Search Results for 'cU'

[charlabob]

Pam Staeheli Brummell (Impecaible Cleaning, Jr.) — Many exceptional recommendations when you do a search on this blog. She and her team do an amazing job, even under trying (multiple cat, etc.) circumstances. 206-972-3557

[WSB]

We do not usually comment on whether flagged posts are deleted or not, or why, but the same user has attempted to post the same information repeatedly, and with the same violation of posted rules. NO PERSONAL INFORMATION SUCH AS ADDRESSES OR PHONE NUMBERS OR LICENSE PLATES of third-parties to the discussion. That goes even when it’s not obtained under false pretenses as per the original text here. I will leave this up for a bit and then it’s going away as did the previous two rule-breaking posts. Thanks.

[herongrrrl]

My daughter has been able to borrow a textbook from time to time, although her teachers have made it clear to her that they “aren’t supposed to” let her do so. So maybe that’s the district rule, but some teachers/schools are willing to bend it?

IMNSHO Everyday Math is horrible. I think I remember that very crossword assignment you mention from last year, and I had the same reaction about it. Unless something major has changed, Everyday Math is also the 5th grade math curriculum, although at my daughter’s school the teacher takes the initiative to add in some other materials from Singapore Math and the curriculum the feeder middle school uses (the name of which escapes me at the moment), to prepare the students for the transition next year.

[Bonnie]

Not BoA but 10 years ago when we bought our house we paid our property taxes in with our mortgage. Pretty normal, right? Well, about 9 months go by. We’re paying our property taxes every single month to our mortage company. What happens? We get a notice from King County telling us we haven’t paid our Property Taxes and listed all the late fees, etc.! OMG! We’d been paying them all along.

So we call the mortgage company. They tell us to fax it to them. We fax it. A few days go by. Nothing. We call again. They say they didn’t get a fax. We fax again. Nothing.

We’re transferred all over the place. Nobody can help us. We have statements saying we paid the taxes in our mortgage!

Then, get this…about 3 weeks into this process of trying to figure this out I check the mail and there is a check for over $5,000 from our mortgage company with a letter saying we OVERPAID!

Excuse me? That was for our taxes! So we get on the phone again. What do they tell us? Sign the back and mail it back to them! No way! There is no way I’m trusting them with that check!

We cash the check and pay the taxes plus fees. It took another 6 months for the mortgage company to pay us our fees back. We finally refinanced and now we pay our taxes on our own!

[Bob]

Curiously, AILI (aili.us) is not listed by the IRS as being eligible for tax deductible contributions of any kind. It describes itself as a nonprofit. But just try searching the IRS’s data base for it. It’s not in there.

http://www.irs.gov/app/pub-78/

Every other real nonprofit that I’ve looked for seems to be in there. I also searched an addendum of recent additions that haven’t yet been updated to the IRS database, and they’re also not in that. I’m sure it’s just my own inability to find them, of course.

[dawsonct]

My guess is some of the posters on this thread are doing so just to point out the ridiculous nature of the thread. Like me.

Sorry Hoop, you’ve been hijacked.

[Ken]

Does anyone know what the textbook used for fifth grade math in Seattle Schools will be next year?

I will not put up with the BS from SSD another year. I requested the step-grandsons textbook be allowed to be brought home over spring break and it was refused by the teacher.

I will buy a copy for next year.

The everyday math system is apparently too damn expensive if textbooks must be shared or horded.

If the entire program is outsourced, what are all those overpaid administrators doing at the district HQ besides job justification and CYA?

I was going to just quietly do this when the new year rolled around but the crossword puzzle sent home this week pushed me over the edge.

I knew most of the clues but that was because it was apparently created in the 80’s and used cultural references no one under 50 would have any idea about much less a ten year old. It was also pretty obvious that even the parents of classmates that are not familiar with American tv from the 70’s and 80’s, the bible and Disney films from 1939 would also be mystified by the clues.

Can anyone tell me if the textbook secrecy is a district wide rule or just a teacher or administrator who does not realize who paid for the damn things.

