I know I asked for rain. All those years – okay, months on end – waiting for a drip or two from the sky. Dark clouds hanging overhead, a little thunder, sparks of lightning, okay, that’s asking for too much. All I asked for was rain. Just a little rain. I forgot that the Great Cosmic McMuffin in the Sky doesn’t understand adjectives or adverbs. “Little” wasn’t heard. “RAIN” was.

The night before we left for the new campground with the trailer, it started raining. I slept like a rock to the magical poetry of rain drops pounding against the trailer’s roof. Magic. Pure magic.

The next morning, it let up for a few minutes, long enough for us to be brave and dash out to start pulling the trailer together for the move to the new campground. Then it started coming down in droves. Cats. Dogs. Elephants. Buckets. Liters. Gallons. Truckloads.

We were both soaked to the skin as Brent and I moved around the trailer, picking up the hose lines, dumping the sewer and putting the hoses away, closing up the slideout and jacking up the trailer for the move. We’d only been there two nights but already we’d set up shop, as we do at every spot featuring water and electricity.

Finally closed up and hooked to the truck, Brent goes off to return the 50 amp to 30 amp converter cable and I take one last look around for any pieces left behind. The water is pouring off my hat, which should be waterproof and is now water drip, and wonder what we are missing by leaving this particular campground behind, and what might be better or worse at the new campground.

It is always a flip of the coin when it comes to campgrounds. Sometimes it is a spilling of the coins to scatter across the ground when it comes to choosing campgrounds. We’ve been in some very nice, fancy, expensive campgrounds, the kind who cater to those “good” people with money, and they’ve had some real assholes there. We’ve also been in poor campgrounds, barely a gravel parking lot in the middle of a treeless nowhere, and found the most wonderful friends and companions. Sometimes we find a mixture of a little of everything. So far, I wasn’t very happy with this particular campground, and totally unfamiliar with the lie of the land for “good neighborhoods” in Mobile, so we’ll find what we find.

Campgrounds nowadays don’t usually show up in the fanciest of neighborhoods with the best schools and amenities. They are usually 1) farming areas that make a last ditch effort to make money, or 2) built and protected by zoning laws decades ago that still remain through that protection while the city grew around it. It takes a lot of money to have enough land to host a campground today.

The rain makes visibility almost nil as Brent returns, soaked to the skin, and climbs into the truck. Off we go, lugging this beast behind us, lumbering through Mobile, Alabama, towards the new campground.

It’s right off the highway, barely three blocks, give or take. Highway 10, no less, the highway I hate the most. It’s two miles from the airport where Brent will be working, so this is a very good thing.

The rain lets up here and there but when it comes down, it pours. The campground appears to be deserted, with little or no activity we’ve seen. It’s winter, so this is to be expected, combined with the damage and lack of tourist interest so soon after the horrible hurricanes pounded the area.

We back into the site we chose the day before and the rain slams down on us. It’s a swamp. The water builds up on the ground several inches and we slosh through it to set up the trailer. Already I can see the wheels sinking and I know that whatever position we set the trailer in to level it, something is going to sink.

Indeed it does, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

We level the trailer with the boards which go under the tires, but the back is still tilted to one side but the level on the front of the trailer behind the truck says that its level, so Brent calls it level and we prepare to disconnect. Brent likes to tell people that the bubble levels on trailers and motor homes were installed by a mechanic making six dollars an hour, so don’t expect much. We worked hard to make sure ours were fixed and as level as possible, but 5 years in the sun and cold, who knows how the glues have held up.

I pull out the steps for the front door and hear swearing coming from under the front of the trailer. I head back there and Brent is squatting down, half twisted inside the generator compartment of the trailer. I hear all kinds of colorful sounds echoing in the chamber. My ears would burn if they weren’t already singed off from years of such language.

It seems that the never-ending struggle we’ve had over the years with the trailers landing gears, the legs that hold the front of the trailer up, haven’t ended. This time though, instead of the gears braking, the drive shaft pin brakes so the gears will work but the drive shaft won’t turn. We never did buy a crank to manually work the legs, and a quick inspection of the hole in the side of the trailer where the crank would go if we had one, finds the hole is filled with dried grasses and the makings of an old bird’s nest. It’s a small hole so I can’t imagine what kind of bird would consider this viable nesting. I pull out some of the grasses but the rain is pouring too hard for me to see very far in there.

Brent finally admits that he thinks he can move the drive shaft manually with vise grips so we can raise the trailer high enough to disconnect the truck. The legs will hold the trailer up. We just have to get the truck off the trailer.

