Spam Flood
I haven’t checked my email since Wednesday nght, and I knew that I would have a ton of email waiting for me. I had a grand total of 1,710 emails waiting for me. 80 or so were from mailing lists, and I just skimmed them before deleting them. About 1,500 of them were spam, and they were junked fairly quickly after reviewing them all to make sure that my spam filters didn’t stop a legitimate email. The remainder were legitimate emails that I took the time to read. The whole process took me about an hour and a half.
My spam flood used to be fairly manageable, then a spammer sued spamhaus to make them shutdown, and he managed to win. I used spamhaus’ SBL/XBL list to blackhole proven spammer IPs. This saved me on bandwidth, cpu cycles, hard drive space, and, most importantly, my time to filter through all of those messages. I used to get about 100 spams a day with spamhaus active. Now that it’s gone, I’m back up to a little over 300 (sometimes close to 400) spams a day hitting my mail server. I check everyday to see if spamhaus is back online because they were a wonderful service. I’m not holding my breath, but I’m thinking that it may return. I’m hoping that it will return.
Breckenridge Summary
I typed some of this as it happened, some of it the next day, and some of it a day or three after the events happened. Details are sketchy in some places, and very precise in others. There are also probably quite a few things that my drink addled mind just couldn’t remember. I had a blast, and I think everyone else did too…. Here’s what happened to us while at the cabin.
Thursday, October 19th, 2006
I got up at my usual time, did the usual morning things, finished packing, and threw some ice over the beer and food in the three coolers that I was taking with me to Breckenridge. My deodorant exploded on me in a final gasp of its existence, so I had to make a side trek to the grocery store to buy some more. This put me a little behind schedule, but I still made it to Jhianna’s and Kolvedic’s house before Bobo, Jasmine, and Craing. We hung out for a bit, then got on the road to Breckenridge. The weather was nice, so we chose to take highway 285 instead of interstate 70 because the scenery is nicer.
The road trip was pretty uneventful. There were some great shots of the mountains, and I took some photos (yes, while driving) of the scenery as we went. At one point we passed four baby elk along the side of the road, and they didn’t seem one bit concerned about the cars zooming past them a few feet away. We finally made it into Breckenridge, and got to the cabin. The cabin had a steep uphill driveway, and due to the snow, I was unable to make my way up the driveway. Fortunately, the cabin owners had built a turn-out, so that people like me could park off of the side of the roadway.
We unpacked and got settled in. Bobo went to work shoveling the walkways to clear all of the snow out. He did an awesome job, and no one managed to slip and hurt themselves. After unpacking, we decided to head into town to get some food, so we headed to the Breckenridge Brewery to get some burgers and beer. The place smelled like brewing beer (mainly hops), and I love that smell. I was a happy camper. With our bellies full of beef, we piled back into the cars. While jumping into the back of Kolvedic’s Defender, I managed to smash my knee into the door latch, and I think my response was, “Son of a whore!!!” It hurt so bad, that I had to lay there for a few minutes to catch my breath while Kolvedic laughed at me because he had done the same thing many times. My knee hurt a little bit for the rest of the day, but it wasn’t too bad.
When we got back to the cabin, the repeated trips up and down the drive had cleared away enough of the snow to make it possible for me to get my car off of the road. I barely made it, but I finally got into the driveway where I could pull off to the side and park my car out of the way. I just hope that Spice is able to get up the driveway when she arrives Friday night.
Once we were back at the cabin, we spent some time in a side house that had a fireplace, foosball table, some couches, and a pool table. We had a good time listening to Kolvedic’s iPod, shooting pool, and talking. It was good stuff. The night was getting colder, but it wasn’t too bad. We ended up getting enough alcohol into us to brave the cold, and get into the hot tub. We managed to pack eight of us into the hot tub. When Spice arrives on Friday, it’s going to be a tight squeeze to fit all nine of us into the hot tub. We may have to rotate around and take turns in the tub.
We spent another hour or so in the hot tub drinking our happy little heads off until we decided to head inside to dry off, warm up, and watch a movie. Ball-Check had just bought ‘Click’, so we opened that up, and started watching it. No one made it to the end of the movie. We all ended up retiring to bed at various stages through the movie. The movie wasn’t bad, but it had been a long day, and we were all ready to get to sleep.
Friday, October 20th, 2006
I woke up around 7:00 AM to the sound of an alarm going off. I ignored it because I knew it wasn’t mine. It went off again, then again. I finally decided to track it down, so I started wandering around to track down the sound. It turned off before I could find it. I decided that since I was up, I would just get out of bed and start the day. Craing, who I was sharing a room with, was awake when I got back to the room. He loaned me some shampoo, and I hopped into the shower. I guess Craing and I started waking people up with our showers and stomping around the cabin. Ball-Check and Kolvedic were soon up and cooking in the kitchen. There was no sign of Tasty, Jhianna, Bobo, or Jasmine just yet.
While writing this, I looked out the window and saw that it was snowing fairly heavily outside. I was glad that I had gotten my car off of the road when I did. I thought about waiting another day to let the snow melt off more, but that didn’t happen. We spent most of the day just hanging out. There was a game room attached to the house, and we spent quite a bit of time in there shooting pool, playing foosball, hanging out by the fire, and chatting. Craing has these two books that are filled with questions that all start with “If…” There are some pretty good questions in there, and not all of them are easy to answer. I don’t remember any of the questions, but they are all designed to allow friends to get to know each other better.
