A ten-minute post

      I have ten minutes before I need to go to bed so that's how long I'm going to type. Let's see how much I can tell you in that amount of time.
      I spent most of the weekend taking care of Mikey. We had a great time. He's a funny, sweet child. It's such fun to watch him learning things and figuring out the world. There's also something bittersweet in it as I hate for him to grow up. He wore his first tie to church today just like his Papa's. I told him that he looked handsome. He smiled and said, "I do."
      My roommate took him home to his mother this evening, and then I spend the rest of the time putting away his toys, doing dishes, doing laundry and getting ready to go to work tomorrow.
      My computer is functioning. Some programs need to be reinstalled still, and the system is still having problems. But Word, Publisher, AOL and Internet Explorer are working, and they're the ones I need for my writing projects. I'll start saving, and maybe by summer, I'll have enough saved to buy me a new one. That's the plan.
      I had an ugly confrontation with a credit card company that I had paid off with my loan. They send me a $79 bill for finance charges. I called them up and asked, "I paid my balance and paid long before it was due. Why am I being charged this?"
      Their answer was that the balance didn't take into account finance charges that were added after they sent the bill to me and before I paid it off. And here's the kicker: If I paid the balance on the new bill, I'd get another bill because once again, the finance charges would be added.
      So how do you pay them off? I quote the account rep: "You send us more money than the balance and then we send you a refund if there hasn't been any charges on the card for three months."
      I hit the roof and went through two account reps and finally got a supervisor. He told me, "I'll remove the charges, but you shouldn't expect us to do this in the future. Your account has no grace period." I thought to myself, don't worry, buddy boy, I won't be using that card ever again. As soon as they remove the charges, I'll be canceling that card, something I had intended to do all along.
      I've been doing quite a bit of editing on Dragons Gather. I've fixed a lot of the plot problems and have a better idea on how to proceed. The basic problem was that I hadn't made it tough enough on characters. They need more perils, more dangers, more arguments, more tension in their wild race to escape their foe. I think I know how to provide that.
      Time's up. Good night all.