About Personal Problems

T

his is that week, the one that causes my normal good nature to develop raw edges. “I’VE PROCRASTINATED TO THE DEADLINE” for filing income taxes. There is no rational reason for this. My part of getting the proper papers ready for the accountant actually takes only a couple of hours once I work up the courage, because Iris keeps all the records in a file and a ledger.

Apparently the physical act of laying all that stuff out on the dining room table and finding out we are paying over a thousand dollars a month for health plus “old folks home” insurance gets me upset. Then there is the matter of about four hundred dollars a month real estate taxes, then we get to the homeowners, automobile and life insurance … etc.

GEORGE! Nobody cares about your taxes and cost of living expenses. Nobody except the Internal Revenue Service. That is a personal problem and just about everyone has it; however, it does explain why Iris serves our dinner in a metal plate out on the porch for those few days before deadline.

The column this week will be about Ole and Sven.

At the urging of their wives, those two guys from Minot, North Dakota, got on with a contractor building a new shopping center in the downtown area. 

After being on the job for a couple of weeks, Ole and Sven discovered the foreman was taking off from work a couple of hours early every day. After talking over that situation at a beer hall one evening they decided that work arrangement wasn’t fair, so they figured out they should do the same thing.

The next day they waited until the foreman left then they went to their cars and drove home. After entering his house, Ole began wandering around looking for Lena until he peeked in the bedroom and saw the foreman and Lena in there making whoopee.

Quietly as he could, Ole sneaked out and drove to the beer hall. Next morning at work, he got Sven off to one side and said, “Sven, Ay tink it would be a good idea if we didn’t sneak avay from work anymore. I almost got caught yesterday.”

Life is good.

G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning columnist for Hungry Horse News. He lives in Kalispell.