Low golf balls, colorful casts, credit card woes

Published 9:40 am Monday, July 13, 2009

A few thoughts from a scattered brain:

Why is it that our hair is perfect one day and the next day it seems to have a mind of its own? No matter what we do, it decides it is going to stay flat or try to stick up into outer space and scare everyone.

 In 10 years I have never seen my son-in-law lose his temper. It only took a golf ball driven hard by the golfers behind us to make him lose his temper. It slid by his head by mere inches and hit the ground. We all shuddered at the consequences had the ball hit him. Golfers please pay attention to who is ahead of you on the golf course. We can’t play any faster if there are many people ahead of us no matter how threatened we are by the people behind us.

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 There is something very relaxing as you watch a robin pull a worm out of the ground. Do we work that hard for our food?

Dogs do not like change any more than humans. Ask my pooch Sam and he will tell you he has had a hard week. We moved his furniture. He ignored me for days. Could he have learned that behavior from us?

 What can we do to convince the world that color matters? My cast was all colors. It made me smile. My walking boot is black, has uncomfortable grommets inside that irritate and cut my skin and doesn’t make me smile. I had to find some colorful paper and stickers to decorate my boot. Color matters especially when you are recovering from a broken foot.

I joined Twitter just for a lark. It could be another learning experience. Within minutes I had people following me. I had not even tweeted. I waited a few days to see what would happen and I had more people following me. They must have been waiting with baited breath to see what my first tweet would be. Why would you follow someone when you don’t know who they are or what they are going to say?

I checked out the people who wanted to follow me and I decided I didn’t want them to follow me. I do enjoy following Elizabeth Taylor. Tweet, tweet, tweet.

Chase Credit Card services recently sent me a letter stating they are changing their minimum payment from 2 percent to 5 percent. I have a very low interest rate with them. They didn’t change the interest rate, they changed the payment. I don’t think Congress addressed that. I decided to investigate. I called Chase Services and asked them what would happen if I couldn’t make my payment.

Keep in mind I have never missed a payment and have paid more than the minimum payment. They informed me that they were not changing the minimum payment for anyone and people who could not make the payment would have to default on their account and incur more charges.

This is interesting. Apparently they would rather have people default on their account rather than pay their Chase account. I checked the Internet for consumer complaints for Chase and this is a huge complaint for people. They had consolidated their debt for a low-interest rate. Now many people are caught in the minimum payment problem. These people also had not ever had a late payment.

One person stated that Chase had told them they could keep their payment low, but then they would have to raise the interest rate. It would take a longer time for this person to pay down the balance. The next day after I received this notice I also received more checks from Chase to transfer balances to my Chase account with this low-interest rate. The ideal scenario would be to not incur credit card debt.

For many people the low-interest rate was a way to pay off debt so they could eventually be debt-free. Chase can argue that with the low-interest rate and higher minimum payments the debt will be paid off faster. However, could these people pay off the debt faster they would have been doing it. Now they will default, and it will affect their credit rating and Chase will not get their money.

Again my question is this: Why would Chase want people to default rather than pay their account? Run to the shredder as fast as you can if you receive a low-interest-rate offer from Chase Bank.

 I don’t drink bottled water because I think it is healthier; I drink bottled water because it tastes better than our treated city water. The government is concerned because we don’t know what is in the bottled water. I probably don’t want to know; I just want water that does not taste like chlorine.

 The doctor’s office asked if I had lost weight while I had my broken ankle. They didn’t ask if I had gained weight. I think that was a wise decision on their part. Or maybe all they had to do was look at me to know the answer.

 I have a hard time posting to my blog. I can’t ever think of anything to say. That’s hard to imagine isn’t it? But then if you just got done reading this column, you know I can’t think of anything to say.

“See, the human mind is kind of like … a piñata. When it breaks open, there’s a lot of surprises inside. Once you get the piñata perspective, you see that losing your mind can be a peak experience.” — Jane Wagner

Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. Send e-mail to her at thecolumn@bevcomm.net or visit her blog at www.justalittlefluff.blogspot.com.