Cohagen Chronicles

After that last post, I thought I should tell you about other things that happened this week, besides pest control. I really HAVE been doing more than trying to kill flies.

Yesterday, I drove to Lewistown for a mentoring session with my friend Mike Waterman, the Lewistown Public School's Business Manager and Financial Wizard.  We were setting up my school accounting system on Quickbooks, and he assured me that he had worked the finer details and awfulness out.  It would be a piece of cake.  No problemo.

When I got to Lewistown, the man was headed out the door to do a radio broadcast with his superintendant on the local airwaves.  I set up my computer and tuned in to hear the show.  Local, small town radio talk shows are difficult to describe.  You want to shut it off, but you can't, because sure as you do, the one big community shocker will occur and you will have missed it.  Little old ladies will be clucking, store clerks talking as they "straighten" the racks, the coffee bunch at the local greasy spoon shaking their heads and you won't have the faintest idea what happened on the radio at 10:23 a.m. because you impatiently shut the dang thing off.

Nothing of the sort happened, sadly, and when Mike got back, we got busy with the Quickbooks. Mike loves school finance. He's weird that way.  I  like him, but  it's still quite strange.  Most people tolerate school finance, some are rather interested, others have nightmares about it; Mike loves it.  I would say I fall somewhere between tolerance and nightmare, depending on the time of year. Mike has the same sort of humor I do, which is rare, and we laugh a lot through the torture, so that makes it a leetle more tolerable.

We had lunch, after a couple of hours of slavery, at Lola's, a little sandwich shop on Main Street.  They make crepes instead of tortillas, and about 20 different types of gelato.  Mike's wife, Lisa Waterman joined us for lunch.  Let me tell you a little about Lisa Waterman.  She's the healthiest person I know. She puts spinach in macaroni and cheese.  And I'm pretty sure she uses whole wheat macaroni, but I can't prove it.  Last year, when I visited them in Lewistown, she confided that she was doing two Beth Moore Bible studies simultaneously, but that neither group knew about the other group.  I find that hilarious! Would that be an infidelity? Or just a secret?

Mike bet me that I couldn't eat my whole crepe wrap with my hands without spilling. (Like eating a soft-shell taco) He said if I could do that, he'd buy my gelato.  Oh, YEAH, I got the gelato! There's no way I'd lose a food bet, with more food as pay-up. 

I won't bore you with the details of the afternoon. (Unless you, like Mike, love school finance...if so, I can email you the finer points.) We got Quickbooks where I need it to be, with the exception of being able to reconcile with the county Treasurer.  That's a little detail we need to work out.  Reconciliation is rather essential, I think.  Big Problemo. 

I finally left Lewistown around 6 p.m. and drove home, my head aswirl with numbers and codes and accounting nonsense.  Driving is good therapy, some days, and it was nice to have the time to unpack my brain before I got home.  Two hours of unpacking the brain can get down to some things that should be better left packed, but by the time I hit that, I was too busy dodging deer on the road to really start scraping the corners.

Most of this week has been consumed with school finance, and I'll be glad to be done with it for the weekend. So now you know, I do other things besides destroy spider webs in household appliances and scare flies!