Snoskred - Life in the Country

Some of you may have noticed a distinct lack of Snoskred in the blogOsphere over the past few days. I apologise - I have over 1,000 unread posts in my Google Reader and I have about 24 hours to read them all so you might not get a comment from me on your posts this week. But why have I been missing in action?

The Other Half

For the last couple of months The Other Half has been getting a few colds and flu. This week he has the worst one yet. I have never seen him this sick actually and we’ve been together almost 9 years. Several nights this week he has had zero sleep and this also means I have had less sleep than usual even though he tried to sleep sitting upright in his recliner a couple of nights rather than the bed.

It’s Not All Bad

The good thing about his being sick this week has meant we have discovered the local doctors surgery. It is within a 5 minute walk (great if he is at work and I need to go there) and extremely acceptable - and it has a female doctor as well as a male doctor. I’ve got an appointment for next week to have a couple of moles looked at by the female doctor (yes I was inspired when I saw a post from someone who had them removed but I forget who now?) and The Other Half has been there twice this week. He has severe tonsilitis, he has had a terrible sinus, bad ears, fever and the sweats since Wednesday and there seems to be no end in sight even though he is taking antibiotics.

Parts Of It Are Very Bad

My routine has been thrown completely out of whack this week. No checklists completed. Only some daily tasks getting finished. Laundry and dishes are on the increase - I’ve washed the bedsheets and quilt cover daily. One very miserable person lurking around the house so unwell he doesn’t want to watch tv, read, use his computer or anything yet he can’t sleep, doesn’t feel like eating much. He’s mostly been trying to nap on the futon in his room. I keep checking on him, which is not good time management, but very necessary to make sure he’s ok.

Parts Of It Are Very Good

On Thursday it was like someone had given The Other Half a dose of speed or something. It may have been pure sleep deprivation. However for about two hours he was like an insane robot. Sephy and I had been talking about the possibility of moving the scam email blogs to Wordpress and I had mentioned it to The Other Half. We have a domain which we’d bought for a scam warning website and we figured it would be worthwhile using and getting away from Blogger which had always caused us major problems. The Other Half set up the new blog for us and just as he finished it the burst of energy ran out, and he retreated to the couch for an afternoon of just falling asleep to be woken up again by not being able to breathe.

Since Then

The insane robot baton was passed over to me and Sephy. We have been working flat out to try and get this up and running by Monday at the latest. We have a lot of content which we need to put on the site as the “base” before we can open the doors, but as soon as we do I’ll let ya’all know so you can see it - and hopefully link to it, because it’s for a good cause.

Scam Emails?

The four sites we already have up and running are -

• 419 Letter Repository
• Job Scam Repository
• Lotto Scam Repository
• Miscellaneous Scam Repository

These sites get some serious traffic - up to 20,000 hits a month, and we’re only able to post approximately 50 scam emails a day. The new site will have upwards of 200 scam emails a day being posted. We won’t be putting any advertising onto the site but we would love to get a sponsor willing to pay the site costs. We may also need volunteers to answer the potentially large amount of contact me forms we may get.

Chicken Soup Time

I make a mean chicken and sweetcorn soup and I’m going to make another fresh one shortly. I’ll take pics and write up the recipe for one day next week.

Back Soon!

I will be back to my normal around the blogOsphere self soon. I mean, this flu can’t go on forever, right? RIGHT? Please tell me I’m right! I crave my routine..

Recently The Other Half and I went to do some errands. It was the first day of his holidays and as usual when he goes on holidays, he gets a cold or flu. So he wasn’t feeling 100% but well enough to do a few chores.

First we went to a hardware store because they had sent us a catalog with cheap pots and many of our plants needed re-potting. Of course when we arrived there none of the cheap pots were anywhere to be seen. This is country law - send out a catalog, but make sure you don’t have what is in the catalog. It generally turns up a couple of weeks later.

Then we went to the bank to deposit our bond check from the old house. The Other Half still used his credit union from Adelaide - which usually means an hour long drive to bank a check because there is no branch here. This time we had been told we should be able to bank it at the National bank. And we should have been able to, but of course when we got there we were told we could not.

We ended up dropping into St George to see how hard it would be to open an account - it was simple and we both ended up with one. And the scammers had been asking me to open an account with them for a while. Of course I won’t be telling them I’ve done it because rule number one of scambaiting is - never do what your scammer asks you to do.

Next up was my favourite store - the animal feed store. They have our kitty litter cheap and in bulk. They also have bonsai, feed for every kind of animal you can imagine, plants, and now organic foods. I could spend three hours in there no problem, just looking at everything. Not today, we got the kitty litter and some pest spray for our plants and we were off.

