The Glass Is Half Full

By Donna Bumgarner, CPA

Our chapter’s 2010 Honorees Night Jan. 28 had many highlights, including the awarding of 17 scholarships to students from local universities and community colleges; presenting the Lifetime Achievement Award to past chapter president Patricia Janes; and the evening’s keynote speaker, CalCPA Chair Andrea Cope, enlightened us with her comments about CalCPA from a state perspective. We also honored our past chapter presidents, a great many of whom were in attendance. Kudos go to the efforts of Ben Towne and Roger Laux, who organized the event with their committee.

Thank you also to all who attended the Attorney, Bankers and CPA events or the annual golf tournament. Both of these served as fund-raisers for this year’s scholarship fund.

Now that we are entering February, many of us are at least ankle-deep into our most productive time of the year. As I look at the February calendar, I see several days marked as holidays, even though many in public accounting find it difficult to come up with the energy—or time—for celebration. For example, the town of Punxsutawney, Penn., will hold a huge celebration in honor of Groundhog Day Feb. 2. The local groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, will come out of his burrow that morning. If he sees his shadow, he retreats back into the burrow, indicating six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t see his shadow, he takes it as a sign of spring and stays above ground. This reminds me of the 1993 movie Groundhog Day. In the movie, Bill Murray stars as a weather forecaster who finds himself trapped in Punxsutawney on Groundhog Day, in what science fiction would refer to as a time loop. As long as he does nothing different, the day keeps repeating itself. He eventually discovers that instead of allowing circumstances to impose themselves on him, he can take control of those circumstances and begin to look at life as a “the-glass-is-half-full” type of guy.

Here’s hoping that your circumstances are such that the month of February is filled with the-glass-is-half-full-type of days.

Please feel free to contact me via e-mail or phone at (408) 287-7911 if you have any questions or comments. I welcome your input.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 12:05 pm and is filed under President's Message. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.