[DBurns]

I find surveys like this difficult to answer. What is a “typical West Seattle Family”??? I thought it was a bit too vague. It bugged me, but I answered based on my opinions but had to skip a lot of the questions as I just couldn’t wrap my head around what “typical” looks like. Our school wanted us to do it so I hope the info will help something.

[Bob]

As a longtime practitioner of arithmetic, I couldn’t help myself and added up the hours and days mentioned above. For the items not specified in hours, here are my guesses.

airport transfers (2 at say 1/4 day ea.) = 1/2 day

host family orientation (say 1/4 day)

student orientation (say 1/4 day)

attending and helping to plan the welcome and farewell parties for the students (2 at say 1/2 day ea.) = 1 day

assisting with 8 half-day activities = 4 days

3 full day excursions = 3 days

Total = 9 days or 72 hours

$500/72 = $6.94 per hour

To make minimum wage, the assistant would have to work for less than 58.5 hours, and the last two items taken together total 56 hours.

Maybe it’s possible (but probably not) to complete all the other duties in 2.5 hours total, thus complying with minimum wage.

Note: This does not appear to be a nonprofit oprganization.

[Sue]

If customer service/incompetence alone were a deciding factor for being in business, many, MANY businesses would go under. Unfortunately, things don’t work like this (although I am sorry for your involvent in their apparent incompetence).

I work with banking lawyers, and have watched as a number of our client banks have now been shut down by the FDIC or under warning that they could be shortly. The reality is that the banks failing has to do with undercapitalization (which you can read more about at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercapitalization#Banking_industry ) – the more money you have to secure your risks, the less likely you will fail. And the big banks have lots of power and volume and money, so they do not go below those ratios, putting them at risk. The smaller, local banks, being smaller, have less volume/customers/money and just can’t recover. So if you are going to move money to a smaller bank, it would be prudent to do some research into whether they’ve received any FDIC or DFI (Department of Financial Institutions) orders/warnings against them to fix their situation or risk being closed.

[JoB]

before you fence.. take a drive around the neighborhood to check out the creative way some of your neighbors have approached fencing…

any neighborhood will do.. but i have noticed some particularly creative fencing just east of 35th between morgan and thistle lately

[Rob Moitoza]

I’m sure you recall the big banks all adamantly stating that they couldn’t get the best personnel for their banks without paying out the huge salaries and bonuses.

Well, here are two experiences I have had with Bank of America over the last four months to challenge their assertions.

A couple of weeks ago my niece came home to her duplex to find a foreclosure notice on her door. It turned out that even though she and her husband had been diligently making payments to her father each month… he had let the mortgage on the duplex, which he and my sister owned, lapse. My sister, now divorced, was livid, and my neice was in tears. This was his own daughter he had let this lapse on. So, my niece and her husband checked and found out they would qualify for a loan to take the place over if they could come up with the money quick enough to stop the foreclosure. That amount was nearly $30,000. None of them could get that amount in time. So, I agreed to take it out of my line of credit as long as it was taken out of her dad’s name and put into theirs.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Bank of America Home Loans was adamant that we overnight them a certfied check for the full amount in order to stop the foreclosure. I also have my own account at Bank of America, so, I went to my local branch, got a Bank of America cashiers check for the full amount, and overnight express mailed the package off to the address we were given by two different Bank of America officials. Next day the check had not been posted. Second day the check had not been posted. Third day… still nothing. So, my niece, noticing that the paperwork they had sent her had a different address on it, called Bank of America. Of course, she couldn’t get a real person on the line. Finally, after much hassle she got through to someone who told her that it wasn’t the right address… even though that was the address they, themselves, gave us! She said it would eventually get to the right office, but by now we were only a few days away from the foreclosure going through. So, they asked us to send a copy of the check receipt, express mail receipt, etc.!

Monday it still hadn’t been resolved so I went to my local Bank of America and asked a “personal banker” there to check on it for me. She found out the “check had been cashed”. So, who cashed it? We finally tracked it down after talking to several different departments. Here is what happened. Even though I wrote the account number clearly on the check and a cover letter telling them to credit it to that account, someone at Bank of America crossed off the number on the check and wrote my house loan number on it. They credited it back tio MY account! After another round of verifications it was finally credited to the right account. Does this sound like a bank that is too big to fail, or a bank that is just too damned big, period! And too stupid at that!

