5 Things from This Week

In no particular order...

1. We are still experiencing some wild monsoon weather.  Examples here, here, and here.
2. I went online to lift the credit freezes I have on my accounts at the big three credit reporting agencies yesterday.  I'm opening another investment account and didn't know if they needed to check my credit or not so I figured it would take a few minutes to log into each account and temporarily suspend the freezes.  Two hours and one near panic attack later, things got worked out.  The first two log-ins were no problem, the last one I tried to log in to said I had the wrong user name and password so I clicked on forgot username and it said they would send a link to my email...only the email they showed was not for my email account!  About the only way to get ahold of the company was through a phone tree that first asked for my birthdate and social security number but it kept saying my entries were wrong!  I had flashes of a multi-month process to get my accounts back from a hacker as I frantically dialed every number I could find for the company.  Finally I got a guy in marketing who transferred me to a real person and he got all of my account details back in my name.  For about an hour, I was really freaking out!  On a happy note, it didn't seem like my credit had been hacked as all of my info was correct and it showed I was two points away from a perfect credit score!  Lesson: check your credit reports for free EVERY year (I hadn't accessed these accounts in probably two or three years).
3. We are still on track with our cash-only challenge this month.  In our shopping today in which we only bought loss leaders, we saved 69% over the regular cost of the food--the cashiers are always shocked when they hit total and see all of the money dropping off of our amount due.
4. My friend's daughter has been sick for about two and a half years.  Like fever, body aches, and other symptoms, everyday, for two and a half years.  She has seen doctor after doctor, and was even brought into the Mayo clinic for testing and still no results.  Finally yesterday she got a call that it is probably a rare cancer that less than a thousand people in the whole country have.  So she will have more tests to confirm this...meanwhile my friend and I spent a few hours pouring over what research we could find on the disease and found that while cancer is a terrifying diagnosis, this sort--if this is what she actually has--is super slow growing, has a good long-term prognosis, and treatment options aren't horrible.
5. I'm trying to avoid the news, as well as several subreddits like this, because everything is so stressful and depressing.  I can feel my blood pressure rise with each article that is worse than the last!