1 September 2011 (Thursday) - Secure Key

I went to the doctor’s today: this insomnia is getting ridiculous. No matter what time I go to bed, I’m wide awake after four hours sleep. The doc has arranged for me to have some blood tests done. Let’s see what comes of that.

I then came home to find postie had delivered my banking “secure key” - allegedly a wonder of technology. It looks like a miniature calculator, and the idea is that whenever I log into my bank account, rather than putting my PIN into the computer, I put the PIN into the secure key. It then generates a (seemingly) random number that I put into the computer which acts as my PIN for that occasion.

So I have one PIN for the secure key, and a randomly changing one to type into the PC. What once was quick and easy now involves a lot of fiddling about: I don’t want to have to lug the silly little gadget about with me. I phoned the bank to have a whinge – they told me to suck it up and get on with it.

I then had a go with the astro club’s account: we’ve got an AGM coming up, and so it’s probably for the best that I give some kind of accounting of how we’re doing for money. There was a worrying half an hour in which I couldn’t find the club account’s cheque book – fortunately it turned up where I’d put it. It kept it somewhere safe (!), and then I lost it again.

I went through the last year’s accounts. And (would you believe it) the figures all totted up. We’ve probably got more cash in hand that we should have (I’ll go to the bank soon), and we’ve hall hire expenses coming up, but the balance sheet has been worse. I wonder if I should email it to the membership before the meeting?

After a spot of lunch I fell asleep on the sofa for over two hours (which is entirely why I went to the doctor this morning), and then I got up and cleared out my “keep this” letter rack. I have a rack into which I pop things which might be important, or which I will get round to later, or which I am a bit dubious about throwing away. There was loads of rubbish in that rack, including stuff going back over five years. And having got quite a nice pile of unwanted letters, I considered having myself a little bonfire.

But I decided against it, and played worms instead…