ByePod-ed, Phished, Just Plain Shot to Hell

Man, definitely having a "shoulda stayed in bed" day, although it's also been on of those weird days when I get the sense that I have the littlest twinkling of ESP or something.

We had a very brief, very intense thunderstorm roll through at about 4:00AM this morning. One HUGE thunderclap which woke the whole house up, followed by about 10 minutes of torrential downpour and gusty wind. Then it settled down and we started drifting back off to sleep. As I drifted, I found myself thinking about how old my iPod is getting, and about how I'd written in my blog about the process of getting it replaced a couple of years ago when my first one failed prematurely, and I realized that I'd probably need to replace it soon since it will almost surely die at any moment. No reason at all to be thinking about this, mind you, but you know how your mind can kind of skip and jump from one random topic to the next when you're sleepy.

Anyway.

Morning comes, and I feel like hell. Sore from my dojang workout the previous night (we're beginning to prep for the upcoming red belt test, so we hammered through all of the line drills, plus did horse stance punching, one-steps, and forms) and bleary-eyed from the rudely interrupted night of sleep. I made the bed, read my email, drank a cup of tea, showered, kissed everyone goodbye as they headed for school, and a few minutes later headed to my car for work.
As I sat down in the driver seat, I noticed that my glove compartment was open, and that my iPod was gone. Stolen from my car, in my driveway, sometime the previous night. I know it was last night and in my driveway, as I got home at about 10:00 from the dojang and had listened to Faith No More on the iPod on my way home. Unreal.

I mean, it's my own fault. I don't lock my car because I have a rag-top Jeep (seen here at the scene of the crime...), and all things considered I'd rather someone just open the door to steal something instead of using a box cutter to rip open my roof, reach in and unlock the door, and then steal it anyhow. Nothing in my car is worth more than the cost of a new rag-top. And while I usually park in the garage at night I've been parking in the driveway for a week or so because the packing material from our new TV is still taking up most of my parking space.

So some teenage ass-hat probably was walking along late, late last night, just trying door handles to see who had anything of value sitting in their cars that could be quickly and easily swiped. And there I was. Nothing else was missing, or even touched -- they left my stereo and my satellite radio alone, since the stereo would take time to rip out and the satellite radio is pretty useless without a subscription. But the iPod would take all of 3 seconds to walk off with.

Man, I just want to find this guy and beat his ass. Oh well. In the meantime I'm left with this odd coincidence of having spent a few minutes during that very night dwelling on how I'll need to replace the iPod soon, and here it was, stolen that very night. Interesting.

So then I head to work, all frustrated, and angry, and annoyed, and tired as hell, and I check my email. First thing I see is a note from eBay (ahem ... "ostensibly" from eBay) saying there'd been a dispute registered against me by a buyer regarding a transaction I made last month. "Click here to see the dispute thread" it says. "Oh come, on, what now!?" I thought as I immediately thought of the guy I'd bought a digital picture frame from on eBay just last month. And then, even though I've been using the internet for about 15 years now, and even though I regularly pitch at least a dozen phishing scam notes a week, I was already so pissed off about my day that I immediately assumed this was legit, clicked the link, didn't even flinch when I had to provide my eBay user ID and password to access the supposed dispute thread ...

... and then it hit me. About the time I saw nothing more than the basic eBay forums screen, with no dispute-specific anything in sight.

I'd just given my eBay ID and Password to some phisher scammer piece of crap. I'd been suckered like an 80-year-old grandma who just heard about this amazing new thing called the intar-webs and had just opened her very first email account. I slapped myself on the forehead, and then set about spending the next 30-40 minutes changing every single password I had (since many of them were similar, if not identical, to my eBay password, and wouldn't be too hard to suss out if you knew my eBay password already). I'm currently waiting to hear from the nerd police -- I assume a notice has gone out declaring my membership null and void and that my geek license will be forcibly revoked any time now.

This day has more than convinced me that I really need a few days to just wind down. I've been running full tilt since, like, September/October, with holidays, and training and work all piling one on top of the other. I'm worn out, just shot, and this month's allergy and cold assaults have just made it worse than ever.

Our kids are off for a few days next week, and we'd been considering a couple of days away hitting the museums in Houston, but last night Christine and I mutually decided that what we really need, as a family, is to just stay home together for a day. I'm taking Monday off, and Sunday we're going to take the kids to the store with the mission to find all the stuff we need for Monday so that we never have to leave the house for the entire day. We're just going to batten down the hatches, sleep late, watch cartoons, have a nice breakfast, listen to music, play games, watch a movie or two, build some stuff with Lego, bake cookies, catch a little afternoon nap, watch another movie or play some Rock Band, take nice long whirlpool baths instead of rushed showers, and go to bed. No work, no school, no grocery store, no running to the mall or to piano class or to karate or anything. We're not even going to start the cars for the entire day. For the entire day, we're going to just chill around the house.

I don't think I've ever looked forward to Monday more in my entire life.

Mood: Grumpy
Now Playing: Tribe, "Abort"