Great news Ruthie! This is what is so great about this forum, we are all friends, we all support each other, we all care about other human beings, about our surroundings, about our planet....

cable ties tie wraps Police use the kind that you pull in one direction and they lock in place. They are plastic ties. They have teeth on them to lock. Cable ties. Unless you want to "organize" an unruly prisoner, I don't know what you would use them for to organize something.

But, as I posted previously, I called Amex (well, actually, it's a 3rd party Amex, so it was really FIA Card Services) and was told that it had been a common occurence at a handful of retailers, that Lowes _was_ one of them, and that it was, indeed a "sham" card read error. Merely designed to discourage you from using the card because of a non-competitive merchant fee. This particular card is only a few months old and works just fine at all other merchants. It isn't the card. And the chances that card readers at two different Lowes just "randomly" started having issues with this card, in the same week, are astronomically small. Somehow I'm not surprised Lowes in involved, because they's always been non-standard in their handling of credit cards. At least on the east coast, until recently the checker always had to enter, manually, the last 4 digits of the card. Any card - Visa, Mastercard, or Amex. Going all the way back to the end of the manual charge card era (yes, I'm old enough to remember that) I've never known ANY other merchant requiring that. My guess is Lowes uses some off-name, discount pay processor that nobody else uses, and they are the ones who have some issue negotiating a merchant fee with Amex or FIA. The other people might not have had a bad experience because they were using "real" Amex cards; though I'm not sure if the back-end transaction belongs to Amex or FIA. (in other words, Amex has now licensed their name and numbering scheme to cards that really are credit cards, mine is the Fidelity one that offers 2% cashback. I suppose it is possible that with certain accounts, the processor tries to exctract part of the cashback out of the merchant fee. In other words the problem isn't mere that it is a 3rd party Amex, but that it's a 3rd party Amex with a good cashback program. I've never carried a balance so I've made a lot of money using it.) This post was edited by davidrt28 on Mon, Dec 29, 14 at 9:48

Thanks for the replies. I guess anything is normal looking at the answers. Dances - did you ever look into Sheehan's syndrome? Not being able to breastfeed due to no milk production is a major sign of Sheehans. I don't know if you ever had a large amount of blood loss (especially while pregnant or shortly after), which is a cause of Sheehan's. That is what I am looking into since I had a hemmorrage after a miscarriage and D&C about 25 years ago. The syndrome affects the pituitary - so it can cause thyroid, adrenal and ovarian problems as well as diabetes.