Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Last night Ron was (Google) chatting with a friend of ours, Modelmaker, who mentioned that he'd gotten into the Palatine High School Spring Craft Fair that is being held on Saturday to sell his pens and goodies. I'd tried to get into the holiday one, but never got a response to my e-mail. Modelmaker said that the spring event is run by a different committee, and they'd been getting a lot of complaints about the other one. And he gave me contact information for the organizer.

I figured they were full up at this point, but no harm in calling. Well, it turns out that they did still have space in our category (not sure exactly what categories they have, we're probably one of the oddballs...). The directory is going to the printer today, could I print out the application and drop it off with the check for the fees? Oh, yeah, you betcha! So that's the plan for Saturday. Shopping hours are 9 am - 4 pm. Linky in the "upcoming events" section Ron added over there on the left.

OTOH, I got some unpleasant news last night in my credit card account statement. I've had the account to accept credit cards for a bit less than a year now, and it's not paying for itself . But worse yet, the statement said they were implementing a new fee of $99 a year to pay for the new credit card security program implemented by the big 4. Oh, plus percentage rate increases and a new 5-cent per-transaction fee. Well, bang goes credit cards.

Ok, CC security is a big deal. I can live with the new rates and the per-transaction fee as they read as covering the new security hoo-ha, and might live with the $99 if it was a one-time startup thing, but not yearly. I called the clearance company, who says this fee is coming from the CC companies. The rep was feigning stupidity (NO, spreading out the fee over X months does not make it any less of a money drain, idiot!) and I finally allowed him to talk me into not cancelling the account yet, since they aren't charging me yet.

But doing some research this morning, I'm questioning if the fee is really coming from the CC companies. I have hopefully set my actual bank to work on the question.