the pits

A connection I hadn't made before:

In the RK OVA, the morning after Kenshin first meets Tomoe and brings her back to the inn, Iizuka teases him about her while eating an umeboshi. Kenshin gets up and leaves, with a cold intensity that freezes the room (a much more subtle response than in the original manga, where Kenshin get overtly angry and makes Iizuka panic). Recovering, Iizuka calls after him, "Hey, you made me swallow the [umeboshi] pit!"( Read more... )

bank rave

I booked the last night of our Quebec vacation at a motel near the Montreal airport, via Yahoo Travel with an alleged "GoodBuy" prepaid special hotel deal several weeks ahead of time. Just before we left, my credit card statement arrived with Yahoo's charge of ~$120 on it.

As we blearily headed out toward the airport around 6am Sunday morning, the desk clerk cheerfully told us that my credit card would be charged. Again. For the *lower* rate of ~$100. Once we got home, I started checking my online account records.

Today, the $100 direct charge from the motel showed up. I started to file a dispute for that on Chase's website, but accidentally hit the "back" key partway through and couldn't get the dispute restarted again. Abandoning all hope, I called the number on the back of my credit card, expecting hours of voicemail hell and days or weeks of Snailing documents back and forth.

Chase cleared things up almost instantly, and zotted the higher Yahoo charge. I am joyfully bemused. (And very disappointed in Yahoo Travel, which was evidently taking its own sweet time to pay the motel; next time I'll just book all lodgings through the place's own website, as I did for the other two places we stayed. Although actually, the charge for the great place in Quebec City hasn't shown up yet. Hmmm. Oh well, no complaints about that.)