Financial Frustrations

Funny that I would write about something stressful right after posting about how worry free my summers are.  I wish summer was strong enough and magical enough to prevent bad stuff from happening.  Still, coming at this from a stress free place has made it easier for me to deal with it in an almost Zen like calm.

Yesterday morning, Bill woke me with breakfast in bed of eggs and orange juice.  We planned to go on a bike ride together and he is always up before me.  In his perfect world, we would have left on our bike ride at 5:30 a.m. while it is still cool out.  In MY perfect world, we'd lazily sleep in until 9 or 10, then head out in perfectly cool weather to enjoy our ride.  His perfect world coincides with reality a lot more often than mine does.  However, yesterday, I got lucky.  It was overcast and breezy, making our late morning bike ride very pleasant.  We even enjoyed some light summer rain on the return trip.

We followed the contour of the east side of the lake, passing by both American Fork and Lindon boat harbors before reaching our turn around point at the Provo boat harbor.  There is a lot of farm land around the lake, so it is a very pretty ride.  We ended up going 36 miles.

On our way home, Bill casually mentioned that we needed to stop by the bank, presumably to explain why he was choosing more high traffic roads.  When I asked why we needed the bank on a Saturday morning, he told me that he got a phone call this morning from Visa telling us that our debit card had been compromised, unless we had purchased lunch in Great Britain that morning.  Definitely not.  There were a couple of other unauthorized charges, including the incorporation of a business.  Weird.  Bill wanted to wait until after our bike ride to tell me so it didn't ruin our ride.  Probably a good idea, because I might have felt like I had to cancel the ride to deal with it.  Instead, I was in a very good, relaxed mood when he told me.

Can I tell you how fun it was to go through the bank drive through on our bicycles?  No, really.  It was a hoot!  Cars in front and behind us.  I felt like one of those people.  The crazy athletic healthy ones.

Anyways, there wasn't much to be done about the debit card.  Other than spend the afternoon pouring over receipts and comparing them to my account online to see which ones processed before the block hit the account, and which ones were going to hit the block.  Ugh.  There were NINE transactions that didn't make it.  Why do these things always seem to happen on the weekend that you go shopping?  I called all 9 companies and explained the situation.  They were all very sympathetic and appreciative of the call.  Hopefully, on Monday I can get it all straightened out.


The other financial frustration came in the mail on Friday.  A big fat bill from the physical therapist office for over $1,000.00.  A bill that was supposed to be paid by the car insurance.  So now I have to call the P/T and the insurance to get this straightened out.  One more thing to deal with because someone else was a bad driver.

And all of this hits right as the Steel Days Art Show is about to kick off.  I'll have to squeeze in visits to the bank and phone calls to insurance and the P/T into the small parts of my day not already taken up by set up, registration, and hanging the show.

At least it is still summer, right?