Shallots in an interesting addition. I wish it were easier to find good ones around here.

p.s. Would it be possible to get ungreyed? CV: Been in the black for your sister site LH for many years. Lifelong cook and kitchen experimenter.

I’m a native Californian, so pimiento cheese is not part of my culinary history. But I recently made a batch out of curiousity. Cold was OK, but grilled? Oh, yes.

With your call blocker of choice that permits blacklisting. Unless you are using a landline, my specific method will not be of interest.

Right? No one I know or even any business in my area has the same area code/prefix that I do. I have those automatically blocked. (It goes to VM on the very unlikely off chance it’s legit.)

Yes. Most are overseas criminals, too, who are spoofing the number. Since I turned 65, the number of these calls have skyrocketed. Medicare scams. And I guess, they assume that we lose all our marbles when we turn that age. Lately, I get a lot where CID shows it as an invalid number - the prefix after the area code…

Careful what you wish for:

Rent increases will eat that up.

...1,500 X 12 X 30 = $540,000 (this does not take into account rent increases, of course).

Totally agree with the “it depends” answer. I had one cat who loved to be held like a baby being burped. She’d get so relaxed, she would drool on my shoulder. The other one however, would stiff-arm me whenever I tried to pick her up at all. Eventually, she acquiesed to being held like a baby as demonstrated above but…

Not the employers. They are just following the schedule. It was a deliberate ploy by the Rs who gave the huge tax gift to the uber rich to fool the not-uber-rich that they benefited, too. Now the bill is due for those who didn’t pay attention.

Excellent. Totally agree with your last comment.

Exactly. If the tax preparer is not asking up front if there were any changes from last year -e.g. lottery winnings, bought a house, had a baby - then they are very bad tax preparers. If they ask those questions up front, then they will have a good idea if some cash should be sent along with the extension filing.

It’s a known that they issued withholding schedules that would under withhold so people would see a bump in their pay checks without any consideration for accuracy regarding actual taxes due. But people who wanted to believe that the ordinary citizen wasn’t getting reamed by the tax gift to the top 1% didn’t pay…

Because there are a lot of people who do have deductions. A lot of them could not afford their monthly mortgage if the they could not up the number of exemptions on their W4s to account for the interest and property tax deductions, which can make a difference of thousands - not hundreds - in taxes owed. They should…

Exactly. It wasn’t a bug in the new withholding schedules but a feature. There were numerous articles written about it at the time.

...this article seems to imply that it usually isn’t, which is really weird.

Be careful. I knew someone who was going to one of those sharks. The tax preparer filed losses from self-employment. The IRS got wise to the tax preparer and his clients got caught in the net. My coworker came to me (I’m a CPA in industry) and after looking at the return, I asked him “Oh, you have a business?” Nope,…

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Thank you. I hate those scales, and medical staff do not give sufficient guidance on it. After a hysterectomy, the pain was keeping me from sleeping. But I could live with it, so when the nurse asked I said “6" and didn’t get any meds. I finally rang her back and upped the number because, damn, I needed to sleep.…

I agree with you. I had lunch this week at a place that is now using paper straws - my first encounter with them since childhood. I just had iced tea, but the last quarter of my time there I was drinking from a straw that had collapsed from getting soggy. Had I planned to stay any longer, I would have had to ask for…