There have been a few spots of excitement in the past few days for us. The first came when Gem suddenly accused me of buying nearly £350 of stuff from designerjeans.com... Now I was pretty sure it wasn't me and she knew it wasn't her so we were wondering who managed to get hold of one of our English credit cards and start using it online. We also found 3 other transactions we didn't recognise, one of them in Pakistani Rubles. We called the Lloyd's bank straight away and they looked into it for us. There were 4 different cards that had been active on our account in the last couple of months. One was mine, one was Gems, one was an older card of mine that had got damaged about a month ago so I'd ordered a replacement. All fine and accounted for. The fourth one was the one making the current transactions however. When they checked it, it was actually my even older card... the one that had been stolen in the Czech Republic... the one that
HAD BEEN CANCELLED ON 15th SEPTEMBER 2006!!! Now its great that we don't have to worry about how someone got hold of our current details as they didn't, and its also great that we are getting the £400+ back with no complaints, but how on earth does a transaction with a cancelled credit card get through? I would have thought the bank would make a check on which card number the request for money is coming from... even if its an old school clunky paper-based machine that processes the credit card, at some point a computer is going to transfer the little zeros and ones to someone else's account, no person takes the money from a bag and gives it to someone else, so why doesn't it get checked? Oh well, the card now has a "
has been used for fraud" tag on it too so hopefully that will stop it from happening again.
In other news, we sat and watched the Tri-Nations rugby match on Saturday and cheered the Aussies on to victory... Was great to see them win when NZ were easily the favourites. Put a smile on my face anyway :)
Right after that we got some great news... Both Gem and Vic got text messages on their phones to say we were eligible to try and get Live Earth tickets. Ages ago, when we didn't manage to get tickets for Glastonbury, we registered our names, along with millions of others, to try and get tickets to Live Earth. Live Earth is a big benefit concert in a similar style to the Live8 concert a few years back... basically lots of artists giving up their time for a cause, in this case, Climate Protection. I think the first round had come and gone and we had just written it off as near on impossible to get them. But with a couple of texts with a special Internet address to try and get some we were lucky! We managed to get 4 tickets in the end. The full details are at:
http://music.livenation.co.uk/liveearth/, but some of the big names going will are;
Madonna, Genesis, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters, Bloc Party, James Blunt, Duran Duran, Razorlight, Black Eyed Peas, Snow Patrol and Beastie Boys.
It's this coming Saturday so its going to be an absolute blast. Can't wait!!!
On Sunday, I drove Grant out to his cricket match. I thought as I hadn't been around to see him and Gordo play I'd watch for an hour and give my support. Grant had an absolute blinder and scored 125, getting his first 100 ever in only 79 balls... He even put three 6's over the fence in a row, one hitting the roof of a car, one getting lost, and one breaking a window. Good work! They scored a decent 210 (its a 40 over match) and were lucky he stayed out there so long as they ended up with only 9 players as a couple had to pull out early that morning. It was at the point that they were about to take the field that a couple asked me if I'd ever played cricket before... Well I think the last time, other than on the beach with a tennis ball, would be when I was about 15. But I thought I'd help the boys out and they found me some whites in the team kit that fitted and I took the field. They ended up winning by about 8 runs and it was a very close match. I think I did ok for a novice... stopped a few balls and chased some down so I guess I helped. Was good fun in the end :)
And as a minor point, there is one new gallery on the right there... Wre are working our way through all the picture we took while Gem's folks were out here now, so we are geting close to being up to date, which will be the first time in ages :)
Thats it for now, enjoy your week people.
Duncan.
I have finally decided to get off my arse and get some guitar lessons... so I went out and bought a cheap but nice electric guitar on sunday. Its a Les Paul Gibson replica model, which I like much better than the classic Fender shape. I think I'll have a bit of a practice for a week or so to try and toughen up my poor little soft computer programmer fingers, and then see who is around to give me some lessons. Should be fun!