He starts cranking and I stand there in the rain, discovering why Brent has complained so long and hard about rain and wearing glasses. All the time I’m learning about the painful process of life wearing glasses. Rain and glasses don’t mix and my hat is more a hindrance that a help to keep the rain off.

Slowly the trailer lifts off the hitch and Brent can finally pull the truck out. He cranks the drive shaft back down so the trailer is now level from front to back, as much as possible.

I go inside and start the process to push out the slideout and get the inside of the trailer ready.

And the rain keeps coming.

After we’ve put the slideout out, one of my first tasks is to plug in the weather radio. It immediately fires off a weather warning alarm. It seems that the storm had brought flooding and high waves throughout the Mobile Bay and gulf area from New Orleans across to Florida. It’s certainly doing more than buckets out there.

The campground owner finally drives by as we are hooking up the water, sewer, and electricity and says that he’ll come by in a day or two to square things up with the rent and everything. We’d be willing now, but clearly he wants to stay dry. Too late for us.

Trying to take pictures in the intense rain, the crappy little digital camera I have gave up. Useless thing. Time for a new digital camera.

A few hours later I go outside to take some garbage and find that all the water that we had been sloshing through has gone. Totally absorbed into the ground. Amazing. I went back in the trailer and told Brent that we were living in a spongy swamp. It was stunning how fast all that water got absorbed into the ground. As the heat came up later in the day, we then knew we were in hell. Where does all that water go? Into the ground to eventually soak through to water ways and streams and rivers. If it actually doesn’t go very far, what happens when the air warms? Humidity. Buckets of the shit. Yep, we’re in heat wave humidity hell. I’m really in hell. I just left all that humidity and heat behind. It’s freakin’ winter, folks. I want a little COLD, some season, something that says W-I-N-T-E-R.

By the next morning, it is obvious that we have to reposition the trailer. It’s slanted way over to the right. But Brent is off for his first day at work so this will have to wait until possibly the weekend, since it will be dark when he gets home from work, and we really don’t want to do this in the dark. We’ve had worse, though it was a while ago, but we’ll survive. You just learn.

Me, I have tons of cleaning, sorting, pitching and tossing to do. It’s a wonder I found the laptop to write this blog entry. I can’t find the power cord yet, but I know its here somewhere, so I’m working off the second battery. Now that we have the trailer opened up and we’re not moving for a bit, I can start the process of finding our lives again.

I’ve opened up the door and windows and turned on the fan to circulate the warm, humid air. The new thermometer reads 75 and it is early in the morning. I’m truly in heat hell again. Damn.

So welcome us to Mobile, Alabama, and the Shady Acres Campground. We made it.
Mobile, Alabama

I thought I would post this complaint I’ve posted to my new web site hosts, ipowerweb, publicly so that all could be warned. The odds are that they will “take this under advisement” and not do anything, but it is important that you, either the current customer or potential customer, should be warned.

While I am satisfied with their host services, I’ve not been totally happy with the slowness it took to get my site up and running, and some of the lack of emphasis on the fine print that screwed up the transfer. But in general, as long as I don’t have to contact customer support constantly (which was the case for the first two months), I’m happy enough. But this really gets my goat.

The following concerns the use of their provided online HTML editor.

Lorelle
Tulsa, Oklahoma

We made all the connections for our flight with ease, enjoying the new Tel Aviv airport for only the 20 minutes it took to get on the airplane. It’s a lovely airport, though. Matches much of the airports we’ve visited, so it doesn’t look any different. Somehow I thought it would “look” more Israeli, a little Jewish, a little Holy Land, posters of Arafat and Sharon…something symbolic. But it was sterile and plain. Maybe they will add more as time goes by. Since it is four years past its completion date, its enough that it functions.

We did spend too much time at the VAT Refund desk. After 5 years of coming in and out of the country and getting our VAT (taxes) back on purchases over USD$100, the new VAT officials have RULES. For a country that doesn’t efforce 80% of the rules they currently have, it was strange to be ordered about by these young girls barely out of the army (or maybe serving time during their army posting). They old rules that are new to Israel travelers are that you must 1) bring your purchases to the airport and on the plane with you as proof of purchase, 2) or show your purchases to someone somewhere before putting them in your bag to go through security and check-in and have them write a note saying they saw the stuff, 3) and any and all jewelry, glasses, contact lenses, pharmacueticals, and really expensive stuff must be with you to show to the clerks before you can get the VAT back. They are fanatical about the jewelry and high ticket stuff. They wanted to know where my eyeglasses were. I told them “on my face.” Odd that they would pick now to get maniacal about this stuff after not being so wacko about it before. And strange that after years of seeing “older” folks with gray hair and accountant looks, it is now clerked by young femals with a uniform white shirt and dark pants, and the shirts are too small with tons of cleavage and gapping buttons and the pants are worn below the top of the pubic hair line. This is the fashion right now in Israel, but it is strange to see on the official clerks. Security females also wore the same look. Disconcerting, to say the least.

