that. Perhaps I'd research a Doctor Who interview book, gathering interviews with people who are still alive from the entire history of the show, with side trips to Wales and elsewhere. Or I could write a survey of British children's fiction, and explore the allure of London as a place of magical characters. Heck, I'm sure I could get a book out of selected holdings of the British Museum, or the writing of T.H. White. And yes, I could even explore London as the setting for a novel.

You know, if I had my choice of any of these, I'd take my six months in London, thank-you-very-much!

As for the extra credit, I was fortunate to be a travel agent in the late 1980s, when there was still such a thing as Fam (familiarization) trips. In March 1988 (or was in March 1989?) Travel Tree sent me on a three day whirlwind tour of Anaheim, CA called Anaheim Tag Days. I toured a number of hotels, danced at the Disneyland Hotel, had my picture taken with an Elvis impersonator, visited a wax museum, picked up a zillion brochures in the convention center, and had half a day each at Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm. It was physically and emotionally exhausting, but a lot of fun. A year and a half later or thereabouts, I took another Fam trip, this time to Mazatlan. I think I was actually in Mazatlan for 23 hours, during which time I toured something like ten or fifteen hotels (mostly on foot, in 90 degree, humid weather), held an iguana, ate dinner at a place with a Folklorico show, and had 45 minutes at the beach with a boogie board. Beautiful place, Mazatlan, but by the time I left I could hardly walk due to the killer schedule arranged by the tour company.

I have photos from both of these trips, and if I can find the box they're in I'll post samples sometime over the next week.

So where would you go on sabbatical if you could, and what would you do? Tell us about it in your blog, with a link back to this entry, and leave a link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week to post the results. Meanwhile...

For Weekend Assignment #250: Hot or Cold?, I asked you whether you'd rather be too cold in the winter or too hot in the summer, if you had to choose one or the other. Here are excerpts from your responses:

Laura said...

Since I'm a redhead, I also don't like sunlight, and winter tends to be cloudier and thus I get sunburned less than in the summer. It definitely feels like New York has been colder and windier this year than in the past.

Florinda said...

To my mind, 80-degree weather does NOT say "January," although I can certainly understand the allure. I spent ten of my growing-up years in Florida and have been in SoCal for almost seven years now, so it's not like warmer winters are unfamiliar to me - it's that they just don't seem right, somehow.

Julie said...

Do I have to pick? I hate the extremes, which is pretty funny considering I live in Texas. My office is too hot in the summer, and too cold in the winter. But I suppose I can pile more clothes on, so I'd reluctantly say winter, though I'll regret it.

Mike said...

As of the last forecast I saw, we are going to be approximately 5 degrees tomorrow and probably won't get above zero Thursday. That's too cold for me. I can handle winter when it is in the 20's and 30's, but once it gets into the teens, I want out.

That's it for now! Assuming nobody sends you out of town this week (or even if they do!), I hope you'll turn up here to tell us your preferred sabbatical project for this Weekend Assignment. And yes, I'm still soliciting your suggestions for future Weekend Assignment topics. Email me your ideas at mavarin@aol.com anytime. If I use your topic you'll get full credit and my undying thanks. And let's have a round of applause for Florinda's great Assignment!

Karen

F&FFF: Where The Grass Is Greener

A Feline and Furball with Feathers Friday Extra!

From my brand new Picasa album Miko's Corner

Perhaps it's just as well that I forgot to blog this afternoon, being busy studying my FAR (Financial Accounting and Reporting) course (okay, I watched a Doctor Who episode too, but work with me on this) and being bereft of ideas anyway. I remembered as I drove to the dog park. When I arrived, I suddenly had something to blog about.

You can see it in the photo above: a major change has taken place at Miko's Corner Playground overnight. Never mind the cool FX on the trees and sky, which I did with the negative and solarization options on my cheap photo editing software. The colors on the ground are accurate. On the left: verdant greenery, a carpet of two month old grass. On the right, a little surviving grass, pounded into the dirt and covered with still more dirt. The difference from yesterday? On Wednesday, there was a fence separating the two. Humans and dogs had no access to the green side. Today, the entire dog park is open! (I should explain that the city blocks off each half of the dog park for a few months each year to reseed the grass and give it a chance to grow.)

Pepper and the grass line at sunset.

Pepper in the fire of the sun.

Most of my pictures from today aren't very good, due to a combination of my camera's limitations in low light and my own inattention to settings at times. But some of them are rather interesting, including these two of Pepper bathed in the almost-setting sun.

Cayenne and Pepper on the green, green grass.

And this one, which I saturated a little.

As seen by my SONY CyberShot.

This one is completely unedited, except to resize and sharpen lightly.

Pepper doesn't mind the dirt.

Of course, the other half of the dog park is in about as bad shape as it gets, having had the entire dog population concentrated there for two months, and also having had extra dirt put down to reduce flooding. The dogs don't seem to mind being on the brown end of the park. In fact, I stopped Cayenne from digging at a hole, an opportunity she does not have where the grass dominates. The humans, however, clearly prefer the green end of the park.

Dogs doing what dogs do.

As I said in yesterday's entry, be sure to check in with Steven each Friday for links to the week's pet pictures. I'll be back later tonight with the Weekend Assignment. This week: a guest "professor" will be handing out the assignment, so stay tuned!

Karen

Ditch Diggers

For Feline and Furball with Feathers Friday, we're stepping outside for a moment.

It's a fact that I don't go in our backyard much, and Cayenne doesn't seem to be out there all that much more than I am. Today I noticed that she was on the couch as usual, being cute. But where was Pepper? We went out back to see.

There she is, in a patch of shade. I wouldn't have thought it was warm enough for Pepper to crave shade, but then again it's probably warm by Lapland standards.

Now the last time I was out back, a day or two ago, the yard was looking pretty good. The grass has died down for the winter, but John had it all mowed and cleaned up. But today there's a problem. Do you see it?

Uh-oh. Someone's been digging!

I don't know which dog's been doing it. It could well be both. But I have my suspicions!

Be sure to check with Steven every Friday for links to the week's pet pictures. And send your prayers and best wishes to Steven's cat, Pickle, who is having a rough time with kidney problems.

Karen