SO.

I cleaned out all the stuff in the templates.  We talked about that last time I popped in to strangle the crap out of figure out what was happening with the bloggybits.  (On all sites, not just moderngypsy.  I think, at last count, I have like eightybillion wordpress blogs for various reasons.  Which might be a little exaggerated.  Or not.)

Turns out that upgrading and such was just TOO LATE, because I’d been hit with something called a SQL Injection attack, which is where virus-writer asshats put code into something that injects itself RIGHT INTO YOUR DATABASES.  Not just onto the wordpress parts, but in the main part of your chunky blue db.

Now, listen:  I know more than some do about how this whole thing works.  And I’m a pretty smart cookie when it comes to picking it up.  But OH MY GOD I HAD NO CLUE.  I took one look at the MySQL thingeedealiedoo-hah, and burst into tears.  It was kind of par for the course for yesterday, but still…Frustration Central, in a can.

Luckily, thanks to my new best friend evar, Dani, we were able to figure out where the jerks were getting in at and what they’d changed that was displaying on all the blogs even though all the malicious codeybits were removed from the footers.  And it’s FINALLY FIXED.

I know.  I’ve said that before.  But this time, we got the databases, we got the places in the back-end/root code they’d affected, and I have decided to start sharpening pointed pieces of bamboo to shove under the fingernails of any virus-writer hacker asshats that I might meet.    I kind of hope I never meet one.  There would be blood.

OKAY, so…clear your cache, run an antivirus scan thingee, and all should be well.  Tons of stuff going on here at Chez Eliza, so hopefully, NOW I can STOP with the virus talk and get back to the Art, which is what most of you are here for anyway.

Whew.

First of all, imagine a very long string of cuss words here.  Invent some new ones.  Scream them at the top of your lungs.

There’s my week for you.

My entire website was hacked, be-virused, and infiltrated with malicious code that would give *every visitor* a virus.  And not just THIS website, either.  ALL the websites under my control, since they’re all on this account.  All of them.  And there are quite a few.

My to-do lists and artmaking and even my knitting sat in the backseat of this road trip to crazytown.  I *finally* got the last iFrame removed this morning, though I think there might still be some code issues with scentistas.com.  Avoid that one for a while yet.  I’ll let you know when it’s safe.

I’m just so tired.  Code makes my head hurt.  All I’ve wanted to do is make bars of soap and pretty yarn, and instead, I’ve been doing another kindof cleaning entirely.

All I want to know is this:  why aren’t we doing something about these people?  Yes, some of them are in Russia, or China, or somewhere.  We need amnesty from the conventional rules so we can go get them and stop these thieves from doing this to people.  I’m generally a pacifist, but dude, seriously…I’d be the first one standing in line to kick these asshats in the nads for what they’ve put me through this week.  I’d jump at the chance to pour fire ants on them, or to keep his eyeballs as a souvenier.

Something *has* to be done.  (Anybody think it’s ironic that we’ll bomb Iraq for oil, but the chinese government pays for backdoor viruses to steal all your money, and we sit by and brush it off?  No, really.  The *government* paid for the virus infiltrating software hack thingee that hit my sites this week, and that’s beyond wrong.)

More when I’m not exhausted and bitter, because I’m sure this makes for completely unexciting reading.  Just wanted to let y’all know that it should be safe now, and if you *haven’t* run a virus scan lately, OMG….DO.  Do it NOW.  Stop reading this, update your definitions or pay for a new antivirus program, and SCAN YOUR SYSTEM.

Because this?  This giant pain in the drain?  So not worth it.

I have about two seconds of DSL before the storm knocks it out again, but I wanted to touch base and tell you that today?  Fired.

This morning, I found that my wordpress got hacked back in April or so.  I mean, I knew that part of it.  Dreamhost (my webhost) fixed it pretty quickly, but told me a bunch of stuff to do with the upgrade, blah blah blah that I fully *intended* to do at some point, but kind of forgot about with May’s time off.

