Some Good News

Some (rare) good news as June starts:  

• As I reported in the May update, I passed my long-awaited and (more recently) dreaded PhD defence (NZ spelling). While my emotions about doing it without my father are very fraught, and I have felt nothing except sadness since, little leaks of relief about it being done are starting to creep in. I do have revisions to make, however, so the journey is not completely over, unfortunately.
  
  I haven't celebrated properly yet because of all of the emotions. It just doesn't feel like a celebratory moment without my father around. But I think other people are going to force it to be celebrated. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet.
  
  
• My previous car service, Mevo, went into receivership. I had $1500 NZD (!) worth of credit with them that I bought with a US credit card when this happened. I have sadly succumbed to buying 1 month's worth of a chatgpt subscription (apparently Claude is better now, but I only just got that message), but in this case, it paid for itself, many times over! 
  
  I complained to it about the situation. It said to write into the US consumer financial protections office to try to claim a refund for those costs based on the company not fulfilling their duties and providing value for the service. It walked me through every step and even helped to draft the complaint letter. That was on April 3. 
  
  The bank the credit card was with (which is now closed) investigated and today, June 7, I found out that it was going to reimburse me about $1,250 USD. I asked for about 1500 NZD, or $875 USD's worth, so this is very surprising. 
  
  I didn't t have a ton of hope that I'll get any of that money back, so this is a huge bonus!