Their new puppy has made a real mess of their carpets and I am concerned for the health of my granddaughter because she is just starting to be able to crawl around and I really hate the thought of her crawling and rolling around on such a badly soiled carpet. There is a good chance that that carpet wasn’t even cleaned from the previous tenant when she moved in just a few months ago, so I’ll feel much better when I know that she has called and had this taken care of.

Ellen Alexander asked me to give her an estimate on the price of installing a new patio in her back yard. She had been given my name and telephone number from her friend Louise Wadleigh She needs to have an area cleared and levelled first, and then a base layer of gravel hauled in. She wants a path from the patio going through the woods down toward the lake. She also wants to have a second patio built down by the lake. She is trying to decide whether or not to install a gazebo down by the lake, and whether to have it screened in or with combination windows/screens. She wants to include a barbecue pit or a fire pit as well. She really has not made up her mind on that one.

She wants to have me do the landscape lighting installation going from the patio down along the pathway on both sides all the way down to the lake. I plan to take some brochures with me to her place that show a variety of options for the lighting and the patio pavers that I think will be in her price range.

I realize that I’m way past the age to care about prom dress shopping, but I like to put myself in my prom-going shoes to help my daughter some. Prom is a much bigger deal now than it was back when I was in high school. I guess that I shouldn’t be that surprised about it because there are so many things that are made specifically about prom and TV and movies make it into a much bigger deal than back in my day. It gets me a little excited too so I’m having a lot of fun helping her pick out all kinds of prom stuff.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of research to help her pick out some prom trends for this year and when I was doing that I saw some bankrupt alternatives online. I hadn’t been looking for them, but I thought that I could really use them with all of my credit card debt, so I’m going to check them out.

I’ve already seen all types of gorgeous dresses, but I’m really supportive of a cocktail length dress and awesome shoes instead of a floor length gown. I think that the shorter dresses tend to cost a little less anyway.

Before leaving the house, I looked through all the loose change for any wheat pennies and any other unusually old coins. I found 6 wheat pennies and set them aside. Then I carried the jar out to the truck and away we went.

When I got to the bank the teller was not happy at all to take my jar of loose change. She made no effort her hide her disgust with having to handle my coins for me. First of all, she asked me why I hadn’t sorted and rolled all the coins. I told I though the bank had a machine to do that. She said, “No – not at the branches.”

She went into a back room and came back out with a large ziploc type of bag. Opening the bag, she turned my mason jar upside down and dumped all the coins in it. Then she asked me for a deposit slip for my account. I was surprised that she asked for that – I wanted cash back for my coins. Again, with great disdain, she said, “No – we don’t do that at the branches.”

Unless I wanted to drive all the way downtown to the main office with my jar of coins, my only choice to be rid of the loose change was to give them my coins with a deposit slip, and wait for them to send the bag of coins to the home office where someone would dump them into a coin sorting machine, add up the total value of the coins, and then credit my account with a deposit. And that it would take 3-5 business days for the deposit to be credited to my account for me to be able to withdraw that money.

I’m sorry, folks. This is just crazy to me. Its not a lot of money and its not an urgent matter to me. But my coins are legal tender and I took them to my bank where I have done business for over 14 years. You would think that the least they could do is exchange coins for dollar bills and not take your money for 3 – 5 business days before you can get it back.

The father of the family is in the chemical investment banking business. To be perfectly honest, I never would have dreamed that there was such a business, and I can only imagine what they do there.  Dave (Shawn’s room-mate) is already planning on entering the business and going into the chemical mergers and acquisitions department in an advisory position.  Being a very hands-on kind of guy, that sounds to me like a lot of paper-work for a job, and that is not something I would be interested in doing myself; I like getting out in the elements and getting my hands dirty. But someone like Shawn, who is a lot more studious and serious, that sounds like something he could do if it interested him.  I’m always wondering if Shawn is going to end up getting a job offer from a friendship forged there at school. After all, they say it isn’t what you know that counts, it is who you know. And going to an ivy league college like that greatly increases your chances of meeting a very influential person that could act as a catalyst in making a major change in your employment future.