Say goodbye to summer

To be sure that we are not missing the changing of the seasons, today is cloudy and sprinkling.  It's not cold, and it is rather muggy.  I don't suppose there will be many more changes to run in shorts, and not today for sure.  I am just hoping it won't be pouring rain at lunchtime.

Booking my flight to Lux ended up to be a bigger chore than I had originally anticipated.  I started out doing it here yesterday afternoon, but I don't have my passport information on me and while I thought I had a copy of it in PDF format, I couldn't locate it.  Therefore, when I got home and after I got my dog walking and other little things done and dinner cooking, I sat down at the desk and set about getting the ticket.  I knew exactly which flight so I was quickly at the payment page.  I entered the credit card information and clicked 'send' and it returned an error message that the information was incorrect.  And even before I could register the fact that I had neglected to change the default expiration date of the credit card my phone began to ring!  That fast!  American Express was right on it.  I re-entered the correct information without taking the call, but it wouldn't accept it so I assumed I needed to clear it with American Express that the card wasn't being used fraudulently.  I called the number and went through the entire anti-fraud automated rigmarole.  This was not a fast process, by the way.  It was finally done and I entered the information again.  And the "Please wait while we process your information" screen sat and sat and sat and whirred.  In the meantime I did a quick job for work, checked on my dinner .... drummed my fingers and finally after about 10 minutes the screen appeared with the same error message.  Gah!!  So I telephone American Express again and got a live person and she apologized.  I assured her I was quite impressed with the speed in which they started inquiring about fraud and it was no problem as far as I was concerned.  I had to refresh the web page of the airline and start all over, basically.  It finally worked.  Yay me.

And that was the extent of the excitement last night.  I had dinner, walked Tink ... in the dark, by the way ...  There was nothing I wanted to watch on TV, so it was early to bed and I read and played with my iPad.  There's *always* something to do with my iPad.  Movies and TV and podcasts and music and games and books and magazines .... on and on and on.  Too much stuff, but I must say I can always find something to amuse myself with.  This is going to be great to travel with.  Usually I have a book or two with me on a long trip, not to mention some magazines.  That gets heavy.  It's all on the iPad now.