Here is story number two:

At the end of December my work situation had been spotty and I was scrambling to come up with my January house payment. I had paid the mortgage on time to Bank of America every month for nearly ten years… the latest refinance being about five years ago. Realizing I was getting close to the first of the month, I went down to my local branch and made the payment by check directly to the teller at the bank. A couple of weeks later I got a call from Bank of America Home loans asking me where the January payment was. I told them I paid by check at the bank on December 28. They said they never received it! I was then told that all of the loan numbers had been changed that month. To make matters worse, the teller had entered in one wrong number on the loan account! There was no such account, but somehow the check was still accepted by Bank of America! It had basically disappeared into the ether! So, I got a “personal banker” from my local branch on the case. She called and called and had the same problem getting through to a real person… even though it was her own bank! Eventually she got though and was told that we had to FAX copies of the check and all the info we had. Fortunately, I had paid by check, rather than the electronic transfer that they are always trying to talk us into… otherwise I would have had no proof of the transaction and may have never resolved it!

So, now the phone calls started! Every night Bank of America Home loans would call and ask me where the January payment was. It had only been about three weeks… yet they felt compelled to harrass me, even though I had been a “valued customer” for all these years. I went back to my local officer. She again called the loan office and they now told her it was in the “Payment Resolution” department. So, I said, “Great! Then, can they please stop with the phone calls?” Guess what they told me? “That’s a different department! We have no control over the calls and can’t stop them.” So, in other words, one department of Bank of America has no way to communicate with another department in their own damned company! This is what our “bailout” and big bonuses are paying for!

By this time, we were almost at the end of January and the issue had still not been resolved. I went back to my local officer again. She sent another copy of all the paperwork… plus a lot of other forms they were requiring her to fill out. She now had many hours into this thing. I told her that if it didn’t get resolved by the end of the month that I wasn’t going to make the February payment. She advised me to make it anyway. Of course, exactly what I suspected happened. They credited my February payment to January! Now, they were telling me I was late on my February payment! Well, after about another three weeks the issue was finally resolved, the late fees stricken and I was okay.

But, here’s the deal, if this bank can’t even keep track of its own departments and give people the right addresses or a real person to talk to, then, bottom line is this, they are not “Too big to fail”. They are “Too big to succeed”. I’d advise everybody to get their money the Hell out of these big banks and go to the little local guys who maybe still care about their customers.

By the way, I have friends making minimum wage who could most certainly do a better job than this. So, this malarky about needing the big bonuses to get the best people is absolute bull. I was terrible in math, but I guarantee I could do a better job myself. How hard can it possibly be to coordinate your own offices? If you can’t do that you’re “too big to succeed”!

Rob Moitoza

West Seattle

[markopolo]

wow. amazing how speed limit, traffic issues and dog discussions get the most attention round here. what’s up with that? fewer than few responses on the underage drinking thread…

[clark5080]

My guess it the Ye old curiosity shop

[Carson]

I also know that an older version of ACDSee had a “4-up” feature that would make them for you, but you needed to print and cut. It even made the little film notches if you wanted them.

[funkietoo]

Michael, owner of Liberty Printing, does a very professional job and is a local resident. He constantly gives back to the West Seattle community via auction item donations, volunteering with a couple of local animal rescue/advocacy groups and Pencil Me in For Kids.

[Sheryl Kenna]

What a cute play!! Great job Twelvth Night Productions!