We decided to go to the up-market garden centre - which is actually cheaper than Bunnings just quietly but they don’t want to tell anyone that. Lets keep good value things a secret, ya’all. We ended up spending over $100 there on pots, some herb plants - and I got me a Tahitian Lime Tree! YAY!

Then we stopped at the Motor Registration to change our address. By this time we had been out for four hours. Just before we walked in the door, The Other Half looked at me and said “Your shirt is on inside out.” I said “Why didn’t you tell me before?” He said “I thought it might have been one of those shirts which was meant to be inside out, but just now I spotted the tag.” So then I had to sit in the motor rego with my shirt inside out while we waited to be served and he laughed at me the whole time while I told him he’s going to hell, and that I was going to stab him while he was sleeping!

The wait was made worse because I had some time to remember how many places I had been with my shirt inside out during the day. This represents a worrying trend - I am embarrassed to admit that I often wear my underwear inside out. This is generally due to me not wearing my glasses when putting them on. I know why this happened - I ironed this t-shirt inside out and I didn’t fix it before putting it on the hanger.

At least I was wearing clothes, I guess. Now that I am hopeful he *would* notice, if I went out with nothing on!
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Just so you know, tomorrow is probably the Big Day of changing to Wordpress. I’m looking forward to it, I hope you all are..

There’s been a recent rash of question asking and answering around the blogosphere. I put up my hand to be interviewed by Emily from Wheels On The Bus, and I got these questions. I changed the order around a bit, sorry Emily!

1) How did you meet the Other Half?

Online, oddly enough. This was many years ago in the beginning of the internet. I got into online gaming - playing Quake. I went to a network game party one night. For those who don’t know network gaming requires you to take your computer along and they all get plugged into each other and then you play games against each other.

Back in those days the internet was too slow to play games over it, like people do these days. And there was my other half, who I knew virtually right away was my other half, strangely enough.

2) You read a lot of blogs regularly. How do you choose which ones to read, which ones to comment on, which ones to link to, etc.?

I read probably 95% of blog posts which arrive in my reader.

I would link to every blog post I read, if it was humanly possible. Sephy will tell you, I’m forever pasting links to blog posts to him in Skype. I have to make do with linking to every blog that I read in the sidebar, and then I have to be very picky about the posts I choose for the weekly wrap up, otherwise there would be 500 links and none would get clicked on.

So the bottom line for me with those weekly wrap up posts is - a post has to stand out, touch me in a major way, make me think, make me want to share it with other people, make me go “Oh, what a great idea” or “I’m going to do that” or “That’s brilliant!”.

Commenting is difficult these days. I don’t have as much time as I used to for it and I hate that, because I want to comment on probably 95% of the posts in my reader.

3) I (and I bet a lot of your readers) know nothing about NSW. What are five things someone who has never visited would be surprised to know about your home?

a. New South Wales = NSW

b. The capital of New South Wales is Sydney, which might be the most famous city in Australia, however it is not the *capital* city of Australia. The capital city of Australia is Canberra - which is completely surrounded by New South Wales. Nobody knows why or how this odd arrangement came to be. Well probably some people do but I’m not one of them.

c. I live on the South Coast of New South Wales. There is also a North Coast. All of these coasts are located on the East Coast of Australia. Yes, it is quite confusing!

d. New South Wales is home to the Funnel Web spider, which mostly lives within a 20km radius of Sydney itself. These spiders are able to stay alive underwater for up to 30 hours by trapping air under their hairs, or something. So I was told, but it was on a documentary tv channel so I am assuming it is true.

e. You can probably tell, I don’t know much about NSW. That is because I grew up in Adelaide, South Australia. That’s about a 15-17 hour drive from here.

4) For those of us unfamiliar with Scambaiting, can you tell us how it works? And how are you able to get compensated for all your scambaiting efforts?

Scambaiting is really pretty simple. You email a scammer (from a safe email address like gmail which does not show your location to the scammer) pretending to be a real victim. You play along with their scam, pretending you are going to do what they want you to do.

You ask a lot of questions, you make a lot of promises, you let them begin to dream of the money you’re supposedly going to pay them. If you have the means you use Skype to receive calls from them, which costs them time and money. I don’t talk to them on the phone much anymore but they call me constantly.

When they’re hooked on the dream, you keep stringing them along as long as you can. I’ve known scammers who have been strung along for well over 12 months. You’re always just about to pay them the money - but there’s an emergency, there’s a problem, there’s another question they need to answer.