The lines were still long with too few clerks and ticket agents and security checkers. I asked our ticket agent how she liked the new airport – if it was easier. She said that the computerized everything was nicer but actually made for more work (such is life with a computer – it is supposed to make your life easier but it feels like more work) and that everyone was complaining that they had to walk too far. As we raced through the airport to our gate (typical), even after arriving over 4 hours ahead of time, the last ones on board, I think Israelis are getting off easy. The new Ben Gurion Airport is smaller than most and definitely much shorter walks than most.

The biggest change is the fact that the airplanes pull up to the ramp instead of having to ride a bus to the plane and back. The least change is the fact that Israelis are Israelis and when it comes to their addiction of cigarettes, even though there are constant announcements that “smoking is prohibited”, it is a toxic cloud of blue fog.

I have a huge bone to pick with all airports and officials who make the signs and such. Why say “smoking is prohibited” when “this is a no smoking (or smoke free) airport. Do not smoke in the airport, period, or we will rip out your lungs and tie them around your head with a pink bow” is much easier to understand and carries more “weight”. Instead of saying “no parking” they say “Parking enforcement is in place. It is prohibited to park.” Say “park here and we will tow your car to Bagdad and you can watch it blow up on CNN.”

Anyway, I’ll have more on those rants later.

The flight was boring, even with all the stops and the races through the airports. Trust me, the race from one end of the airport to the other to catch our connecting flight in Amsterdam was five times the distance for the longest jog at Ben Gurion. Kohav did great, pooping on command. With her tummy problems, we only had one small poop accident but it was quickly cleaned up. I knew she had to go but we were racing to the plane and the last ones on so we had to wait until way after take off to get her into the potty. My mistake.

I slept through most of the flight, watching only one movie, “I, Robot” censored and edited but okay. I didn’t find much hopeful about it, so I see why it didn’t do well at the box office. The main character’s angst against robots wasn’t clear until too late in the movie. He just looked like a beast until we learned the justification, and then he still looked like a beast.

Brent didn’t sleep through much of it so he was pretty wasted.

His parents were waiting for us and thrilled to have us arrive. Watching our flight via the Internet is now a way of life for traveling family and friends.

Unfortunately for me, the laryngitis turned into strep and I’m sick as a dog. Finally had to go to an emergency clinic and pay way too much to get a perscript for antibiotics. I’ll be better in a couple of days but I feel like something dragged through the streets and jumped on. Sleeping most of the time.

We’ve had some trouble getting the license tags for the truck and trailer. You have to show proof of insurance, and if the vehicle hasn’t been licensed recently, they give you all kinds of grief and require justification for your pains and sufferings of living overseas and not wanting to continue to support local and federal US governments when the country you are living in takes almost 50% of everything you make FIRST. Same with our insurance. Luckily, the insurance agent has known Brent since practically birth and is a long time family friend. He jumped through all the hoops for us to testify on our behalf that we are good people and why should we suffer and have to pay more because we were living overseas? I know the military gets away with it through their military association, but what a pain for the normal folk.

So we got that done yesterday and will put the new tags on the truck and trailer this morning, when the rest of the family wakes up. It was a late night of visiting with family and the kids, though I was in bed by seven.

We will be taking the stuff out of the trailer and putting it in the storage room we rented at the same storage place we have the trailer, cleaning out the trailer, and then putting things back in over the next few days, as much as my poor worn body and spirit can handle. We are scheduled to move the trailer to a nearby campground next week, so we don’t have a lot of time. We still have to get new brakes and tires on everything…somewhere in the new few days.

Everything left in the back of the truck is totally sun damaged. We had to get new gas tanks (plastic) and hoses, filters, tire chains, everything. The hitch is a rusted mess. I thought we’d left a cover on the back of the truck but I guess we didn’t. Have one somewhere that came with the truck but who knows where it is now.

