(no subject)

Happy happy happy. Lots of stuff to boost my mood this weekend.

My credit appears to be looking up, finally. I sent off an application for one of the more attractive offers I've been getting, fully expecting the standard rejection letter. On Saturday, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a shiny new credit card with a quite decent limit. There should be a balance transfer happening soon, which will get most of the balance on my other card down to an interest rate that's roughly 22% lower than it is now and then I won't feel quite so guilty about carrying a balance at the moment.

I've got a visit planned with M. soon, which always makes me happy. Granted, it will be an incredibly busy weekend and if I take the train up as I'm planning right now I think it will effectively be a short visit thanks to the inflexibility of train schedules between DC and Boston, but a visit nonetheless.

Speaking of visits, D. has said that he's coming down to the area in October to go to a boat show (sailing geeks, why'd it have to be sailing geeks?) and visit. I haven't had a visit consisting of more than lunch with D. in...*think* more than year. And even that was sort of a side effect of my visiting his housemate, whom I was also seeing at the time. (Note to self: never, EVER do that again.) Naturally, that weekend is the weekend I'd planned to go up to Boston again to hang out with M. and A. and see a bunch of other folks that I haven't seen much since they moved to Boston. The timing leaves something to be desired. =) I don't know when I'll get another chance to spend any real time with D. again, so I think I'd best take advantage of the opportunity.

I got the itinerary confirmation for the plane tickets, so it's definite that my sister and brother-in-law and nephew are coming up for Thanksgiving; if I'm lucky I can persuade my brother/sister-in-law/niece to show up as well. Mom always told me that eventually I'd learn to like my younger siblings; as much as I hate to admit that my mother was right about anything ;) , she was. I've gotten to actually respect them both in the last few years. My sister and her family were living in my mother's house, and she was the one to take care of Mom before she died. It was really rough, and I gained a respect for her that I hadn't had before after seeing how she held up. My brother finally seems to have settled into the career he wants, and he's started his own contracting company, which seems to be fairly successful, and is building a house.

C. and I are also talking again about a trip to San Francisco, somewhat more seriously than we were before. I just wish I could persuade him to go outside the US; the only destination he's shown any interest in has been Australia. That would be a great trip, but so would the UK or Rome or Tokyo (when we're feeling a bit richer) or China or...
Ah well. If he won't go, I suspect I could probably find a friend willing to travel with me.
The one small annoyance in this is the fact that I'm left to make all the plans. *sigh* Although that does mean that I get to schedule what I like; if he doesn't like it...too bad, you could've made the reservations as well as I could. ;)

Also, I think I've lost 3 lbs. or so since I started going to the gym last week. Not a huge loss, but it's a start and it will help keep me motivated. This is also without changing my eating habits yet; once I do that the weight should come off more quickly. I'm also seeing improvement on the cardio workouts; I can now do the cross-training program on the elliptical trainer for 45 minutes without wanting to die.

Eek. Late. Must sleep...

if you don't get it, you don't get it

Rant for today.

I was attempting to sign up for the new online banking option for my credit union, to save myself from having to trek 20 miles into downtown during the day during the week to do anything related to my account. Happily fill out the little form, asking for my SSN and bank account number, hit submit and get a warning message from my browser: "This form is secure, but the information you're submitting is not. It's probably in your best interest to hit 'Cancel' now." So I look at the source to the form and discover that while the form and the confirmation page are both hosted on a secure server, the form that processes the data is not. Duh? And even better, even if the script was hosted on the secure site, it's a form mail script, so my information is getting sent in a plain text email.
Or rather, it's not. I sent email pointing out that it wasn't exactly secure and asking if they ever planned to make it that way, and every address listed on the site in turn bounced back with "user unknown/relaying denied" messages. We can't even set up a webmaster address that doesn't bounce, but we're going to do online banking. Uh huh. And then, out of curiosity, I went to the account management page to see if they were set up similarly, and was presented with a huge error message: "Sorry, your browser has JAVA disabled or it is not supported. Please check you r browser's settings. " Strike three. Bzzzzt. Thank you, drive through. Ah well, I've had that account for 10 years and only use it these days to autopay my student loans from; closing it out won't be a big hardship. =)