Hello all of you out there if you are still out there.....It has been so long since I have had any contact with any of you at all. What has been going on in your lives? I would be so interested in finding out, so let me know! As for me-- My new baby granddaughter is now one I am starting an art project using tree bark and pampas grass :) My son is starting over in a completely different career and is going back to school My daughter is still in the Army National Guard I am still a lousy cook, a fan of Big Brother, Survivor, and Amazing Race, and a readaholic I have a new dog that is psycho, in fact, I may do a post on My New Dog someday.... And ... I have been working out daily, a first for me, for several months--love those new knees! Anyway, could we have a Steeple Reunion or something? I'll try to work on it. Whatever, my best to you wherever you are! Fleur

Jaycee is preparing for the UFE, and ran into a wall on the comp . It's natural to get tired of a five hour exam case, especially when those little devils in your head start nagging with those evil thoughts, like " Two of your seniors who had passed claimed to have never done any cases at all. They just practiced outlining and read the evaluation guides. " I of course immediately called shenanigans on that. Being a smart young CA student, she herself quickly dispelled those notions, but I felt like adding more on top of that comment: here are the original thoughts plus at least one more idea while I'm at it. Don't fail at studying If you play musical instruments or any sports, you will be familiar with what it's like to "practice" and really practice. You will only perform, play or write as well as you practice. If you want to get to SOX City, you'll need to do a few things first. If you go through the motions of trying to play a piece of music without...

Let me know if I missed any!! Fall Premiere Schedule (all times are in Eastern Standard Time) *= NEW Shows Monday, August 16 Weeds - Showtime (10:00 PM) Wednesday, September 8 America's Next Top Model - The CW (8:00 PM) Hellcats - The CW (9:00 PM)* Thursday, September 9 The Vampire Diaries - The CW (8:00 PM) Nikita - The CW (9:00 PM)* Monday, September 13 90210 - The CW (8:00 PM) Gossip Girl - The CW (9:00 PM) Tuesday, September 14 Life Unexpected - The CW (9:00 PM) One Tree Hill - The CW (8:00 PM) Parenthood - NBC (10:00 PM) Wednesday, September 15 Outlaw - NBC (9:00 PM then moves to Fridays at 10:00 PM)* Thursday, September 16 The Apprentice - NBC (10:00 PM) Monday, September 20 Castle - ABC (10:00 PM) Chase - NBC (10:00 PM)* Chuck - NBC (8:00 PM) Dancing With the Stars (Performance Show) - 8:00 PM (2 HOURS) Hawaii Five-O - CBS (10:00 PM)* House - Fox (8:00 PM) How I Met Your Mother - CBS (8:00 PM) Lonestar - Fox (9:00 PM)* Mike & Molly - CBS (9:30 PM)* Rules of Engagement -...

A wiki devoted to Canadian tax is out there for your joy and learning. . If you're actually practising tax you may know much of these things. But perhaps you forgot about rules regarding moving expenses . You'll find them here. The goal here is to make Canadian tax law more "flexible and accessible." Note this doesn't mean "easier to understand, but I suppose it's a start.

Really, help me out. Does the constitution say anything about marriage as a basic right? If not, does the US government have any jurisdiction over marriage? I mean, if a state wants to let humans marry pine trees, what business is it of the US government? Furthermore, does the Bible give any authority to the civil magistrate (at any level) to define or endorse marriage? For example, are state-supplied marriage licenses a Biblical idea? Just wondering what you guys think about this? Seems to me the marriage covenant is between the husband, wife and their families, with the Christian covenant community present as a witness to the event, all attesting together that this marriage is according to God's Law. The state would only get involved in cases of violations of God's Law, and thus the families and church would be needed to attest to the reality of the marriage covenant, as witnesses to the state.

That was more dramatic than it needed to be. The ICAO must've had some kind of technical glitch which prevented the results from the 2010 School of Accountancy exam from loading on time - it took roughly half an hour for the website to get updated. The results are, however, now up - this page will let you see which of the writers passed - out of the population of writers who gave permission to have their names on the website. Official results will be mailed to individual writers in a few days. Congratulations to those who passed! Smartly, the ICAO recoded their main webpage to reduce the massive crushing load of traffic that's sure to hit them today. When you land on their page you'll just see this: The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario Homepage SOA Results | CA Firms That's a smart move though - let people get to the results faster, and keep your web server from melting down. A shame about the delay, but what's another 20 minutes, especially if your own...

My fingers are crossed for my friends waiting to hear their marks. Hang tight - the School of Accountancy results should be coming out soon. If you're not feeling stressed enough, why not dive into the SOA 2010 discussion board ? For them, the waiting is done. Judging from the commentary, it was a sufficiently ridiculous exam this year. Thinking way back to my attempt, I recall missing this or that seemingly obvious and very important issue - and still making it through in one piece. Perhaps the mistakes I made weren't that significant - more likely, everyone makes mistakes to some extent. Part of the success lies in making less mistakes than everyone else!

Greetings, steeplefriends. Hope you are all well, clinging to Christ and walking in His ways. How has everyone been?

