Hijacked!

I sat up in bed Saturday morning and grabbed my phone as I headed down stairs to get my HP Netbook out of the car to set up and write my daily blog. Seems innocent enough, no?  As I hit the button to unlock my HTC phone I see a "Google Talk" notification from my good friend Tom McCloud.  I tap the icon and see a message from him that takes the momentary smile off my face....."Clarke, I think someone has hijacked your e-mail account."  I stop dead in my tracks......we exchange a few messages back and forth, all the while my head is spinning with thoughts of "....how do I fix this?  How many of my friends have received this?"  Tom's next message is that he has done a "full screen capture" of the e-mail and is sending it to me......here is what I got:

My first thought was to send an e-mail to everyone for whom I have an e-mail address to warn them....I send a few out using my phone, but it is too hard looking up addresses, so I set up my HP Netbook to do the rest.......only I am unable to access my e-mail account.....I have only used the HP Netbook in the past two weeks to run my GPS navigation program, and haven't connected to the internet with it for even longer.  Well, it turns out, completely separate from my e-mail issue, that some how a couple of bogus programs have been sent to my computer at some point in the past that slow it down so much I cannot access any of my programs.  So then begins the 6 hour odyssey of cleaning those programs off the computer so I can use it to warn my friends not to open this bogus e-mail.  I had to download my anti-virus program, which somehow had been removed from my computer, and then purge the scourge from my computer.  It took a while but I worked around the problems, and finally got it installed and scanning my hard drive for the programs, and cleaning them off the hard drive.

If you read my blog yesterday you saw in red italics what had happened, and why it took soooo long to get the blog entry up.  As the cliche goes...."all is well that ends well" and that was certainly true at 2 pm Saturday when "it ended well".

About the time I got the blog up for Friday Bob returned from his salmon fishing expedition sans salmon, but with two stone crab, so it wasn't a total bust.  I stayed home to fix my computer, and so Bob took another friend.  My turn, hopefully, will come Sunday when I hope to be un-encumbered with computer problems.

Bob showed us how to clean stone crab, which was not as gross as I thought it would be, but it did involve the use of a hatchet and hammer.

Shot of the "Sound" late afternoon

Bob was going to cook Prime Rib for dinner, which was to be held at a home of their friends, Joe and Debby, who live on the west side of Whidbey with a long view to the Port Townsend Ferry terminal, which you can see in the distance in the photo below....right below that "notch", center left in the picture.  We headed over to Joe and Debby's around 6 pm, and unloaded our cargo of Prime Rib and Stone Crab.

As has happened often on our journey we immediately felt a connection with Joe and Debby and had a wonderful time talking the evening away with them, and, of course, Bob and Karen.  I actually cracked open a few crab legs, and claws, and dipped the white meat in drawn butter......very, very tasty.  All the while bottles of wine are being uncorked and consumed.....a Pinto Noir we had donated, a Syrah from Bob and Karen, a bottle of Pink Chablis Champagne provided by Joe and Debby......and on it went.  The Prime Rib was perfect, and with a little horse radish just melted in our mouths.  

At some point we noticed the sun was setting and rushed out on the deck to capture these shots.........

We stood outside for about 20 minutes, while our dinners sat uneaten, ooohing and awwwing at the beautiful sunset we had been blessed with.  One of the nicest since Cedar Key.

When we sat back down to eating and talking I heard Debby make a reference to a book she had recently read called "Wild" (written by Cheryl Strayed about partial, solo hike of the PCT back in 1995)....the link to the left is to my blog entry about the book).....wow, I thought, I just read that book a few months ago, and loved it.  So we commenced a long conversation about hiking the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) and the Appalachian Trail, etc.  As it turns out we have a lot in common with Joe and Debby, and got along famously with them.  You just never know what is around the next corner.....

We headed back to Bob and Karen's a little after 9 with smiles of contentment on our faces....a day that had started out poorly for me ended up with a nice surprise at the end.

Thanks for stopping by!