We are the proud owners of a used 400mhz G3 tower, bought off Craigslist this morning for a very good price. This will make a good backup system for Jen to work on until we buy a faster Mini or other up-to-date machine, and it came with a full-size keyboard and optical mouse, as well as a Jaz drive and ½gig of RAM.

In the other good news column, the repairs to the Saturn were almost $50 cheaper than what they quoted, so we’re pretty happy with that.

Shit. Somebody’s got hold of my bankcard number and has been dropping incremental charges of $1 on me for the past couple of months; I caught it finally when I saw they had upped a charge to $25. Looking around the internet, I read about another fellow’s experience and the sobering news that it’s going to be a hard road to clean up this mess. From what one person writes in the comments, the companies billing me (Trilegant, Faces.com) are in bed with somebody else that I have purchased through and sold me and my information down the river. Great. The interesting thing is that they claim I went to netflip.com and signed up for the “service”—with my old mailing address. From what I’ve read, it’s some kind of opt-out direct mail scam where you are signed up if you don’t mail them back something, a la Columbia House. So, my advice is to carefully scrutinize your bank statements (I had gotten lazy in the last two months) and make sure you’re not getting scammed.

Oy, With The Howling. Jen called to let me know that Penn is in a bad way—yowling, farting, limping… the poor cat has been on so many medicines it’s a wonder he’s not on the street giving $5 favors away for a snort of Special K. Jen has an appointment this afternoon with another doctor to see if he can figure out what’s going on.

4:50pm update. Jen called to let me know that Penn’s bowels opened up all over the inside of his cage, and that it is like no other substance she has ever smelled in her life. I will bring my wife pretty, fragrant flowers tonight for dealing with this mess.