PG&E outdid themselves today. We’d gotten a letter from them last week telling us that they would be doing maintenance on power lines near us today and that we’d be without power between 9am and 3pm. They didn’t turn off the power until nearly 9:45, and it was back on before 1pm – it was out long enough for our UPSes to give up, but not long enough to affect any food or for the house to get uncomfortably warm. I’m glad they’re doing maintenance, and I’m glad they could beat their schedule!

It’s still Passover, which means we’re modifying recipes to avoid obvious chametz. Tonight, that meant using rice chips instead of pita chips in Spiced Chickpea Salad With Tahini and Pita Chips; if I hadn’t known about the substitution, I don’t think I would have realized there was anything different.

I have the bad habit of checking my email almost as soon as I get up. Mostly, I just look at the subject lines and delete obviously useless stuff, but once in a while, there’s an email that grabs my attention.

That was the case this morning with email from Vueling Airlines, telling me about a schedule change to our flight from Barcelona to Porto in August. It was a flight we had no intention of taking.

Last year, I’d been able to get refunds for almost all of the flights and cruises we’d had planned; the only exception was our flight on Vueling. They would only allow me to reschedule for another day, up to a year later, so I did that, hoping that they’d allow me to postpone again and use the credit in 2022.

Today’s mail said that they’d rescheduled my placeholder flight to be about six hours later. But because they’d moved it more than five hours, I now had the option of requesting a refund.

I took the option. The website offered Flight Credit with a 10% bonus, good for three years. When I declined that, they gave me a US phone number to call to get an actual refund. After listening to yet another recording offering me the Flight Credit, I was connected to an agent in Barcelona who (after offering me credit again) actually started the refund process. It’s more complicated than it should be because my credit card number got changed since I bought the flights, but I have hope!

We celebrated by getting our hair cut professionally for the first time in more than a year – I guess I should give the Wahl Peanut a really good cleaning and put it away.