Okay, this is going to be a 'little' embarrassing for me, but it can’t be helped. I mean, who’d a thunk I could get lost in Down Town Greenville for cryin' out loud.
This situation I got into actually started a couple of weeks ago when this company called CLA (no, not CLR, that's for cleaning up stuff and this is for financial planning) sent me an invite to an Estate Planning seminar. Well, of course I ignored it! Me? An estate! A little more than 12 acres in bad need of mowing and upgrading isn't an estate…is it? Needless to say a few days later this real nice person called up and wanted to know if I'd got my invitation and how many were coming with me. I tried to explain that no way did I have anything remotely like an estate, then I was talked into going anyway.
After all they said the two magic words: Free Food.
These nice friendly folks even called up to remind me at least twice. And, what the hey, I didn't have anywhere else to go or anything else to do besides feed my horse and dog and clean the litter box and then go feed a vacationing friends dog and clean her cats litter box so why not? I just neglected to do 2 things: 1)write down the directions, or even pay real close attention when they gave them to me, or 2) write down the name of the restaurant where the shin dig was to be held. After all I still wasn't really planning to go.
The day of the seminar arrives and I get all my chores done. I realize I haven't any real plans for lunch and nothing I'm interested in cooking. That's how I find myself in down town Greenville driving around in circles and all I can remember is that it's supposed to be 'about one block' from the court house and that the name of the restaurant is a little unlikely sounding with the name of a woman and the term 'catering' included in it. Not being a man I finely stopped, and asked someone for directions. I'd wasted some gas driving around "about a block" from the Greenville County Court House looking for this unlikely sounding restaurant before I gave up and asked. I kept thinking I'd see something that would trigger that rusty computer inside my head.
I'm sure I left a lot of people scratching their heads and wondering who let the crazy old fat lady out of the loony bin. By that time I was also having trouble retrieving the word 'catering' from my rickety old memory bank. I had to define it for them. Of course they didn't know what the heck I was talking about but one nice gentleman said that there was a county tax office just down the street and that they might be able to figure this out for me. Made sense. So I park and then walk over to the place, and go into the indicated door. "The second door!" he called after me as I stopped at the first.
Well, it wasn't a tax office, but you could register to vote there. I'd already registered so what really got my attention was this big rack of hand outs from the County Extension Service. I had finely found where they were hiding!! I started loading up on hand outs. I was already late for the estate planning thing anyway I thought, so why not make the trip worth my gas. I was also looking to see if they had anything on my favorite subject -Permaculture. Of course they didn't. So I decided to bug the lady behind the desk. The extension agent wasn't in but the nice lady looked up Permaculture on her computer and was blown away by how much was on the Internet about it. I told her that what I wanted to know was if the county agent knew of any local courses or classes on Permaculture that weren't on the net. She kindly took down my name and phone number to leave a message for the agent. [It is now 2011 and I still haven't heard anything about Permaculture from the County Extension Agent.]
Oh, and after my stumbling description of where I wanted to go, she also knew the restaurant I was looking for and where it was.
So I did get my free meal, some good ideas about how to get around inheritance taxes should I ever have anyone to leave my land to, AND some interesting hand outs from the extension agent.
Oh, the estate thing? As I expected I’m several thousand short of having an estate. No surprise there.
No comments:
Post a Comment