Ebay Stalkers

Don't you just love them?

We're now being cyber-stalked by some illerate woman from ebay who claims not to have received the two CDs she was sent. You know when you get the feeling, right from the start of a transaction, that something's not right? This particular woman hassled me non stop before she even bought the CDs, wanting to know exactly how long it was going to take, whether we could send to a friend's house, yadda yadda. Not just simple questions, but dozens of questions, in dozens of emails, often repeated over and over again. In one afternoon alone I think we had fourteen from her. Against my better judgement, I let her buy the stuff, but I think I said to Jon even as I was packing it that it was bound to "go missing". Surprise, surprise, it did. So we get another flood of emails asking where it is, why haven't we sent it, when will we send it, why isn't it there, when will she get it. Reply politely, reminding her that it was sent to a "friend" at her request. Yes, she says (minus the spelling, puncutation and grammar and over the course of half a dozen more emails) but the friend hasn't received anything.

OK, says me, sensing trouble. Check with your sorting office. If it's not there, get back to me and I'll issue a refund. Anything for a quiet life. Next thing I know she's opened a paypal dispute claiming that we won't answer her emails and have refused to refund her money (how did we do that if we didn't answer any emails, I wonder?). She got her refund, which she would have had anyway - and then sends me a threatening email stating that she intends to ruin our business and that we haven't heard the last of her and that we've defrauded her (sorry? Who's defrauded who, exactly?) and that she's going to report us to the Sun (?????????). She's clearly unbalanced. Leaves us a ton of negative feedback to that effect. I report her threat to ebay, who, of course, have done nothing. Next thing I know she's opened a new user name and "bought" something from us, then immediately emailed pretending to be this other person saying that she's read our disgusting feedback and wants to cancel. Sigh. I think she's too, um, intellectually challenged even to realise that her illiteracy is so distinctive that it's perfectly obvious who she is. Report her to ebay for malicious bidding/buying. Next I know, she's gone to our normal online store (not ebay) and started emailing us from there using yet another email address.

Honestly. Someone needs a psychiatrist.

Still, you win some, you lose some. With the bank at least, we appear to be winning. They've refunded us £700 so far, which accounts for the charges they took in March alone. They've also admitted a catalogue of mistakes and errors verbally, although we're still waiting for it in writing. They'll be coughing up a lot more than that before we've finished with them.

After our Ostara celebrations on Wednesday, Emily and Jon went off to tai chi on Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon Emily did bits and bobs of literacy work mostly. On Friday we got stuck back into our new curriculum, starting with Latin. We're onto chapter 2 now and we're studying the nominative and accusative cases. Emily did the online vocab tests for chapter 1 - she got 10/10 Latin-English in 22 seconds and 10/10 English-Latin in 16 seconds, lol, so I think she's getting the hang of it ;-))

After Latin we started on a new maths textbook. Heartily sick of all the normal KS2 cartoony rubbish, we found this Maths: Basic Skills textbook which is written for adult numeracy courses. Finally! A maths textbook like the ones I remember, without gimmicky pictures and patronising sweeties and rabbits examples. This one is really good. As far as I can see it covers everything that's covered in the primary maths curriculum plus a bit more, with worked examples of everything and sensible, challenging questions to answer, no fill in the blanks. We jumped into the middle with a chapter on percentages, which we've never formally done before. Emily loved it (and this is maths we're talking about!) and within minutes was confidently working out things along the line of "For each of these hourly pay rates, calculate the new rate of pay following a 4% pay rise". Think that one's a winner.

In the afternoon we just about had time for some history, the second part of the first lesson in the History Odyssey course. Emily filled in a map with the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Fertile Crescent, and wrote summaries about irrigation and Goddess worship to go in the binder. We had to rush out to the tap lesson after that, but having got there Emily started feeling really sick and poorly, so we had to come home again. She's better now, though.

There was no tap lesson yesterday morning as their Saturday teacher is away for 3 weeks, so Jon and Emiy went off mooching around charity shops instead and came back with an enormous haul of goodies including a rather fun Harry Potter quidditch game they found for the princely sum of £1. Meanwhile, I took my Dad for a run in our car, hoping it would play up while we were out so he could hear it and investigate, but it failed to misbehave, darned thing. So we're none the wiser as to what's happening with it, but it keeps slipping out of gear and making weird noises.

This morning Emily went to her karate lesson and was one of only five children who turned up, lol - the rest presumably got caught out by the clocks moving forwards, as did George himself who arrived ten minutes late. Ater a quick lunch, she got dressed up in lots of black sparkly things with glitter in her hair and went off out again to her friend Rhiannon's birthday party back at the same hall karate was in. She was very excited about that, so hopefully she's had a great time - they're not due back for a while, so I'd better get on with some work!