Early Mother’s Day, Early Saturday, Big Carrots, Little Energy, 599

So after work on Friday I went straight to mom’s place.  We had arranged to do an early Mother’s Day celebration.     I took the SSR to work for the occasion.  I took a few pictures of the truck through out the day.  This one came out the best.

I took mom up to Hemmingway’s in Coconut Point.  We had a nice meal in their outdoor seating area facing the water. During dinner I utilized tech in a way that even made me, a certified geek, appreciate.

Mom had asked me last week if I could pick up a supplement she uses at Costco.  Unfortunately when I went last week they were no longer carrying it. Mom was bummed. However technology came to the rescue.

I whipped out my Iphone, loaded my Amazon app and found the supplement, available with free two day Prime shipping no less.  I placed the order, arranged for it to ship to mom’s place and was done in the span of three minutes.  Tech is so commonplace nowadays I lose appreciation for just how powerful the internet is since it is used so frequently.

After dinner I asked mom if she needed anything else while we were out.  She asked if we could stop over at the nearby Super Target to try to find another ion bracelet similar to what I bought her a couple years ago for Christmas.  They didn’t have  that exact model anymore although they had something similar.  Mom wasn’t interested in the alternative.  I dropped her back off at home and made plans to take her to Trader Joe’s some night this week.

I had an early Saturday morning planned.  Alison was one of the organizers for an all girl 5K that was being put on.  Even though it wasn’t an official GCR event a number of our people showed up to help.  It was a good thing.  Things were pretty chaotic early on.  My role was much different than it is on a typical race day where my nose is mostly planted behind the screen of a laptop.

I wound up on the crew that was setting up the course, using my truck as the transport vehicle.  There was some confusion regarding the course layout so we wound up using the Tacoma odometer to do it along with some guesstimation.  It turned out the course was around 3.2 miles, a little long but pretty damn good for figuring it out on the spot.  After laying the course out I was recruited once again for my truck, this time to take the course marshals out to their various spots.

I got back to the registration area with only 10 minutes to spare.  Luckily the only thing involved with timing this fun run was activating a stop watch at the start so I could set the finish line clock.  Those ideas I had about chip timing the run would have never worked out.

There was a decent turn out for the race, over 150 women signed up.  The number is very good when you factor in that the race was only organized a couple months ago.  A nice chunk of change was raised for the charity the race supported and the women all seemed to have a good time.

Saturday afternoon I was dragging from the early wake up call.  I cut some corners with the house chores, something I don’t normally approve of but it felt like a smart move.  One of the chores was tending the garden.  I pulled a MASSIVE carrot out of the ground, it may be the biggest ever.  It looked like a couple different carrots may have grown into this singular monster.

Saturday night I watched my latest Netflix dvd, John Carter.  This Disney movie made a lot of noise when it was released for both it’s huge production costs (about a quarter of a BILLION dollars) and it’s relatively small box office numbers (only 73 million domestic gross).  Still, it looked like something I would find entertaining.  I did.

The movie was not horrible at all although it certainly did not merit the kind of money that was spent on it.  It seemed like they were definitely trying to hop on the Avatar band wagon in many ways.  John Carter certainly is not a movie that leaves any sort of lasting impression but for at least 2 hours it did a good job of keeping me entertained, B+.

On Sunday morning I did my first endurance training in a looong time, I had not run a single mile since the 16 miles I logged with Tracy a month or so ago.  It has not been a deliberate avoidance of endurance work, just other things have gotten in the way.

Well I went full boat yesterday, combining a run, bike ride and swim.  I paid the price.  The weather yesterday was summertime muggy.  Even with starting relatively early I was sweating my ass off after the 4 mile run.  The bike portion didn’t feel any better, especially after the turn around point where I was pedaling into a slight headwind.  My legs just were out of gas.

I also decided to not wear bike shorts for the ride, instead thinking my running shorts would suffice for the 12.25 mile ride.  I regretted that decision greatly during the last 4-5 miles. My nether regions felt raw.

I was totally spent by the time the swim segment of the workout came up.  When I hopped in the pool, despite very warm water, I had heat exhaustion style goosebumps going on.  The first 400 I swam felt very difficult.  I kept my ass in the pool until I covered an additional 800 yards.

I emerged from the workout exhausted but glad that I completed it.  I need to get more consistent with my Sunday tri training.

Sunday afternoon I was doing my bills.  Part of it was reconciling my credit card statement.  I came across the charge for my visit to Zookies when Troy was down.  I noticed they charged me $6 more than I had authorized.  This pissed me off of course.  There are lots of stories of this going on, restaurant staff padding the charge, assuming most people are too lazy to look closely at their CC statement.

Well that amount of anger was nothing compared to what I felt when I saw the next charge, $599 at UnderArmour Direct!!!!  What the fck??!!  So I immediately call the CC company and report the charge.  I also hopped on to their website to verify that I didn’t see any other bullshit charges, nope UA was the only one.  Someone bought a shitload of athletic clothing on my dime.

Now I have to go through all the bullshit of them cancelling the card, sending me a new one and then my having to update every situation where I have stuff billed directly to the card.  There are a lot of them.

Once I hung up I was doing more head scratching.  The overcharge at Zookies was two days before the Under Armour charge.  I wondered if whomever was brazen enough to pad my food bill also was the person that made the UA purchase.  All they would have needed was the info on the card in many cases.

I called up Zookies and asked for one of the owners, neither was there but they said they would let them know and have them call me.  I got a call back shortly from Mrs Zookie, whom I have talked to several times at the bar, she is very nice.  I explained to her about the overcharge at the bar and my suspicions that it could be connected to the massive UA charge two days later.

She was very concerned by my story.  I told her I have no way of knowing for sure if they are connected but wanted to make her aware that one of her employees could be dealing in CC fraud.  She said she would review the receipts from that night to see whom cashed out the bill.  I thanked her for her effort.

I actually plan to try to do a little investigation on this myself.  Far too often banks basically ignore this fraud and write it off as a cost of doing business.  They won’t even try to prosecute the criminal perpetrating the fraud.

I am going to try to contact Under Armour and get details on the order, specifically what address it was sent to.  Since it was done in my name with my CC I am hoping they will give me this info.  If they do I will pass the address along to Mrs. Zookie to see if it matches up with the address of one of her employees.  If so, BAM, gotcha.

I also have a phone call to make to Comcast.  My promised 49.99 rate seems to have been smoke and mirrors, this months bill was $68. I really dislike Comcast…