Inside, everything is coated with dust, dead flies, wasps, and spiders. Yep, we even killed the spiders. We had rat poison and bug stuff everywhere and that has to be removed and the areas totally cleaned up. Toshi’s cat door to his potty was in the “basement” of the trailer, but that has to be blocked off and a new one to the toliet set up for Kohav. She is having the time of her life racing around the house here, so shifting into the small trailer will be a major shift for her. But there are lots of little hiding places.

So everything has to be cleaned out, gutted, and scrubbed. It’s a lot of work. I’m hoping to get some family to help, but they seem to be busy with holiday stuff, so it is probably just Brent and I. We’ll see.

Well, that is the news so far. My nose is dripping, my throat is raw, my bones and muscles ache, my head pounds, and I’ve got a great case of diahreah from the new antibiotics. So I’m doing fine and should be back to normal soon. Very soon.

Miss everyone!

OH, and Arafat’s timing was great in dying just after we left. We’re worried about everyone back there, though. Amazing that we were there during such a cructial time in Israel’s short history.

Lorelle
Tulsa, Oklahoma

I’ve been digging into the various options and gizmos associated with using WordPress for blogging. I’m amazed at the incredible work done by so many to advance this free software. Seriously swift folks are battling away at spammers, and pumping up the capabilities of WordPress for everyone. And they are all so willing to share that knowledge and expertise. I’m humbled.

Here are a few of the whiz bang plug-ins and add-ons that I’ve found so far for WordPress blog software.

• Tamba2′s Resources for WordPress’s Anti-Spam techniques
• Wiki WordPress Plugins Listing
• Unknowngenius.com’s WordPress Plugin Database
• Mt. Dew Virus’s WordPress Plugins and Hacks
• Bistr-o-Mathik’s WordPress Plugins
• Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Hacks
• Chait Gear’s Final Candidate: CG-PowerPack PHP & WordPress Scripts/Plugins
• WordPress KEYWORDS Meta Tag Generator and Static Page Converter

After checking out some of the “easier” plug-ins and hacks, I’ve added a few.

• Countdown – Allows the easy inclusion of how many days until or since a specific event. For instance, it could say that there are 4 days until the US Presidential Election or 3 days after the US Presidential Election. I’ve included it in the sidebar to let people know how many days until we arrive back in the US and a few other useless bits of date information.
• Wasabi’s Related Posts WordPress Plugin: After much messing around with different options to create a list of posts related to the current post, I found this awesome plugin which searches through the text of the posts and finds the words most common in the current post and lists those links. It ain’t perfect, but it gets most of the related posts 8 out of 10 times. Wonderful!
• Manalang’s WordPress Plugin for Condensed Content for Date and Category Archives – I’m still trying to make this work, but the goal is to have the main page feature snippets of the most recent blogs with a click to take you to the whole thing for thorough reading.
• Discussion on Blog by Email Problems and Instructions for Blog by Email – Another process with plugins that I’m still working on. Can’t get it to work yet, but I’m eager that it does. Seems the problem may be with my host server.

I’ll list more goodies as I find them, and hopefully figure out the details and post them here so I can use them again in the future…in case things get screwed up. This is our life. We have become experts in computer crashes and problems and trips from hell. I want an easier, simplier, boring life….just for a while.

Tel Aviv, Israel

We are starting the steps to switch over to our domain’s email services and that involves setting up POP3 Accounts through Outlook Express. The setting up process is fairly easy, though you do have to make sure that the SERVER, My Account Requires Authentication is checked or unchecked, depending upon your server’s requirements. There are lots of helpful sources online to find out how to set up a POP3 account.

The problem I’m having is that I have 7 different POP3 accounts with my domain. One is for the newsletter subscriptions, another for blog comments and information, etc. All 7 POP3 accounts dump everything right into the Personal Folders Inbox. Well, this is great if I had one or two accounts, but I don’t. When I want to see only what is happening with my newsletter subscriptions, I want to see those. When I want to see what is in my inbox from any account and then choose what I want “on” my computer or to be deleted right there from the server, this is what I want to do. Dumping everything into the Inbox means EVERYTHING goes in there like a cluttered back closet to hide your purchasing mistakes over the years.

I can’t find anything about multiple POP3 accounts that apply to my situation in Microsoft’s Knowledge Base or elsewhere on the web….so far. Talking to one tech support guy from my domain host isn’t much help and finally got an answer that I’m screwed and this won’t work the way I want it to work.

I can’t seem to figure out if this is a problem with POP3 accounts, Outlook Express/Outlook, or my server. I really need to work this out.