[JoB]

Carson…

i am not going to contact the homeowner for you to get action because i don’t have a problem with them parking their jeep on the sidewalk.

i think it’s really stupid and illegal and wrong.. but i live down by Westwood so it is unlikely to impact me.

if i lived in the neighborhood.. after notifying the tenants… i would definately send the owner a letter detailing the violations of his tenants…

as it is.. i have neighbor issues of my own to contend with.

i live next to a couple of houses that look abandoned.. one to the north and one directly across from the alley.. all lived in by their owners.

we are digging vegetable beds in the front and the homeowner to the north asked if we would dump the displaced weeds masquerading as sod in a hole in his front yard.

while doing so.. my husband was yelled at by the neighbor across the street because she assumed he was illegally dumping… the place looks that abandoned:( i wouldn’t want to live across the street from that house either.. downwind is bad enough because of his exceedingly healthy weeds and blackberries…

but there you go. both homeowners are dealing with significant health issues. I suppose that’s easier to excuse than youthful arrogance…

i have my hands full at home combating the migrating weeds and blackberries:(

wanna trade neighbors?

i’d love to have your options.

[luckymom30]

http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/archives/201805.asp

And on Friday …

Free Jack in the Box fries

The fast-food joint will give away a small bag of fries per customer. No forms to fill out, no coupon to print. It’s Free Fryday.

[sam-c]

we just received a bill that was $50 LOWER than the last one.

the last one (10 CCF) was estimated, and for this current one (6 CCF), they actually read the meter.

so, if they only read your meter every other billing cycle (every 4 months), maybe it will work it self out ?

I don’t know if this is the case, but if there are instances/ houses when they ONLY estimate usage, maybe one could read the meter and call them to tell them their estimate is way off.

though if the higher usage amounts are based on actual readings, they will tell you to look for leaks as had been mentioned on the thread previously.

[Ken]

Ipods are not magic. If you never install the apple firmware, it is just an external hard drive. There are dozens of open source firmware replacements and utilities that will give you full function without the limitations and DRM of either apple or MS software.

I refuse to allow someone else to dictate how I use any piece of technology Or force me to re-buy music I already own. The trade off is I never buy software, ebooks or music that has DRM.

Most people are not willing to go that far or are not willing to brave the learning curve so there will always be enough sheep for Jobs and Gates to sheer :)

http://lifehacker.com/329507/the-20-best-ipod-utilities

If you need details per question, gimme a call

There are workarounds for most of your issues even if you want to keep the apple firmware.

[Carson]

JoB, you might want to also send the owner of the property a copy! You can find out who owns property in Seattle at::

http://web1.seattle.gov/mnm/

It not only will tell you who owns what and where they live but it will also tell other code violations. If you look you will notice they were in violation of ” Violation of Weeds & Vegetation- observed vegetation encroaching into side walks” and took a while for them to get into compliance. Again, this is a heavily traveled (foot traffic) area. I don’t think they trimmed their hedges or cut their lawn all last summer, so I am sure they will need another “suggestion” to be compliant this year as well.

[JoB]

dawsonct..

i bathe every day. i live in a rental and am trying to figure out how to get my bathtub water out the small window 3/4 up the wall and into a barrel below.. thus cutting down on water use. the “safe” soaps i bathe in will act as natural pesticies.

any practical advice here?

[MargL]

I’m not sure we ever got an ‘official’ story from Seattle Public Utilities on this. So, being curious I just called customer service.

They say as far as they know the only time the collection contractor will replace the bins is when they are damaged in some way. I suppose the contractor’s ‘call’ on what constitutes ‘damaged’ is variable.

Also, according to the SPU rep – the containers they’re being replaced with should be the same capacity, either 96 or 64 gallons as your old one. If it’s definitely not and you’re going to regularly fill your container you can request another at no extra charge.

We don’t get billed for recycling, just for yardwaste and garbage. If you only occasionally have a little extra recycling you can put it out next to the recycling can and they’ll pick it up for no extra charge.

‘Course what SPU tells us and the contractors actually -do- is a different story so if you do get weird charges – like for extra units of garbage (check your bill) call and complain.

I was getting extra charges for yardwaste – I had a 64-gallon can but am paying the 96 gallon rate so I was putting out an extra can of yardwaste.

They replaced my yardwaste can with a ’96-gallon’ size -but- the bin really doesn’t look much bigger than the old one! In truth – checking the bin manufacturer’s website it’s only 95 gallons. Shrug.

[dawsonct]

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

—

Light (or enlightenment) is the best disinfectant.