identity monitoring | Bertram's Blog

Making Sense of Little Mysteries

June 27, 2022 — Pat Bertram

This must be a particularly hard area for meteorologists to predict the weather. Yesterday morning, there was an 80% chance of rain, but only a few meager drops fell from the clouds, not enough even to color the sidewalk. When I went to bed last night, the chance of rain forecast for this morning was 10%, dropping to 0% after 10:00am. Well, this morning, around 10:00am, the rain started, and it’s been coming down ever since. At first, they said there was a 65% chance of rain, even though it was 100% raining. The forecast changed to 100% a few minutes ago. Now they say it will rain until 1:30, but that might mean it will continue raining until whenever, or it might actually mean it will stop raining soon. Who knows? Obviously, no one.

If I had known that it was going to rain so much today, I wouldn’t have watered yesterday, but I have a hunch it’s my rain dance (me standing outside with a hose) that brought forth all this moisture. If I hadn’t watered, today would have simply been another dry day.

I’m being facetious, of course. Although it sometimes feels as if my doing such things as watering my lawn under the right conditions will cause it to rain, I am simply not that powerful. Like everyone else, I do the best I can with what I am given and create mythologies to help me make sense of little mysteries.

One mystery — not weather related — has been solved. The other day I mentioned getting a letter from a bank I’d never heard of telling me that a cyber breach had impacted my personal and private information, and they referred me to an identity monitoring company to keep track of any use of that information. It turns out that the bank mentioned in the letter had bought out my father’s bank, and although I’d long forgotten (no wonder, since he’s been gone for eight years), I’d been a signatory on his account. Although I decided not to worry about why the breached bank had my information, it’s still good to know that it wasn’t anywhere near as mysterious as it seemed.

Another mystery, one that is weather-related and one I have not yet solved, is how, if it continues raining, am I going to manage to ford all the flooded gutters and get to work later today, but I’ll worry about that when the time comes.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in life. Tags: bank cyber breach, bank information compromised, difficulty predicting the weather, flooded gutters, identity monitoring, rain dance, weather forecast. 6 Comments »

Weird Times

June 23, 2022 — Pat Bertram

This seems to be a time of weirdness for me, though if things come in threes as the saying goes, then by tomorrow, my life should be back to normal. Assuming, of course, there is a normal anymore.

First, there was the issue with someone trying to change my Facebook password. By itself, it’s not that weird, but at the same time, I was unable to get into the email associated with my website, and two concurrent anomalies do make for weirdness.

Second, there was the issue with Flagstar Bank and their security breach. Again, by itself, it’s not that weird, but their having my identity information is inexplicable. And yet, as someone pointed out, I will get two years of free credit and identity monitoring out of it, though it does seem a bit much since I have no credit to ruin.

Third, well, this third thing isn’t at all in the same category as the first two, but weird nevertheless. I purchased a plant starter at the local hardware store. The planting instructions mention that the plant will grow so densely that in two or three years, it will need to be divided. The instructions also included the caveat that propagation is strictly prohibited. In other words, I will have to propagate the plant by dividing it, but I am not allowed to do so.

That falls more in the category of irony, I think, than true weirdness, but it’s noteworthy all the same. Not that anything will happen to me if I do propagate the plant since here are no propagation police wandering around with magnifying glasses checking out people’s gardens to look for propagation violations. The warning is more for those who sell plants commercially, which, of course, I don’t do. I’m on the other end of the commercial spectrum where I shell out money for plants rather than raking it in.

And anyway, I should be so lucky as to have to propagate the plant. So far, the only plant that’s done well enough to need to be divided are my New England asters. Last fall I divided my single clump of asters and ended up with seven or eight clumps. Each of those clumps look as if they will yield another four or five plants, so I will have to figure out what I want to do with all of them. Right now, the asters are edging part of the swath of grass that sweeps from the side of my house to the back yard, and I’m thinking of continuing to edge the grass with the asters. Luckily, I have several months to decide what to do — I certainly wouldn’t want to jinx the poor plants by counting on their doing well right now when the weird times are in full swing.

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