As an accountant, I use Excel for everything. Not just numbers stuff, but lists, schedules, ideas, everything. It’s just such a useful life tool. I tried to teach my artistically-inclined D the basics when she was in HS. I tried to sweeten it for her by showing her how to color code, shade, font, etc. No dice.
tworinanddone, you made my day. <:-P
@2muchquan, since my usual car turns my headlights on automatically when it’s dark (but not when it’s raining), a lot of the time I have to be reminded to turn them on. L-)
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I was older than 40 before I learned “lefty loosie, righty tightie”. And that was AFTER renovating a house.
So the girls already know it because wow, that was embarrassing.
I picked up dd from the train station yesterday along with her friend who lived 10 minutes away. She had difficulty giving me directions to her house but we some how made it there.
D got locked out of the house last evening (garage door opener in that car is erratic and as usual she had no house key). I was home but missed her text and call because I was vacuuming. She went back to her friend’s house until I finally saw the text and called her. I asked her why she hadn’t tried ringing the doorbell. She looked at me blankly and then said sheepishly, “I forgot we had one.”
Last night, my son thought maybe Bill Clinton was Hillary’s dad. Sad, but suggests that hair coloring makes a difference.
Bill Clinton & Al Gore were the youngest president/vice president team ever inaugurated.
One of my kids asked me if it was ok to apply for a job (submit resume and cover letter) on the weekend since the business was open only Monday through Friday. Yep! 
8-|
^I am embarrassed to admit that my college graduate S (2015) said the same thing to me last year. Fortunately, that child has now been gainfully employed for a year but I will admit to shaking my head and wondering how this would all go in the spring of last year… 
Thanks, @SyrAlum. Your post makes me rest a little easier. Glad your son is gainfully employed.
@AboutTheSame I called them the Hunk Ticket. They looked pretty fine together.
I have my list of things I wish I’d taught my kids, but somehow didn’t. It always seemed like there would be time…and now D is off to college in a month.
- I didn’t teach my kids how to use power tools. I worked as a carpenter before grad school and have a full shop as I remodeled our house and built another house pre-kids. But I never taught my kids to use tools much less power tools. Sigh.
- I didn’t teach my kids how to repair cars. I do most of the repairs on our cars. I would drag them out and make them help sometimes, but it bored them and so I didn’t force it.
D is quite handy and practical, so I think she’ll teach herself what she needs to know. I don’t hold out much hope for S. He’s awful smart but with tools, he looks bewildered. Sigh. He can’t really handle a knife either. Double sigh. However, he does week-long trail building volunteer trips so it may be that he has skills that I’m unaware of.
Jumpstarting a car! “Black to black, red to red, start the living, then start the dead!”
^Oh, that’s really good, I’ll be stealing that as I need to teach it to my D and S…
That’s a great saying. When I mentioned it to my kid I got a reference to YouTube. So unless YouTube has bad info, they have a library of how - to in their pocket.
@BunsenBurner – I never knew that either about jump starting the car. Will continue to pay for AAA. Even the highway Good Samaritan rescue truck guy couldn’t get my spare tire off the car recently (full-sized spare) and then couldn’t get the car up on the jack…
Took the flat to the auto repair place in town, and the owner struggled for a long time trying to get the spare off again. I think cars have gotten complicated, but I admit, that I am just this side of useless.
LOVED the Bill & Hillary not married conversations…
DS is moving into his grad school apartment next week. They asked him to bring a cashier’s check to pay the move in costs. Google was kind enough to tell him what a cashier’s check was and how to get one.
S showed up at the apartment office thinking he could pay his first month’s rent and security deposit with his debit card. He had packed seldom-used check book in a box he couldn’t readily identify. We ended up getting money orders from several grocery stores and pharmacies in the neighborhood. Each place had a limit. After we hit the limit at one place, we moved on to the next one. Took us awhile, but we did come up with the full entry fees.
My ex and son are both fixers and figure-outers-self taught at pretty high levels of auto repair, plumbings, electrical, etc. Neither D has ever had the remotest interest in learning any of that, so AA and handy guys step in when needed (older D has an apartment-the LL fixes things anyway).
Younger D can find an answer on Google before I finish a sentence-I am not concerned with whether I have taught her everything, because chances are she’ll have the answer before I could ever explain it.