….and I’m switching blogs in one of my classic impromptu switches. I backed up the original site and moved it to a safe place. Now I’m going to use that as just a blog, hosted by me published by blogger. The reasons are outlined here and the new blog is here.

I just reactivated Akismet and its like night and day, its catching spam by the second… And I was able to re-enable email alerts on comments and I can now look at the moderation queue without getting shell shocked.

Of course I had to flush 23000+ spam out of the queue, it was such a mammoth job I did work directly on the database, WordPress brain surgery if you will. Hopefully there will be no lasting after effects of that. I took out the entire queue, then I nuked all comments from hotmail addresses as that took out 95% of the spam that got through, sorry if one of my readers used a hotmail address to post here. Hopefully it won’t be a problem anymore. Once I took out the bulk of it with phpMyAdmin I went right ahead and pruned the rest throughWordPress. Whoo.

So in response to me complaining about both chronic migraine headaches and back pains that rival the Great Wall of China in magnitude, my doctor had recommended I go for a head scan MRI and a back X-ray….did those today. And I hated it.

The X-rays weren’t bad, I had to don lead lined pants to protect the boys, but otherwise it was a lot of uncomfortable postures in front of a machine that kept irradiating me for the sake of diagnosis. But that came second, first came the MRI.

Now I knew ahead of time that these machines can be cramped, but I wasn’t prepared for having my head caged in and padded to immobility, nor did I anticipate the rather echo-y sound my panicky breathing made in the machine. Luckily I was given headphones or I would have completely lost it. I am in fact mildly claustrophobic and this was not my favorite adventure in the whole wide world. To make matters worse while listening to low quality music on the headphones I was greeted to a loud, abrupt Windows error sound and angry mumbles from the doctor running the machine. That definitely did not help my apprehension and I nearly aborted the scan right there. However I let him finish it and have shiny pictures of my head to show for it.

Speaking of, here are some of them: Scans of my head

All I’m going to say is this is your warning that Tom and I are cooking up something downright scary…

Sound check

So about, maybe 15 minutes after my last post there was a loud crash, followed by that unnerving electrical buzzing and then darkness. Some idiot met our telephone/power delivery pole with his car, then peeled out, making it a hit and run while our transformer gave quite a convincing, if overly dramatic delivery of its death scene.

The good news, after calling 911 we had power back in an hour, the transformer actually shut itself down to prevent a complete overload. The bad news, the pole was so badly cracked and the wires pretty cooked, that it warranted replacing. So we had the block coned off all afternoon while the guys from LIPA put up a new pole and transferred the system over, cutting off our power for another 90 minutes during the transition. At least we got a warning that time

A byproduct of my nerdiness, I was awake when the pole got hit and had my Mini-Maglite in my pocket. So I was out there in a second scouting for fallen wires. At least I wasn’t barefoot like my father