Well, I finally broke down and bought my little pink iPod mini. The iPod envy was ratcheting up again, and when I went to the Apple website to drool over them, I saw the price had gone down to $225 (with my educational discount). So I ordered it up and it should be on its way soon!

Not five minutes after the order went through, I got a call from Visa's fraud protection department! Apparently some of my Amazon birthday order also got charged yesterday (more on that in a sec), and the two internet charges so close to each other set off some flag or something. I'm kind of surprised, as I thought they would take my past account history into account - I do love me some internet commerce! I told them the charges were fine and they told me to have a nice day. I'm actually kind of impressed - I'm glad that they're keeping such a close eye on things.

The Amazon order has been somewhat of a fiasco. I ordered three things on January 23rd, thinking they should be there a tiny bit after my birthday, seeing as they all "usually" shipped within 2 weeks (one was 24 hours, one was 1-2 weeks, and one was 8-14 days). Well, I finally got one of the items on February 24th... over a month after the order! It took them three weeks to figure out that the Esquivel! CD I wanted was fairly scarce (I probably could have told them that!), so they only started looking for the Omara Portuondo CD and the Cranium game I ordered at the same time. As luck would have it, Cranium was also delayed, so they finally decided to send my Omara Portuondo CD. And I thought my stuff would be here only slightly after my birthday!