Wednesday

Lunch with 3 today at Kelly's on 53rd Street. Their lunch platter of chicken strips feed two.

Good-bye din-din tonight for 2 at Granite City. She has a six bells flight tomorrow AM to Oklahoma for a weekend wedding of a college friend. And then she's off to Paris on Sunday. I'm her cab driver tomorrow at 0430.

Some rain here this afternoon to break the heat. Sounds like they could use the precipitation in Tahoe.

Discovery announced their TdF team today. A couple of surprises as two veterans were left off the squad in lieu of a couple of younger riders. Given the turmoil in the professional peloton right now, the sheen is off the prize.

Craig Wilson's lament today was the disinterest that he has for waiting in line. For anything. The subject was prompted by stories of people camping out at Best Buy or Radio Shack to buy the new iPhone. If my Google search function for 4000 Days was operational, I bet we could find previous comments from this author about my own disdain for lines. Everybody is stealing my material.

USA Today has been running stories all week about families taking care of aging parents and the issues that thusly develop. And the decisions that have to be made. Been there. Done that. No worries here. My pal Bill has a Power of Attorney to run me over with a truck.

There was a very odd, and sad, story in the local paper today about a veteran teacher at a local high school who caught the gambling bug. Somehow the school got tipped off and she was dismissed. Turns out she had dipped into a small extra curricular activities account which she controlled to the tune of $1500+ over a period of years. Most of the embezzlement came in the form of withdrawals from an ATM on the local riverboat.

Here's another example of how greedy the credit card companies are by their own fine print. I made an error in my on-line banking procedure and a scheduled payment was not made to Chase in early May. Ring up the $29 late fee, plus interest on my next statement. (I think that I paid the overdue balance even before I got that next statement.) I paid the additional amount to cover the whole "new" balance as soon as I got that next statement rather than wait until the statement due date in early June.

I received my newest Chase statement this week, and even though the prior balance was paid in full by the early June due date, actually, by May 20th or so, they dinged me for another $5.13 of interest. I intuited that they were charging through the date of that second payment, because they always offset payments against the newest purchases, so that they can continue to charge interest on the "overdue" balance. But I wanted to have the calculation explained, so I called.

Naturally, you have to do the automated decision-tree procedure before you can get to a live body. My "live body" had no clue, saying at one point that once you had a late payment, they charged interest on even purchases for the next two months. I said, "Fine. Cancel my card." She said, "Let me get you a supervisor."

The supervisor tried to be nice, and to educate me, but I put her on the defensive by describing what the service rep had said. So we agreed that she would credit the additional interest on the latest statement and I would keep the card.

Make payments on time or you will be paying interest forever. Not to mention those credit score things. Throw away all those credit card applications that keep coming in the mail.

Gotta go.

Be careful out there.