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I
always look back over the columns I’ve written to kind of keep track so that I
don’t repeat myself. I find that I have a tendency to stay on one subject or
another for longer than necessary. I looked back over last year, and I seem to
always write about income taxes during the first week of April. I’ve thought
about some type of column about the IRS again this year. I have failed to come
up with something new. It’s really simple. Whatever income you have left, you
just should send it in so they can continue running the government.
About the only new comment I can
think of, well maybe two comments are: I think the government somehow thinks the
word "profit" is a nasty four letter word. I’ve got news for them,
it isn’t. If we didn’t have any of the so-called nasty old profits, there
wouldn’t be any tax and then ergo, no government. Which in some cases isn’t
a real bad idea. I also think the concept that the IRS came out with a year or
so ago, you remember a kinder, gentler IRS? Hey, has anyone actually seen this
happen?
No one that I know has. It’s taken
me over a year to get a refund from a couple of years ago. Seems, the receipts I
produced from a mortgage company and a church weren’t good enough to suit them
and I had to hire an attorney to recover the refund. The wonderful IRS came to
me about 6 months ago and offered to settle the matter if I’d take 50% of what
was owed to me. I turned them down and waited another six months to get what was
mine in the first place. What’s kinder and gentler about this? It’s hard for
me to fathom.
You know they spend zillions of
bucks on good will and public relations without passing on the new policies to
the worker bees. You ever try to reason with an IRS agent? If you have then you
know of what I speak. Doesn’t make a lick of sense to me at all. You would
think that at sometime or another, they’d figure it out that we are the ones
paying the bills for this country to run. Well, enough of this. What I wanted to
write about this week was spring time and flowers.
Each year about this time, just like
the IRS, I drag out the old hoe and shovel and start working on the flowers
again. Those that made it through the winter get pruned and fed and pampered.
The dead ones go into the trash. I also keep a kind of victory garden of semi
dead plants. These are the ones that don’t look like they’ll make it, but
still have a little life in them. I put them over in the corner of the yard and
take extra care of them. They get fed more, watered more and checked for bugs,
fungus and the like. It’s kind of a plant hospital, if you will. If one of
them makes it though the spring and starts perking up, then it gets transplanted
into the rest of the yard. Somehow I always feel a little better toward the ones
that survive this action.
I have lots of tools. You can’t
own a flowerbed without tools. I have tools for projects I know I’ll never get
around to doing before I die. I’d get a tractor if I could figure out where to
store it. Kind of tough when you live on the 3rd floor of an
apartment. No just kidding. You need hoses, buckets, sprayers and the like.
Fertilizers and bug sprays only last a year or so, and then they have to be
replaced. I’ve always found that once I find a good spray or food for my
plants, they stop making it for some reason or another. My question is this, if
it works so well, why stop making it?
On the other hand, the ones that
don’t do anything just seem to keep on getting produced year after year. Makes
me kind of wonder what is going on at the plant companies. It’s almost like
they don’t want plant diseases to be cured. Makes you think doesn’t
it?
I also notice another strange thing.
Take a look at the plants you see along the highway. Nobody sprays them, nobody
feeds them, and nobody tries to kill the fungus or mildew that grows on them.
What happens to them? Why, they are healthy and hardy and just doing fine, thank
you very much. How does this happen? Here is some old rose bush out in the
middle of nowhere and it’s just blooming up a storm. Leaves are green, the
stems are strong and no a bug or fungus in sight. No body waters it and it’s
doing just great. I’ve got plants that’ll freeze if the temperature gets
down to 32 degrees for about a minute or two. We use just about all of the
blankets and sheets we own in covering up plants when a freeze is due to arrive.
You never see any plants along the highway that are covered up, and yet they
keep on blooming year after year.
Of course, you never see any
government employees actually working either and they keep on increasing year
after year as well. Makes you wonder doesn’t it? If left alone would plants
and the government eventually take over the planet? Who’d end up paying for
them? Scary thought. Send your scary thought to me….at www.pearyperry.com.
Keep nasty comments inside your computer, I’ll get them later.
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