Wednesday, 16 September 2026

 

Well, this isn't fun. Buddy started thumping his leg against the carpet as he scratched himself repeatedly, and when I turned him over, I saw several fleas crawling over his belly. I cleaned up the living room, bedroom, vacuumed a few times, threw his beds and blankets in the dryer (and then the washer, and then the dryer again), and gave him a bath; I don't know if it did any good or not, but I also squeezed some of my hair conditioner in with his dog shampoo to thicken it up and hopefully arrest the fleas traveling on his body. Now I've got him a flea collar, since the fleas and ticks this year are apparently defying his usual, and usually quite effective, Hartz UltraGuard treatments.

Given that interest rates went up today, I decided to go ahead and transfer almost everything off one of my bank-tied credit cards and onto one of my credit union's card (which just granted me a few thousand dollars of extra space). It means that I'll now have to pay over $200 per month on interest rates on the credit union card, but that's life... and I'm definitely more concerned about getting what I owe out of the hands of the banks than worrying about percentage rates. I'm going to have to freeze the bank's credit card rather than close it, both to preserve my credit rating and to leave myself a financial option in case of an emergency. Once the dust settles, I'll pay off whatever's left from any pending money exchanges (like the $4.39/gallon in gas today), and then freeze it.

Now my concern rests with the "big" bank's credit card and its almost-$19k in charges. This is the card that generally took on the debt from my 2015 NMU expenses (housing, classes etc.), dental work, gas, vehicle repairs, and just general survival in today's society. But, since my father's death and Mother's strokes changed my plans to get an M.A. and move back to Chicago, the debt never went anywhere. I started a checking, savings, and credit card with this particular bank in Los Angeles around 2004 (I also had a short-lived credit union account while at NAS Lemoore), only to finally have to close the checking and savings because they kept charging me for not making the required ten transactions per month on the debit card.

There's only one benefit with having such a high balance on the "big" card: free gift cards via the Rewards program. I went onto the site and ordered two gift cards for a nearby gas station, one for $100 and another for $25, to use up some of the points I've accumulated in the program. Maybe 80% of the cards offered don't apply because we don't have those businesses around here.

Still slowly weaning myself off Google. Although I have little interest in buying a subscription to anything being offered, the free Proton Password Manager and Drive elements would be helpful to have. It's not clear how many of Google's features are mirrored by Proton, but it is obvious that Google is corrupted by our current political system and it's not offering the same levels of security that Proton is. DuckDuckGo is still something I'm adjusting to as well, as I'm fond of Google Books, Google Images, and the search engine in general for online researching. My only Proton concerns would be if AI takes it over, like it has with so many other sites.