Ed Icionsub

My brother and his wife are wonderful hosts. My sister-in-law is a domestic goddess – I’m not kidding. She loves to shop for furniture and decorating items, like drapes, lighting, wall decor. She is a great cook, manages the house and does a lot of volunteer work for children’s charities. So now that their kids are grown and the last one is headed to college next fall, they are thinking about making a lot of big changes in their lives. She wants to establish and run a bed and breakfast, and I think she would be great at that.

Their home can be easily converted to accept paying guests, so they just have a few business details to implement and advertising to get the bed and breakfast started. I asked what they planned to do about credit card processing and they admitted they hadn’t thought about that yet. So I tried to explain a few things about that.

First, they have to arrange for their merchant accounts with a financial institution. It is similar to applying for a credit card itself, as your credit history is considered during the application process. That won’t be a problem for them, but they need to read up on the whole situation to avoid any unpleasant surprises, so I shared a link with them to a web site called Card Service Sales.com. This is where they can read about credit card processing, telecheck processing, and merchant accounts.

It was so nice to have the day off from work and be able to just kick back on a Thursday. The football game at noon was a bonus. The Titans don’t usually play football on Thanksgiving, but today they played and tromped the Lions. The game was on at noon, so it didn’t interfere with everyone’s dinner plans.

Went over to my brother’s house for dinner with the family. He has a nice big house and likes to entertain.The dinner was a traditional Thanksgiving feast – roast turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry relish, homemade yeast rolls and pecan pie with vanilla ice cream.

We’ve been keeping manual time sheets for years and when the bookkeeper is out on sick leave or vacation, I’ve had to help cover her duties. I can tell you with complete confidence that manually keeping time sheets and then having to input them into the computer’s payroll system is incredibly tedious. Not only do you have to duplicate the work involved to input the dates and times, but you also have the risk of making errors from typos or misreading the numbers. You would not believe how many “4s” are printed to look like “7s” and sometimes it is hard to tell between a “5″ and a “6.”

We are seriously considering changing over at the first of the year to an online time sheet system like the one at Atlantic Global. They have a simple and efficient time sheet and expense report system that is on the internet, for easy access by anyone in the company, whether inputting the information at their desk, from home or even from a hotel room if they are traveling on business.

I was mostly interested in automated time sheets, but since they have an expense report system, too, it is doubly attractive to my company.

There must be a huge pile of escaped pens somewhere in this universe and I think a good chunk of those pens used to belong to me. I am always buying pens and yet I never seem to have one. I try to keep 3-4 pens in each car and on my desk, several in the kitchen and even a couple down in the laundry room. Yet when I’m on the phone and need to write down a phone number or some critical information, I can never seem to find a pen. I swear that when I leave the room or turn my back, the pens escape down some mysterious escape tunnel.

Today I was at the drug store and walked down the clearance aisle on my way to the check out counter. They had a big plastic barrel full of cheap pens and I noticed that the clearance price made them just 20 cents each. I couldn’t pass up that bargain and bought the whole barrel. Now I defy those pens to make a mass escape attempt tonight!

The parents of a child diagnosed with Autism several years ago started the Autism Foundation of Tennessee to help other parents of children who have Autism. The late night local news has been running a short series on Autism this week and tonight they showed some short segments on the Foundation and how they help with specific therapies and counseling for the parents.

Current statistics show that in America, 1 out of every 150 children born are diagnosed with Autism. Sadly, in Tennessee there are more than 30,000 families statewide affected by the disease.