It was snowing pretty hard, and I was happy to be in the cabin rather than driving around in it. Spice was supposed to join us after she got off of work on Friday, but the weather was just too bad for her to come up. We talked to her several times on the phone to tell her how bad things were. We wanted her to join us, but we didn’t want her to run off of the road on the way up. Spice finally decided to stay home for the weekend. We missed her a great deal, but I was glad (in a way) that she didn’t come up because I would rather have her as a friend for years to come than go to a memorial service for her next week.
I don’t remember most of the details of the day because I didn’t write about it right away. Jhianna, Craing and I ended up in the hot tub for a couple of hours. We were mainly drinking water because we had been drinking all day long, and if we continued to drink in the hot tub, we’d be hurting the next day. I don’t remember what all we talked about, but we had a good time sitting out there picking each others’ brains during the night. It was good to hang out with my friends and just talk. It’ll be one of my best memories of the trip.
We finally got out of the hot tub, and Jhianna called it a night. Craing and I hung out for another 30 minutes or so on the couches talking about our D&D worlds. I learned quite a bit from him about the background of his world that I had been missing out on. I was glad we had the talk.
Saturday, October 21st, 2006
After getting six hours of sleep (Craing got three) we got up. We hung out for the morning before heading into town to get some chow. Ball-Check drove us into town to get some chow at the Breckenridge Brewery. I wasn’t feeling too good because of the heavy drinking and lack of sleep. Once I got some food into me, I started to feel much better. After eating, we walked up and down Main Street. There were some cool stores there, but nothing really caught my eye. I did manage to find some snacks for the dogs at a specialty store. Most of the other folks bought various shirts, hats, sunglasses and other stuff.
About the time my feet were starting to get cold and sore we reached the end of the shops, and walked the length of Main Street back to the Suburban. We ended up back at the cabin where we warmed up. We shot some more pool, hung out some more, and had a good time relaxing. It was going to be Jasmine’s birthday soon, and Jhianna had bought her some gag gifts. They were all funny and some were sexual in nature. It was good stuff, and we all had a laugh about the gifts.
After the gifts, some people hit the hot tub, and the rest of us stayed inside to play some drinking games. We started with with a plinko style game that was called Drinko with various shots of drinks in the bottom of the plinko setup. I had a shot of whiskey (eww!!) and something else, but I don’t remember what it was. We decided that mixing the various types of alcohol in our system would lead to some serious pukage. We ended up heading to the dining room table to play some 3-man. It’s a drinking game where people get very drunk, very fast. Poor Ball-Check ended up downing four beers in a matter of about twenty minutes. He was burping like you wouldn’t beleive. I felt sorry for him near the end of the night. We cleaned up the cabin a bit after the drinking game, and headed to bed. It was around 12:30 by the time I got to sleep. I had forgotten my meds the first two nights that we were in the cabin, but I had thrown my pill bottles on my pillow during the day. This night, I took my meds, and the meds combined with the booze knocked me out cold. I’m pretty sure that I had only been in bed for a few seconds before I was out.
Sunday, October 22nd, 2006
I slept in Sunday morning, and didn’t get up until 11:00. It was good to sleep in after getting up so early the three previous days. Jhianna, Craing, Ball-Check, and Kolvedic grabbed the plastic sleds from the garage and spent a good hour outside sliding down the hill. I got some good pictures of it. I thought about joining them, but I spent most of yesterday with cold, wet feet, so I decided to pass this time around. It really looked fun, but I was happier inside where it was nice and warm.
We didn’t do much of anything during the day. It was a lazy day of relaxation, TV, naps, and books. I spent most of the day just hanging out and watching TV. There was a “Dog Whisperer” marathon on one of the channels, and most everyone watched it all. I watched about four episodes, and the guy kept telling the owners of the dogs the same old stuff. It wasn’t new to me, and I got tired of the repetition. Craing, Ball-Check, Kolvedic, and I ended up in the game room at some point, and we played quite a few games of pool. It was lots of fun.
Sunday gave us the best weather of the weekend, but we were all too pooped from the previous days to go out and enjoy it. I tried to get some people to go to the hot tub with me, but no one seemed interested. I don’t really blame them. When the sun went down Sunday evening, the temperatures plummeted quite a bit. It would have been very cold out there during beer and water runs outside the tub.
Monday, October 23rd, 2006
Monday morning was very cold, and I was hesitant to get out of bed. However, I could hear people moving around and talking. I figured that they were cleaning up the place in preparation for leaving. I didn’t want to be a slouch, so I got dressed and headed downstairs. I was right. Everyone was very busy cleaning things up. I tried to help, but I seemed to be getting in the way. It was a 3-4 person job, and we already had 6 people working on it. I decided to head upstairs and pack my things. By the time I got most of my stuff to the car, Ball-Check, and Kolvedic were coming around the cabin with my coolers in tow. I snagged the two light ones from them, and let them double-team the heavier one.
Once we were all packed, I headed down the slippery driveway first. Everyone watched as I slid my sports car down the snowy slope. I managed to keep things under control just fine, and I made it down to the road. Once we were all on the road, I got a call from Craing telling me that we were going to Bubba Gumps one more time for lunch before going our separate ways. I hadn’t had a chance to pay for a single thing while on the trip, so I took this opportunity to pay part of my way for the trip.
We had a good lunch together, and that was the last of the trip. We all piled into our cars and went our own ways back home. It took me a little over two hours of driving to get back home, and I was glad to be there. Don’t get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend, and I’m glad I took the vacation. However, it’s always be back home in your own place after being gone for so long.
