We enjoyed complete sunshine Monday through Saturday this week. It was lovely - crystal clear bright blue skies and bright, warm sun. The melting process makes all the gutters on the house sound cheery with the trickling of water down the spouts. Streets thaw out a bit during the day so there's trickling water heading to the storm drains all day, too.
On our weekly Saturday trip to Atlantis, we finally (FINALLY) saw blacktop in the street. Still some patches of ice and definitely watery melt but it was so nice to see the road for the first time in weeks. Only the streets in our neighborhood still had snow and ice - since they don't get plowed. It's made getting out of the neighborhood a bit of a challenge this winter. It's the first winter we've had so much snow and ice that cars on the street sound crunchy. Loudly crunchy.
The weather forecast said 70% chance of snow on Sunday but we've had so many days of the weather forecast being wrong, we were thinking 'no, it's not going to snow'. But it did. Boy did it! It snowed most of the night and most of the day today and we've got more than 12 inches of snow on the ground now.
When the snowfall slowed down a bit, I heard an engine running - and sure enough, the best neighbor on the planet was outside in snow gear with his snow blower clearing the sidewalks between our houses and also the driveway. The worst of the storm was over so he got right to work. He is the bomb-diggety of neighbors and we are so blessed.
J. passed most of the day watching football. I should have worked on taxes - but I didn't. Vegged rewatching The Crown.
I've been tortured by Amazon for several days - attempting to use my rewards points to purchase iTunes gift cards caused them to flag our account as possible fraud activity. They froze the accounts, cancelled the purchase and forced me to wait 2 hours before I could reactivate. I phoned the customer service number and confirmed the gift card purchase was legit and completed by me. After the two hours, I set up a new password and re-connected my Amazon Visa to our account. All was well. I waited a day and did a new purchase of gift cards. When I went to bed that night, the order was 'scheduled' so I figured the email with the activation code would be in my in box in the morning. It wasn't - and when I clicked on the order status, I immediately received the same email messages as the day before - fraudulent activity. Damn! Another call to customer service [and yes, I gave them a piece of my mind because having just confirmed the day before in a long call that I had purchased the gift cards and did not understand at all how they flagged it as fraud again] - another two hour wait - another round of cancelled purchases including them deciding to cancel my Kindle Unlimited subscription which was 'new'. The prior days cancellations didn't do that. Completed another reset. Then I noticed that all of my reward points were gone - not available to use and not showing on the account at all. If it had been a few dollars, it would have been no big deal. But the points were over $400 and I am going to use them so I want them back. The current theory is the points will update when our credit card billing cycle updates to Amazon. Fingers crossed. The guy said 'the second fraud alert basically cleared your entire account'. Great. Not. I just logged on to our credit card account and took a picture of how many points we have as of today - and the picture does include the date - so we'll hopefully get it straightened out soon.
It's been a couple days from my initial start of this post and am relieved to say my Amazon points reappeared so all is well on that front. So glad because the tediousness of calling their customer service line is not something I was looking forward to doing again.
Sunny today - bright blue skies again. Melting happening but it was zero degrees when we woke up this morning so it's pretty darn cold. It's almost 3PM and the outside temp is 28 degrees. Melt takes warmth and we don't have any. LOL. We saw a bald eagle on the tee on the course outside our fence - he took off with some 'food' in his talons and his flight was so beautiful. Amazing to see him up close - we see bald eagles on the trees near the lake when we drive north to Reno - but it was really awesome to see him right outside our yard.
We just finished the quarterly call with our finance guy - as always, I was nervous about the call - and also as usual was reminded by the call that there's nothing to worry about. Our account took a huge hit in 2022 (as did many accounts) but it's already inching it's way back. Our finance guy is confident we will recover quite a bit by the end of 2023 and that's a relief. We are keeping things pretty much status quo for now but we did mention we plan to make a withdrawal and will work out the details of that in the next month or so.
Tons of leftovers in the fridge but I'm hankering something else - which is pretty much the norm. I'm going to use the air fryer to make something. Roasted potatoes I think.
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