Title courtesy of Alice in Chains. I miss Layne Staley. Great voice.

So, for the second time in a month, I have become the victim of some kind of fraud. Yes, it happened again. At the beginning of the month it was someone hacking into my eBay account and buying an $800 laptop. It took about a week, but I got the money back from PayPal and no harm no foul, except for the seller on eBay putting out a non-payment strike on my account. But F him. I told him numerous times I didn't buy it and it was unauthorized. So, it happened again, although slightly different. I was trying to relax at home on Saturday night with Missy and Keyser (I borrowed him for the evening. More on that later) and I get a phone call from my Visa card bank, asking to verify some purchases on my account. There was one for two $500 gift cards to Bed Bath & Beyond that I didn't make, and another one for almost $1,100 at the Apple Store that I didn't make either. So they canceled the cards, issued me new ones and started the process of refunding me the money. Needless to say, I was pissed. Twice in one month? The only thing I have to say to that is WTF?! I think the thing that pissed me off the most is that I really want a new MacBook Pro, and they probably bought a $1,000 laptop at the Apple Store. I'm debating filing a police report with my local precinct to maybe see if they can do anything. My best friend Brett, who is a police officer thinks its a smart idea, my dad, not so much. He said I'll get the money back, so I'm not out anything, and doesn't think the police will pay attention to something like this. We shall see. I'm debating it, like I said.

Onto my next topic, borrowing Keyser for the night. I figured it would be a good idea to take him to the house now that its actually hospitable and seeing how he reacted. The verdict? He reacted badly. He was all over the place, and didn't really know what to do. He wouldn't sleep and kept waking up every hour or so in the middle of the night, and of course the second we tried to crate him he whined and barked. And, the second it looked like we were leaving to go back to my parents house on Sunday for Father's Day, he started freaking out. So, experiment failed. All I lost was a nights sleep, and some sanity. Everyone was joking that its good practice for getting up in the middle of the night for a newborn. Ha ha... not funny people!

So that's about all for now. Peace out party people...

Title courtesy of The Doors.

So, last week was a bit of a rough week, and that's really putting it lightly. The worst week ever would probably sum it up a little bit better. I'll start at the beginning, because it started out pretty crappy and just got a million times worse.

Sunday, for starters, began decently at first. I met my parents and younger brother for breakfast, then went to the gym to get back into a fitness routine. Missy and I proceeded to throw out the rest of the paneling in our spare room, and I settled onto the couch for a relaxing afternoon. Then, I got an e-mail that set me off on a hours long odyssey of frustration. I got an e-mail from a seller of a laptop on eBay asking me to call him and give him a copy of my driver's license. I thought that this was very odd, because I wasn't bidding on anything on eBay, and hadn't even used my account for a very long time. So, I log into my account and lo and behold, there's a message from this seller and eBay is telling me I have feedback to leave for one item. I look at said item, and it's a laptop! That I somehow bought for $810.63. I immediately log into my PayPal account to see if there's anything fishy there. I pulled up my history and yet again, there it is, a transfer set to go through on Monday for $810.63. I immediately start freaking out. I get on an online chat with eBay to tell them that someone fraudulently bought something using my account, then went through the steps with PayPal to say it was an unauthorized transaction. I actually spoke to people at PayPal on the phone twice, and they assured me that everything that can be done was being done. They couldn't stop the transfer from going through, but the money would not be sent to the seller and it would most likely be returned to me in 7-10 days.

The money being taken out of my account would have sucked, but it happened on a Sunday, May 31st to be exact, and our mortgage payment scheduled for June 1st was being deducted from my account, the same one that was used to pay for the laptop the next day. I had enough money to cover the extra $800 missing, but later in the month we would've had issues. Missy transferred the money into my account to cover the cost until I got the money back. That finally happened this morning so I put it back into her account. Getting joint accounts that we can transfer money between easily was the smartest thing we've done, I have to admit. So, once I did everything humanly possible to get my money back I went on a tear changing as many online passwords as I possibly could. Credit cards, banks, any and all financial institutions, Facebook, Twitter... you name it, I changed my password. I even changed my eBay member ID along with the password. That's how paranoid I was. I even signed up for LifeLock, an identity theft prevention service because I figured if they got into my eBay account, who knows what else they got into.

There was also a bit of icing to this cake on Sunday. In my paranoia I changed my wireless network settings at home. I stopped broadcasting my SSID, and changed the wireless security from WEP to WPA2. I changed my laptop, iPhone and MIssy's computer, but when I went to go change it on my Wii, the damn thing wouldn't power on. There was no light indicating power. I went through the online instructions to diagnose the problem, but nothing worked. So, I filled out the online repair thing, printed a FedEx label and everything. It was only until the next day, when on a whim, I decided to give it one more shot and it worked. Turns out there's a fuse in the Wii power supply that'll trip to protect the Wii from getting fried. If it trips, you need to unplug the power supply from the wall or power strip for more than 90 seconds to reset the fuse. I had taken the power supply from the power strip and plugged it right into the wall without waiting 90 seconds. So I unplugged it and was getting ready to ship it all back to Nintendo. Then I tried it and it was OK. I called Nintendo just to make sure and the guy on the phone gave me the above explanation. So all was OK on that front.

All of that sounds pretty crappy... but it got worse. My grandma went in for open heart surgery on Monday. It was surgery that we were all fully expecting her to get through OK, her included, because she wanted to get better for when my brother and his wife have their baby in October. Well, sadly, she didn't make it. I won't go into the details here, but I'll just say she passed away at the young age of 85 on Monday and its a shame, because there was a lot of life left in her, and she definitely had a lot to live for. So Monday night and most of Tuesday was kind of a blur.

Wednesday morning was her funeral and as Missy and I were getting dressed to leave for the cemetery we got a call from one of Missy's best friends. Her mother had passed away suddenly the night before, and it was just a bit too much to take. I didn't really know her mother, but Missy did, and she was a mess over it. Her friend is an only child and her dad died when she was two, so her mom was all she had. She just got married, so that was a bonus, and her mom has two brothers, so she's got some uncles, but its not the same. So, we had that funeral to go to on Thursday, and then we went back to her mom's house yesterday to sit Shiva some more with her.

I went back to work on Friday and tried to just make it through the day so I could get to the weekend and relax a little.

So, like I said, worst week ever. Just trying to break through all the bad stuff on last week and focus on nothing but good stuff and good news ahead.