Happy New Year!
Jan. 1st, 2026 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutIt’s still pretty fresh, and I’m sure sensible folk are still sleeping, but I am awake and thinking about exercise room lighting. Since I got that mostly squared away — Waveform has put out a nice LED panel with a surface mount kit that should solve my problems — I decided to brave the credit card and banking apps that I took a one day break from. And lo and behold, developments!
No, not on the Woman Within problems. The only change there is they canceled an order that I think I already received.
But on the fraud, I think the ACH stop payment worked! The debit shows up followed by a credit the next day, which is what the kind woman at TD Bank told me is how it would look if the stop payment worked. I only knew to ask for a stop payment because the efficient woman at PayPal said I should call and ask them if they could do anything. I haven’t gone over to PayPal to find out what the status is over there — in the back of my mind, I’ve been wondering if this would turn into a Delia’s situation, where I contested something a couple different ways and wound up getting my money back from a stolen gift card times 2. No wonder Delia’s went under.
On the hotel charges — I failed to notice a fraud alert and it wasn’t repeated, and so some of the hotel charges just haven’t shown up yet as a result. They have managed to charge me for my room and my sister’s room, but they still haven’t managed to charge me for J’s room. I expect they’ll figure it out. They have a signed credit card authorization form from before I even arrived. It’s apparently just taking a while to percolate through.
I’m also seeing the refund on the Yuji lights pending, which is nice to see.
All in all, I have no complaints whatsoever. Yesterday I took apart the Lego gingerbread AT-AT and the lego holiday ski chalet. I’m going to list both (I took pictures), but haven’t done so yet, because the weather sucks and it is icy and I don’t want someone having a slip and fall in my driveway. This is a better hobby than shopping at unfamiliar websites online and getting into trouble that takes a couple days to clear up. Altho shockingly, only a couple days.
Back to the lighting thing. We have a drywall ceiling in the exercise room (on a Chicago grid), and I had an idea for just having a rectangle with a crossbar of strip lighting (and a smaller one in the alcove), but I could not for the life of me figure out how to deal with the power supplies, and I knew D. the electrician was going to ask, assuming no one asked before that. I actually feel really good about knowing to think about this part of the problem, even tho I’ve watched other people around me screw related things up repeatedly (this is me learning from other people’s mistakes, which is why I feel good about it). After poking at various specialized junction boxes and trying to figure out how to make sure it was appropriately ventilated and blah blah blah I thought, you know, it would be so much easier if there was just a panel … and then I searched on that and found Waveform’s Dec 2025 version of something that’s been around for a while everywhere else, but NOT with a nice surface mount kit. They charge more, and they fix the thing that aggravates people. Win win.
Alas, there isn’t full technical information on the product page, so I’ll have to reach out to get that or ask JB to do that.
But I used all the zillions of similarly sized LED panels to guesstimate the lumens, and decorated a snip from Procore with proposed locations for 7 of them, which (if I got the lumen guess correct) will be roughly what I had figured for the strip lighting. Fingers crossed.
No, not on the Woman Within problems. The only change there is they canceled an order that I think I already received.
But on the fraud, I think the ACH stop payment worked! The debit shows up followed by a credit the next day, which is what the kind woman at TD Bank told me is how it would look if the stop payment worked. I only knew to ask for a stop payment because the efficient woman at PayPal said I should call and ask them if they could do anything. I haven’t gone over to PayPal to find out what the status is over there — in the back of my mind, I’ve been wondering if this would turn into a Delia’s situation, where I contested something a couple different ways and wound up getting my money back from a stolen gift card times 2. No wonder Delia’s went under.
On the hotel charges — I failed to notice a fraud alert and it wasn’t repeated, and so some of the hotel charges just haven’t shown up yet as a result. They have managed to charge me for my room and my sister’s room, but they still haven’t managed to charge me for J’s room. I expect they’ll figure it out. They have a signed credit card authorization form from before I even arrived. It’s apparently just taking a while to percolate through.
I’m also seeing the refund on the Yuji lights pending, which is nice to see.
All in all, I have no complaints whatsoever. Yesterday I took apart the Lego gingerbread AT-AT and the lego holiday ski chalet. I’m going to list both (I took pictures), but haven’t done so yet, because the weather sucks and it is icy and I don’t want someone having a slip and fall in my driveway. This is a better hobby than shopping at unfamiliar websites online and getting into trouble that takes a couple days to clear up. Altho shockingly, only a couple days.
Back to the lighting thing. We have a drywall ceiling in the exercise room (on a Chicago grid), and I had an idea for just having a rectangle with a crossbar of strip lighting (and a smaller one in the alcove), but I could not for the life of me figure out how to deal with the power supplies, and I knew D. the electrician was going to ask, assuming no one asked before that. I actually feel really good about knowing to think about this part of the problem, even tho I’ve watched other people around me screw related things up repeatedly (this is me learning from other people’s mistakes, which is why I feel good about it). After poking at various specialized junction boxes and trying to figure out how to make sure it was appropriately ventilated and blah blah blah I thought, you know, it would be so much easier if there was just a panel … and then I searched on that and found Waveform’s Dec 2025 version of something that’s been around for a while everywhere else, but NOT with a nice surface mount kit. They charge more, and they fix the thing that aggravates people. Win win.
Alas, there isn’t full technical information on the product page, so I’ll have to reach out to get that or ask JB to do that.
But I used all the zillions of similarly sized LED panels to guesstimate the lumens, and decorated a snip from Procore with proposed locations for 7 of them, which (if I got the lumen guess correct) will be roughly what I had figured for the strip lighting. Fingers crossed.