Arrrgh!

It has been a Arrrgh! kind of day!

First of all, I decided to make a loaf of raisin bread. In the machine I have, the raisins and craisins go into the little hopper on the lid which is supposed to drop open at the right moment to put the fruit ininto the dough. You program this by pushing a button which is called "extras" Well, today the little hopper didn’t open at all and I only caught on to this during the first rise! I am thinking that what the hopper needs is a good cleaning and it is raisin gunk that stopped it opening. {This is going to be a fiddly and annoying job because it is on a part of the machine you can’t put into the water…no, wait a minute—I think the cover comes off the machine completely! Hmmm, I will look into this…} Anyway, as soon as I realized that the hopper had not opened, I put the fruit in by hand and it was kneaded in a bit. However, a lot of it didn’t make it into the dough so I stuck the fruit into the top by hand, too! Actually, since I do drop a half-handful into the ingredients before the paddle starts, the final product wasn’t too bad. Anyway, it tastes pretty good. However, since the book that came with it has a useful table that tells you how long each part of the cycle lasts, I am going to work out a time that the raisins should go in, write it on the recipe card and set a timer next time I make it.

Next came the homework assignment for italian.  I have done about a fourth of the assignment  which is agreement of nouns and adjectives. This is considerably more complex than English because  nouns are either male or female as well as singular or plural and the adjectives have to agree with the nouns. Lots of checking and underlining and headaches. Oh, and we have to write the complete sentences not just the answer. I actually agree with this and know why she wants it like this but there is no doubt that it takes MUCH longer. And it takes me much longer than most of the students because I write it by hand first in my notebook and then type it over. This is something I choose to do because I am a person who learns by writing. Anyway that went well without an Arrgh! in sight!.

Next I went to the drug store to get my medications and Fred’s. And that was where I was told that my debit card wouldn’t go through! And, much to my surprise, the debit card I have for our household account would not go through either! Now, I had had email from Amazon to say they were having a problem with the card for my personal account that  I had used to pay for some books I was waiting for but I had not done anything about it because I had half-assumed it was one of those scams. You know, the ones where they ask you to visit your Ebay account and put in your credit card details and your password again!  Anyway, I came home and accessed  my three accounts {household, personal and savings} only to find that my personal one had a negative balance!

When I looked at the tranactions, I could see what had happened and I think it was something I had done when I set up my ING account to regularly withdraw from this personal account. ING has a good interest rate–much better than the local bank so I keep most of my money there. The checking account I have linked with my ING account actually pays NO interest at all so I try not to keep too much money in it! But not a negative balance! So, I could see why that card would not work! But the household account was pretty healthy because both Fred and I had recently put ine money to cover our shares of the new funiture we had bought. Anyway, the bottom line was that there was NOTHING wrong with the household card and no reason at all why it should have been refused. I checked it by buying a small amount of groceries and it went through fine. Then I came home and moved money back into my personal account to cover the negative balance and make it all look a bit healthier! The person I spoke to at the bank told me there would be no penalties for overdrawing if I got it covered before 7 pm tonight. And of course, the value of online banking is that these transactions are done almost immediately.

So, there you have my day. Fortunately everything worked out well in the end despite my panic!

Until later….