Daily Archives: February 28, 2014
Old Friends and New . . .
First up, there are now two authors in the Russell family. Nick, of course, who has had 6 Kindle Best Sellers in the Mystery category, and now Miss Terry, who has just come out with a cookbook containing almost 300 of her great recipes.
Regular blog readers will remember the many times Jan and I have raved about Miss Terry’s cooking, covering everything from ribs to desserts. Check it out below. Your taste buds will thank you.
Had something strange happen with DirecTV this morning. When Jan got up she found we had no TV stations available. The message on the screen seemed to be saying that there was a problem with the receiver. So I did a full reset on it with no luck.
So the next thing I did before calling them, was to log into my account. And I quickly found the problem. My account was past due. But what was strange about this is that I’m set up for auto-pay for my DirecTV account, one of the few that I do this on. So why didn’t they bill me? Well, apparently because they said my credit card was no good. And the reason it was no good was that it was an old, canceled number.
I have had 3 VISA debit cards since November. While we were gate guarding in early November, I got an email from Chase saying they had detected suspicious activity on my card and were sending me a new one. And as soon as I received the new card I went to the DirecTV site and updated my card info. And using this new card number, my December payment went through just fine.
Then, shopping at Target for the first time in several years, we got caught up in the Target data breach, and so Chase sent me another new card. Which I promptly updated on the DirecTV site once again. And using this new, new card number, my January payment went through just fine.
So what happened to my February payment? Well, it looks like it was a server hard drive crash, and an out-of-date backup. Because when I looked at my credit card info stored on the site, the number showing up was my old, old number that hadn’t been used since November. And two payments had gone through since then with no problems on the new numbers.
The only thing that makes sense is that the hard drive containing my info (and a lot of other people’s of course) crashed and burned, and they restored a backup to the replacement drive. And either, someone grabbed up an older backup by accident, or the most recent ones were bad, and they used the first good one they found.
I’ve seen both of these happen over the years, so it’s nothing new. But hopefully it’s fixed for now. I updated my card info and manually made the payment, and about 5 seconds later, we had TV again. I may check it again next month and be sure it’s OK.
About 1 pm, new friend Debi Hurlburt and old friend Jan Evans walked down to our rig and invited us to Debi’s for spaghetti.in an hour or so. And of course we said YES.
Here we are last night with new friends Ed and Debi Hurlburt at Sealand Seafood.
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And here we are with old friends, Dave and Jan Evans at Stomp’s Burger Joint in Kemah back in December of 2011.
It seems like no matter where we go, we make new friends, and run into old ones. Just one of the many benefits of the RV life.
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Thought for the Day:
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