Taxes Are Done (And Early)

I’ve been a nervous wreck since pulling the info for our taxes last week. We were to meet with our advisor on Tuesday, but had to put it off until yesterday (Thursday) due to the snow storm that turned out to be rain.

We were late because I was putting together one last piece of information on our rental property. I figured there was no way we were going to finish our returns in one session, but our advisor is a patient genius and got everything done for us.

In my befuddlement I’d forgotten a checkbook, so we got a money order at Rockland. Afterwards, we dropped off Alpha’s keys at the gas station, picked up groceries at the Falmouth Service Center and drove home via the ocean.

Until the Last Dog Dies

Likewise, the atheist Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of deeply Catholic France, mused, “No society can exist without inequality of fortunes; and inequality of fortunes cannot exist without religion.

“When a man is dying of hunger beside another who is stuffing himself with food, he cannot accept this difference if there is not an authority who tells him, ‘God wishes it so.’”

Jim Pence of Glendale, Ky., who runs the feisty Hillbilly Report Blog, put it similarly, if more inelegantly and irreverently: “Never before have so few with so much promised to take away so much from so many and then laugh their asses off as the so many with so little vote for the so few with so much.”

Rural Whites Will Stick With Trump

Do You Know (Diana Ross)

Heard this on the radio the other day when I was driving back from Hyannis Toyota and it resonated.

Now looking back at all we’ve planned
We let so many dreams
Just slip through our hands
Why must we wait so long
Before we’ll see
How sad the answers
To those questions can be

Do you know where you’re going to
Do you like the things that life is showing you
Where are you going to
Do you know

Do you get
What you’re hoping for
When you look behind you
There’s no open doors
What are you hoping for
Do you know

500 Women in Science

At a meeting of the Woods Hole “pod” this week, it was gratifying to see the number of women who are able to make a living in STEM fields in this area.

They claimed to value diversity in their work forces, but no one in these competitive fields wants to hear that their professional success is the result of luck and social class as much as hard work and ability, nor are they really willing to do what is needed to lower the barriers for those who weren’t born as lucky.