I like to make them fall in love with my characters - usually using photographs of models like Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks. As those characters I pretend to be a virginal, extremely rich, naive girl who is looking for her perfect man. My character might be a model just starting out, she might be a singer, she might be a minor celebrity, or she might have family money. The scammers think everyone in the USA is a millionaire, so they believe it.

When they have fallen in love, I like to take their heart and crush it into tiny little pieces, like they do to their victims. The girl might find out he is a scammer. She might find a man closer to home. She might be on her way to meeting them at the airport in their country and the plane somehow falls out of the sky. I make newspaper clippings (it’s easy and simple to do) which support the story. If my character dies, it turns out my character has left them money - and they have to jump through hoops to get it, fill in forms, take photographs, etc.

There is no compensation for it, sadly. It is like any hobby, you have to put a little money into it. I pay 30 euros a year for my Skype In number, I pay around $80AUD a year for my post office box. Both of those cause a lot of anger and frustration to the scammers, so to me it is worth it.

5) How did you get into scambaiting?

A scammer was silly enough to send me an email asking to borrow my bank account, I googled and found one of the scambaiting websites and began to bait them. Soon after I started I found my “first husband” and within a month I was “engaged” to six scammers. It was sometimes difficult to keep the stories straight, and tell them apart when they called. Strangely, none of these relationships worked out!

Thanks for asking me the questions. If anyone wants to be interviewed by me, just leave a comment and ye shall receive 5 questions of various goodness.

Emily is hosting the Hump Day Hmmm this week as well - the topic is - something you experienced that affected and affects you. Feel free to join in the Hump Days, they are an excellent way to blog, I find.

I’m running way behind on everything today. There was so much on my to do list, and so little time. One thing that absolutely had to get done was a hair dying - it was of utmost importance because I don’t dye it the same color as my natural hair and there was a fair chunk of roots showing.

I’ve dyed my hair since I was probably 15 or so, back then it was never permanent colors because Mum wouldn’t allow that, it was only rinses that lasted a few washes. I suppose she was scared I would dye it pink or something. I did once manage to dye it green but that was not intentional. My thanks to the “state the bleeding obvious” beeyotch in high school who said, in front of a bunch of people, hey, your hair is green. I can’t remember her name but she had a funny eye and I’ve never forgiven her for saying it, and I’ve never forgiven myself for not bitchily shooting back a zinger of massive proportions, all of which came to me long after she said it.

I had actually been trying to dye it black, but it didn’t work out because I had been secretly using hair lightener to make it a little blonde. Tip to new players - you cannot go from blonde to black without going to red in the middle, or else you will get green.

But these days, The Other Half dyes my hair for me. It’s good because he is anal retentive and obsessive compulsive, so the color always turns out a lot better than a hairdresser who’s busy reading the magazine you’re reading over your shoulder while applying large globs of goo.

So about an hour ago, standing in a shower that looked like a shark attacked me in it, with red hair dye splotched all over the place, I thought heck, I haven’t blogged today. This is bad. And it really looks like I’ve been attacked by a shark in here. Tip for people who have not dyed their hair at home - it’s all nice and pretty in the salon when all the dye goes down the sink behind you and you can’t see it. It’s not so pretty in your own shower. However, it is easy to rinse off the walls, so not to worry.

Then I thought, is this environmentally unfriendly? Probably it is, considering the fumes from the hair dye would be enough to send you into space for a few days.

All these things add up to me thinking, maybe I should go back to having it done at the salon. But, it is so much cheaper to do it at home, and the color turns out great, and The Other Half really loves inflicting pain on me trying to rub off all the “oops” where he smudged it on my neck. He also has a great time wrapping my head in gladwrap once he’s finished the dying.

So, note this is the closest you’ll get to seeing any part of me here on the blog - here’s my hair..

We had a heck of a lot of rain today, my little rain guage tells me it’s over 70mm in our own backyard. This means the lawn looks like a swimming pool, and the rubbish bin is now full of water. But rain is good and much appreciated. I just wish it was in places like Goulburn where they’re having a bad drought.

So now, I have to get some packing done because I have not even started yet, and then I have to get to bed pretty much on time because tomorrow I have chores and shopping and I have to get stuff ready to go. At least all the washing is done, and the Kitties are having a mutiny because I washed their favourite rugs.

If I get a chance before I go, and I should because I will make the time to do it (it might mean a chore doesn’t get done, but I can live with that) I want to blog about the kitties, they’re doing some strange things lately..