Turns out that when my WP got hacked, the spammer asshats put some kind of code in the page that was A VIRUS.  I’m not sure why or how or why it chose this past week or so to come out from being dormant, but those of you who have visited and have no virus software?  Find some.  Apparently, there’s a popup that was coming up that plays on your active-x commands or somesuch, brought on by a .jpg file that *I* sure as hell didn’t know about that contains a NASTY virus that makes cockroaches eat your screen.

No, seriously.  It blanks out your browser and images of cockroaches start eating your browser.  Very cute, viruswriter asshats.  Go die.

So just now, after cleaning my system all freakin’ morning and dealing with TORNADOES all evening (no, really — we’re talking THIRTY FIVE of them in a line from Minnesota to Kansas, with at least nine of them here in our area, including one that wiped out a Boy Scout Camp just north of here and killed four boys. It has been A DAY.  And not a GOOD DAY, either.), which has been prompting our DSL line to just randomly go out for fifteen or twenty minutes at a pop before coming back online….I find that WordPress issued a big post thingie that says that even IF you upgraded, you have to do all this code crap to make sure that you’re not passing virii on to your unwitting visitors.  Like, YOURSELF.

*shudder*

Let me just say it now:  I am soooo not a codehead.  If you’re visiting right now, you’ll note that the blog looks a little different.  It’s going to for a little while — it’s the default settings — because I have to get in there and muck around with the code AGAIN to get it back to where it was before.

Right after I change all my passwords again and hope that this fixed the virus problem.  Some days, I swear….just *fired*.  Today, YOU ARE FIRED.

p.s.  I have pictures of a funnel cloud forming from a sunken wallcloud.  I need to get out of tornado alley.

While I was ‘gone’, so to speak, it’s not like I was a TOTAL slacker.

Okay, yes, for the most part, there was much slackage.  Or what a lot of folks would probably read as slacking.  It was more “creative loafing”.  Ahem.  Lots of puttering around, discovering my stash again, knocking things off the personal to-do list, spending time with the family, as small as it is.

But I made a bunch of art, too, so all’s well, right?

Above is part of a two-piece collage series on 8″ squares of wood.  It’s called “Sweet” and it’s my favorite of the two.  I think the other one, “Home”, may not be done yet.  It needs something.  I’ll figure it out at some point.  This is Home:

Actually, looking at it now, I think I know what it needs.  I’ll get on that straightaway when I’m done babbling at you all.

I also carved a whole metric buttload of stamps.  I’m over half-way on the List Item of Fifty Stamped Doom now, in fact.  For those not planning to letterbox in/around the Omaha, NE area, there are images of those over there in the sidebar under the list item name.  (They might be letterboxes, so rather than spoil it for anyone, I’ll just leave them there.  I know there aren’t many of us out here in the hinterlands, but you never know…) :)

Speaking of the hinterlands, we totally had a tornado warning last night.  The sirens were going off just after J got home from MCing a show over in Omaha, and because of the accoustics of the river, we can hear them here if it’s quiet.  And folks, it was QUIET.  Like, all the wind stopped, the rain stopped, and all of a sudden, there was this godawful wail, all disembodied and freaky.  Took me a minute to realize what it was, in fact.  So I pulled up weather.com, and there t’was, bright red and blinking:  TORNADO WARNING.

Now, for those of you not from the hinterlands of grass and cows, let me explain:  There are tornado *watches* all the time.  The conditions are right for a tornado to occur ALL THE TIME.  We even get really weird skies sometimes that are freakin’ spooky — all green and roiling and you can just feel the balance in the air…if one little thing tips just right, one butterfly flaps a wing just a little too hard, and that sky is COMING TO GET YOU, BARBARA.  Zombie clouds, out for brains.

