What a Week!

I had a great time at my conference, catching up with old friends and spending some quality time with my grad school friends Lisa and Shari, exploring Boston's Back Bay area and having successful meetings with publishers. My paper went down well and I made some good contacts, heard some great work and generally enjoyed the experience--complete with spring and summer like weather.

Of course I had a ton of work to do when I got back--and still do with the book deadline on Friday--but I also had to deal with debit card fraud. Someone tried to open an amazon.com account with my debit card number on Tuesday so I had to cancel the card and have to monitor my financial transactions. It was a pain as I was out of town again and had no debit card so I had to pay for a hotel room in cash (which isn't something that's easy or desired these days) and worried that I'd run out of money before I could get my new card. I'm hugely afraid of identity theft and don't bank online, shred or keep every financial statement or receipt (and often shred and then soak the pieces of paper so they fade and turn to pulp--I'm that crazy) so I have no idea how my number got out. I wonder if someone in the hotel was less than scrupulous about some print out but that's something I can't control. It just goes to show--I've had friends who are far more cavalier than I am about these matters and have never had an issue with card fraud. Thanks to Amazon's quick action I'm hoping I won't have to deal with fraudulent transactions but the timing could not have been worse.