Feed items

I’ll start off this post with a couple of questions:  What comes easy to you?  What comes hard to you?

Hopefully you have a good answer to these questions.  Or several good answers to these questions.  Pretty much everyone has things they do well, and things that they screw up royally when they try them.  Usually they know what these things are.

This may be a harder question, though:  Have you admitted to yourself what comes hard to you?

This is a different question entirely.  Knowing what you’re not that good at is one thing.  Fully embracing that fact and writing it off is another.  Doing that takes more time and more soul-searching, and is a bit more painful perhaps, but it can freeing to do this.

Math always will be hard for some people

Our primary credit card was compromised.  Again.

We noticed a spurious $9.84 charge when looking over our Chase Sapphire statement.  A quick visit to the website and a bit of Googling revealed the bad news.

So we called up Chase, reported the transaction, and they credited it back to us, no questions asked (they’re good like that).  They canceled our current card, and rushed us a new one for free, which came promptly (they’re good like that, too).

Following that, we looked over our recurring charges on that card, and saw only one that was due to be posted soon.  A couple of days later, when my wife went to the business to change the credit card number on file, and to pay if needed.  she was informed that the charge had bee posted that morning, and that the system was reporting that our account was paid up.  So, she left without paying anything.

You may have heard “ABC: Always Be Closing.” But what about: “Always Be Creative?” Or: “Always Be Charming?” Pick a few of these and level up …

Some time ago, I read this article on Cracked (fair warning: strong language and not really safe for work) talked about six harsh truths that will make you a better person. (It's since been updated for 2019.)

And harsh, it is. I don't necessarily agree that we are nothing more than our value to other people. But as far as learning new skills, it's spot on.

There’s no good time for a company to have a financial security breach, but it’s hard to find a worse time to have one than the start of the holiday shopping season. Target confirmed that as many as 40 million credit and debit card holders may have been affected for purchases made between November 27th and December 15th of this year.

Members of my family had made purchases at Target over the past few weeks, and have had their cards replaced. It’s an inconvenience to need to reset subscription payments and update credit card information in numerous places.