Junk Mail

This December 29th will be our 10th wedding anniversary.  Now I am running behind on getting my wife a gift or planning a wonderful evening.  I remember back when I was single and how my dietitian had told me that 87% of all type one diabetics would be divorced at least once.  She explained that it was hard on a relationship if I did not take care of myself with the highs and lows mixed in with the mood swings and depression.  This is just hard to manage for alot of people.  With that information in hand I knew that if I were to be of the 13% that got married only once in their lifetime I had to take care of myself first, and second find the right person that can handle all this mess that diabetes is.  I am thankful for my wife every day.

We spent our honeymoon in Italy on our first anniversary.  The thought of putting a honeymoon on credit just seemed bad.  So we saved our first year and paid for the trip with cash.  It felt so good and the trip was so worth it.  Italy was a perfect place to visit from just after Christmas through early January.  That is the season where there is almost no visitors and most Italians are on vacation to other places.  You get the entire place to yourself.  Our tour guide kept telling us how all these almost empty museums in the summer are packed like sardines and the lines wrap around the buildings to get in.  We just walked into each museum and had the places to ourselves.

When it came to getting ourselves a gift from Italy, we planned on not just buying a bunch of random junk to bring back from the trip.  So we decided it had to be one big ticket item.  In the pictures above you see a hand blown Morano glass lamp that we purchased as our gift to us.  My wife backpacked this lamp for a week in her day bag because it was going to cost us an additional 75 bucks to ship back to the states.  This was the only item we put on credit for the entire trip.  That was to have the insurance on it in case of theft.

Yesterday when I got home and was sorting through the mail and I came across this postcard pictured above.  Recently I have had postcards that looked like the one above about recall notices for my Ford F-150 and service notices from my local Ford dealership.  So I almost just chunked the card in the trash until I noticed it was from "Currency Conversion Fee Antitrust Litigation."  This got enough of my attention to see what it was about.

The backside of the card had a standard record update and information verification. I am still under the impression that this is complete junk mail and needed to be shredded.  Then I notice it was not just a postcard but it was postcard size and was folded in half and sealed shut.

I open the mail and low and behold it is a check for $18.04 made out to me.  The fine print on the bottom discussed how there was an antitrust suit with Visa and MasterCard on FX (foreign exchange) transactions from 2000 to 2006.  That puts it right at our honeymoon.  We did have to pay a hefty fee when we purchased the beautiful lamp that hangs in our entry way.  Is this a sign from god that I married the right person for life or is this just a weird coincidence with our ten year anniversary coming up?  In my heart I know that my wife is who was made to be with this crazy camping diabetic and that this is just god giving me $18.04 to help with our anniversary dinner!