Les Bonnes Choses

I'm enjoying a strawberry-banana smoothie, made with two overripe pureed bananas, some frozen strawberries and some homemade yogurt that was being made even as I blogged last Friday. After reading Kelsey's blog post about making yogurt, Rebecca and I (mostly Rebecca) became obsessed with making yogurt, and I've been trying to get it right ever since. In my attempts to create a nice, warm environment for the yogurt culture to do its thing, I overheated (and killed) the yogurt twice. I've gotten it to work on two consecutive attempts in the last week, so I guess I've mostly got it figured out. I still think I should get a heating pad for the job.

Incidentally, I made the smoothie using a blender magic-bullet hack that I read about somewhere online. If you have a conventional blender and, for whatever reason, don't want to use the blender pitcher that came with it, you will probably find that the blade, gasket and ring that screws to the base of the pitcher will also conveniently fit a standard mason jar. You can, for example, make a quart of smoothie, enjoy half of it, and refrigerate the rest. Brilliant. Just make sure the gasket doesn't fall into the jar when you attach the blade, or you will have blended rubber in your food. I did that. I was frowny-face emoticon. Fortunately, I found replacement gaskets for cheap on eBay.

The other day, I forgot to mention the topic that brought me back to the computer to blog.

I had been trying to book a trip for Rebecca and myself, involving a Robert Q shuttle to Detroit, and then a flight from Detroit to NYC. I'm not a fan of planning these sorts of things. So I tried to use a London travel agent to make the arrangements. No dice. I was calling from Chicago. They don't take credit card information over the phone. Why? Because they had recently been burned by credit card fraud over the phone. The only way to book with these people is to physically go in and hand them your credit card -- much as you would do if you wanted to pay in cash. This means that, in this situation, using a credit card is strictly worse than cash, as it had no upside (e.g., not having to physically present the payment) and several downsides (e.g., interest charges, standard 3% transaction fee and additional fees imposed by the card issuer). I sympathized with the manager, who I spoke to in order to get to the bottom of the matter. Certainly, he cannot afford to bear the cost of a fraudulent transaction, as the profit margins for travel agents has become quite slim. But I find it difficult to comprehend how, with the services and technology available to facilitate financial transactions, I could not persuade someone to take my business.

Incidentally, this blog post is effectively advertising an opportunity for anyone out there with any background in electronic commerce. I won't even ask for a cut. I just want to be able to get someone to book my damn vacation because I don't get off on bargain hunting and attending to the minutiae associated with trip planning.