Our week

What a week it has been. On week ends we really do not watch a lot of news. I get more news via the Internet than by television. Even so, as I was driving to work on Monday morning, I was surprised to hear there was a named storm in the Gulf of Mexico. When I got to work I checked the National Hurricane Center web site and sure enough there was a tropical storm and it was headed our way. It was not expected to be a strong storm, in fact it was not even projected to become a hurricane. I storm has to have sustained winds of more than 74 miles per hour to be a hurricane. Never the less, all tropical storms have to be taken seriously. In 2001 tropical storm Allison hit our area and dropped 3 FEET of rain. It killed around a dozen people and caused billions of dollars in damage. I called Elizabeth and told her to check our hurricane supplies. Things like water, foods that do not require refrigeration, batteries etc. We were in pretty good shape but she did go to the store and get some more water. She also started to prepare the house. For a storm it is important to get any loose items stored away. She put things like the patio table and umbrella in the garage. At work it we went into hurricane preparation too. Again this was mostly securing loose items. When the wind howls at over 100 miles per hour anything can become a deadly missile. Even at 50 or 60 miles per hour, heavy objects can be blown about. It was decided that only essential personnel were to report on Tuesday. That does not included me. Around 2 I headed home. When I got there we finished getting the house ready and made one last trip to the store. By this time the hurricane center was projecting the storm would make landfall around noon and a bit to the east of us. This is important as the east side of a storm is the dirty side. All storms rotate counter clock wise so the heaviest rain and strongest winds are to the east of the storm’s center. By the time it has rotated over land it loses much of its punch. When we got up Tuesday the project land fall was only a few hours away and still farther to the east. While we did see some wind and rain, it was pretty much a non event for us. We have had much worse weather in just plain old everyday thunder storms. In fact I think I have ridden my bike in worse weather than we ended up getting. We did stay inside most of the morning but by mid afternoon the sun was actually shining from time to time.

I went back to work on Wednesday and it was a pretty typical day. Thursday also started pretty typical. Once Elizabeth gets up and has her breakfast she logs onto the computer and can communicate with me by instant messages. She started doing this when suddenly stopped. She send me one message saying she was dealing with something important. When she finally got time to talk to me it was bad news. She had gotten a phone call from a guy claiming to be a lawyer with the firm of Kingman and Cole. Their address is in Brockport New York. He said Mary had gotten a credit card from Orchard Bank and then defaulted on it. He had checked her credit report and saw she had nothing but apparently that directed him to me and he wanted me to pay some five thousand dollars. As disturbing as this was what made it worse was he had my social security number and our home phone number. That is unlisted and we give it to only a few people. Elizabeth is pretty smart. She called our lawyer to get some direction. After she talked to me I did a bit of research on the internet and it became obvious pretty quickly this was all a scam. The address listed in Brockport is a UPS store. We pulled a credit report and found he did access my report that morning. Just to be safe we went to the bank and closed our checking account and reopened a new one. Today I will be calling all three credit bureaus and putting us on fraud alert. We are also on credit monitoring. That way they need to contact us for any changes to our credit. At least we discovered this before he could do much damage and hopefully we can prevent much of the usual identity theft stuff. It will be interesting to see if they send any of the requested information to our lawyer. Per their direction we asked for account documentation. We have also contacted the attorney general’s office

So that was our week.