Short answer: yes. In fact, I'm working from home right now. Above: not home. Would be nice though. To be specific, I stopped working when I checked mail from my readers, and decided to write a little article. I can easily resume when I'm done. In fact, I was going to resume, right now, as I had a nice long article written. Then random computer things broke down - we forgot to add diesel to the engine running our server - which caused me to lose my entire post. That's ok, though: you get to enjoy the more succinct "take two" re-write I'll share with you, which loses most of the superfluous wit or "fluff" in the interest of trenchant analysis reducing the aggravation from my computer, once more, choosing to spite me when I least suspected it would. It's also ok, because at least I have the luxury of working from home. This saves me the hassle of going downtown to the office. If you live nearby, that's probably an hour of round-trip travel. If...

This a wonderful and mostly altruistic action: any CA from Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia or Bermuda can click on this link here , to go a page where you can tell your local provincial Institute of Chartered Accountants to donate $25 to a charity of your choice - from a list of five, including Kids Help Phone and Easter Seals. I say "mostly" because this is all nestled in a webpage hosted by Manulife who sell insurance to CAs and would no doubt love to translate this little bit of charity into some sort of boost to their business too, but given the fact that they're simply giving cash away, I won't hold the fact that there's still marketing involved in this against them. According to the ICAO's little e-newsletter, about 850 people have already clicked, which suggests that this campaign is only halfway through. If you haven't forced them to give away money to charity, feel free to push $25 of someone else's...

Big Four firms are very hierarchical, to the point where a colleague jokes with me that you gain certain magic powers when you get promoted to higher ranks. Mind-reading, the ability to move through walls, halt traffic with your mind. And other sorts of Jedi tricks. I experienced a surreal moment Monday after work, as I discovered what may be as simple as a perk that comes from wearing a dress shirt and nice pants: you have the keys ot the city, so to speak. Perhaps I should talk this up at future recruiting events. The adventure started when my phone buzzed with news that the 506 streetcar had to detour around the stretch of track in front of the Police HQ. Thank you TTC : coupled with the weekend's protests and violence, you could infer this meant protesters had gathered in front of Toronto Police Headquarters to lambast police tactics and chant for the release of those detained during the weekend's G20 shenanigans. And so I walked up from my office, big fancy camera in hand...

This post is an example of where the mindset of the Hardcore CA will take you. In AuditLand and other corporate environments, when something goes Horribly Wrong, rather than point blame and string people up, you have a "Lessons Learned" moment, which can either be a casual debrief, or an exhaustive exercise in identifying what mistakes were made, and how they can be avoided in the future. There will no doubt be some very professional investigations conducted into what happened this weekend at the Toronto G20 riots. One of the most shocking images online and on TV came from the fires that consumed Toronto police cars , which initially engendered some extremely sceptical treatment. After all, they just bought a water cannon - couldn't they handle a fire quickly and safely? This presumed that the security teams knew they may need to use it as a firefighting vehicle; given the delays it's probably safe to assume wasn't planned for. This makes sense, considering its stated...

A sad day for Toronto , and a sad day for Canada. The crowd sings O Canada, and as best as you can casually tell, gets viciously attacked for possibly ignoring a challenge to move back, instead sitting down in the face of what soon turned into a full-on assault charge by the riot line. Video of the peaceful G20 protest at Queen & Spadina is by Meghann Millard on Vimeo . Seriously, what is up with this? Very good eye-witness commentary here - just go read it here . One of my favourite quotes, which drags the blog barely back "on topic": Nobody near the police line was chanting. There was only one sign I saw, and I couldn't make sense of it. I honestly think it might have been offering accounting services. Periodically someone would yell, "This is a peaceful protest." Often someone would answer back, "Who's protesting?" Everybody was just staring, as though wondering if there was anything more to the G20. Absolutely nothing was happening. What we...

I missed out on the madness downtown today. I followed it on my phone, but missed all the live TV footage which no doubt justifiably enraged my friends. I did catch stills like this one which from a local Toronto photographer show why the city was on edge all week long. It's perhaps best I wasn't around - I could've had my camera smacked down to the ground by an imported officer from Peel region. Of course he might've been on edge - not sure if this was before or after one of those police cars was set on fire. The you'll "be on Youtube" response, while accurate, was rather snarky to the point of inviting an assault. Not justifying, of course - this is clearly a criminal offence by a police officer. Also freakish: random arrest videos by plainclothes officers. I should point out that some well-meaning people naively claim that when store windows got smashed in, the "peaceful" protesters should've taken action to stop the anarchists and ne'er...

Go and read this entire article by the staff of the Torontoist . It's an excellent summary of The Friday June 25 G20 protest shenanigans, along with a well thought-out commentary on the nature of protesting global summits. Well worth a read. Photo below is from their site - check out the entire article , including this moving paragraph about friends of a deaf man detained earlier in the day, as depicted below: "When we left at about 11:30 Friday night the protesters were still there, still chanting (although they'd switched to ASL to save their voices) and occasionally chatting good-naturedly with the cops, who couldn't help but be impressed. It spoke well of them all. If you were imprisoned, wouldn't you want your friends to fight to the utmost limit on your behalf? That's what these protesters did. As of right now, that's what they're still doing. They're not going to give up any time soon."