When we canceled our Antarctica cruise, I knew it’d take a couple of weeks for the refund to show up on our credit card. Usually, refunds are for small amounts, so it’s not worth trying to get the money back from Chase – it’ll get spent again quickly enough. But the refund from this trip was a different story – it’s probably more than I’ll put on that card for the rest of the year, so I wanted it back in my bank account, and I didn’t want to wait for a couple of months if I could avoid it.

I called Chase late on Tuesday afternoon to ask how long it would take for the balance to be refunded. The agent said she’d put in the request for a refund immediately (which surprised me – the billing cycle hadn’t even ended yet) and that I should expect an email from Chase Payments offering me the chance to have the refund direct-deposited. That email came yesterday afternoon; this morning, the money was in my credit union account.

I am impressed. I complain when companies do a bad job; this time, I’m happy to be able to praise Chase and Provident Credit Union for exceeding my expectations.

We started watching Only Murders in the Building and are really enjoying it. We might even be caught up before next week’s episode drops!

I started working on my photos from August 5th – they include far too many photos of whales (not usually a problem for me). Tonight, though, I’m including my only photo of Surtsey; it’s a tourist-free island!

The theme of our Toastmasters meeting this morning was “Mistakes”. Famous quotes about mistakes were bandied about during the meeting – at the end, our Toastmaster, Gordon, quoted Maxwell Maltz (author of Psycho-Cybernetics), who wrote “You make mistakes. Mistakes don’t make you.” Gordon asked us to consider the opposite argument: “You don’t make mistakes, mistakes make you.” As someone who’s done improv, I like that formulation better – it’s “yes, and” all the way!

I rectified a long-standing mistake today – back in 2006, I got a Hepatitis A shot, but I never got the second one. And I didn’t give it another thought until we were planning for our Africa trip that was supposed to happen this month. Diane got her first shot in June; I waited until I could find out if I’d actually gotten two shots back in 2006. I eventually got my official immunization record from the California Department of Public Health which only showed one shot, so today, we went to Costco so I could get my second shot.

The process was a lot faster for me than it was for Diane – I was finished in less than half-an-hour from entering the store. But that still gave us 20 minutes to wander around while they prepared the shot, which was long enough to go down aisles we usually avoid.

When I was finished at the pharmacy, we grabbed a cart and picked up the half-dozen items we’d planned to buy – as well as the kitchen rugs we’d discovered in our explorations. Having time to kill at Costco is a mistake!