It doesn’t happen all that often, though.  This year’s been worse than most (GLOBAL WARMING, ANYONE!?  DUH.), but even on a bad year, the destruction isn’t all that widespread versus, say, a hurricane, because it’s so localized.  At most maybe a path a mile wide and thirty miles long.  (Which is a *lot*, don’t get me wrong.  But in the grand scheme of things, a tiny fraction of the whole midwest with each storm, unlike the bigger disasters like floods that take out entire swaths of states.)

So when I saw the WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! going across the screen, I may have freaked out just a little bit.

Okay, fine, I freaked out a lot.  Grabbed Emma because I can carry her fat little behind, and got J out of the shower (his head was all soapy), and we hightailed it to the shelter, where we tried like hell to get the laptop to connect for updates.  Let me just say that four panting dogs and a still-dirty-but-wet husband in a damp bathroom shelter in the middle of an already-dirty building?  Aromatic.  To say the least.

We didn’t sustain much damage.  The storm had already lifted by the time it got over the river (as usually occurs), and we lost a few tree branches, but scarily enough — garden was totally untouched.  Even the trailer-trash bed I put in two days ago.  (Planted some of the radishes in it to get them out of the mystically growing pot of them.)  Tornadic winds are weird.

Speaking of the garden….

OMG!  TOMATOES!  I MADE FOOD!

There are seven or eight of them on the bush now, and I. am. chuffed.  I can kill plants just by looking askance at them, and the tomatoes apparently didn’t get that memo.  The bush has probably doubled in size since that last picture I took, and there are little flowers all over it, each of them starting to develop a little green bit of love right there in the middle of ‘em.

I get all puffed up looking at them.  J’s completely stymied, because he comes from ranch stock and doesn’t get that I’m finding this all to be some kind of weird alchemical type magic trick.  Take dirt + plant + sun + water, wave a magic wand, and PRESTO!  FOOD!

I expect I’ll become obnoxious about it all pretty soon.  I already make people admire the Miracle Tomatoes before they walk in the door.

In the spirit of Obnoxious:

I took lots of pictures of the little pot with the peppers and radishes, too.  (See how dense they are?  I thought maybe one in ten would come up, due to my crappy gardening skillz, but noooo.  I’m transplanting now.)

And one more gratuitous shot (only one, and only because the pictures of the flowers on the jalapenos and anchos didn’t come out well enough…ahem.):

One of the shoe garden shoes is getting little spikes on it!  And a couple of them have little purple flowers, despite them being out there in the elements all the time.  In the shade.  It’s just boggling to me.

I have more to talk about, but this is getting long.  Remind me next time to tell you about the community-wide garage sale that we went to (O! M! G!  SCORE!), and the knitting that got done and the spinning pictures of a zillion pounds of handspun (finished another 8 oz last night) and a couple of good book recommendations and the re-surgence of my favorite mailing list Evar, and the soap thing.

Oh, man.  The soap thing.  Obsession x100.  That’s all I’m sayin’.

I’ll leave you today with another little bit of Art Playtime.  I found Zentangles via the aforementioned Favorite List Evar, and the concept is simple — make a scribble in a square, and then start filling it in with small, repetitive patterns.  The point isn’t to make things that look good, necessarily, but to get into a Zen state of mind where things flow and you’re empty and at peace.  Those of you who are artists know what I’m talking about — that mindspace where time just STOPS and you are just a pen, making marks on a page, and when you come out of it, you look up and an hour’s passed somehow.  Best feeling in the world, that one.

Anyway, I tried it after the discussion on Belle Papier, and this was it:

Obviously, it was part of a larger journal page.  But it really worked — I had no idea how much time was going by.

There’s a kit available on the site with some high-quality paper blanks, a pen, a book, and some other stuff.  It’s $50, though, so it might price out some folks.  Suffice it to say that you don’t *need* the kit in order to make Zentangles.

It kind of reminds me of the psychochicken, actually.  (If you don’t know what that is — I’ll look for it and post it next time.  It is what occurs when Eliza meets Vicodin on an up-close-and-personal level.  Oh, but seriously.)

More soonish!

(this is why I should not let more than a few days go by without updating, obviously.  Sheesh.)