One of the reasons for this panic to figure it out is because I got horribly spammed by a blog spammer during the first three days of having a new blog set up. Over 300 spams. Each one generated an email sent to my new blog email account telling me that someone had commented on one of my blogs. Since I hadn’t even set up a link from my site to the blogs, I was rather flabbergasted, and then pissed (if you’ve been reading, you’d know how pissed) that I’ve been flooded with over 300 spam messages.

If I had known I was being flooded with spam, I would have gone to the webmail site and deleted them all there without even looking at them. With this strange “dump everything into the Inbox” without headers as a choice, I got over 300 spams in my inbox – on my computer. F@ckers. If I had just seen the headers, it wouldn’t have taken 20 minutes to process my Send/Receive sequence, and my computer wouldn’t be filled up with 300 spams, which become 300 deleted spams in my delete box, which then have to be dealt with.

If anyone knows any way of working without filters or gimmicks (host tech recommended finding someone to write a perl program to presort the mail before it comes in – blah!) to set up Outlook Express to handle multiple POP3 accounts nicely, please let me know.

I’m going to start researching replacement programs for Outlook Express to see if they handle this differently. We’re going to be separated from the Internet in a couple of days when we fly back to the states to set up our new lives on the road (again) and I don’t know when I’m going to have solid and consistent access to the Internet again. It may be a while. So I’m off to do more research. Whine!!! Wankers!

Tel Aviv, Israel

November 4, 2004

Well, the news is fluctuating back and forth. Dead. Not dead. Dead. Not dead. Clinically dead. Means not dead. Dead. Not dead.

Either way, good riddance to bad rubbish.

I know Arafat wanted to go out with martyr’s bang, a target of Israeli aggression, assassination, some spectacular event where he dies facing down a tank or something. Instead, he (may or may not) be dead from a creeping crawling little insidious yuk from within, the kind of yuk that gets more people than dramatic flames of media deaths.

I’m sorry, Arafat. You aren’t going to be another Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, or Elvis Presley. You are not dying with style.

But you are dying like you lived. Creating chaos and confusion in your wake. It is a controlled anarchy, with you ruling the whirlwind from within, protected by the games you played to create the whirlwind. But it is still a mess that the rest of the world has to deal with.

I am sure that he will be martyred and Israel will be to blame in spite of the truth. Too many people believe that the winners rewrite history. In the Palestinian/Israel conflict, history is rewritten by the best spin doctors and propaganda artists on the losing side and people will believe the propaganda and not the reality.

So as a reminder, as we wait for the final death verdict, Arafat died falling apart at the seams, a victim of his own life, sloppy and messy.

Predictions on the spin? Let’s see. While I am not an expert in this, after five years living in the midst of the anarchy Arafat crafted, especially through four years of the intifada, I have a pretty good estimate of how things will work.

Israel will be blamed for preventing Arafat from getting help sooner. They will be blamed for imprisoning him in Ramallah. They will be blamed for the “harsh” conditions making him ill. They will be blamed for preventing doctors from attending him. They will be blamed for preventing him from getting better medical treatment. Let’s see, they will probably blame Israel for poisoning him, or using chemical weapons. Since there really has been no announcement about the specifics of his illness, they can make up all kinds of stuff about what killed him, and Israel will be the leader of the pack.

Idealistic teenage suicide bombers will be convinced of his greatness and do everything they can in their blindness to blown up themselves and any Israeli civilians they can get access to “in the name of Arafat” rather than Allah or Mohamed or whoever they claim as they disintegrate into pieces and their soul goes up to their strange version of heaven where the virgins are awaiting them.

A stink will arise as to what to do with the martyr’s body. Fly it back to the West Bank? Gaza? No, probably not Gaza. He never called Gaza home and could hardly control it, though he did try, through spies, assassinations and corruption. Yet, Gaza is the only clearly defined “land” for the Palestinian Authority. Arafat was born, raised, and educated Egyptian, but they don’t want him. Arafat fought for years to be buried in Jerusalem, a place he only visited rarely (he had an uncle living there – the Grand Mufti, a Nazi collaborator and inciter) before the Oslo Accords. Israel has made it very clear that his body will never get within a millimeter of the city. The Arab countries where he lived (in a fake exile) don’t want him or the people he represents, so that is a dead end, literally. Jordan might take the body. They’ve always been sympathetic to his cause…well, at least after losing the war in 1967. Before that, they didn’t care like the rest of the Middle East. I’m sure he’s made some kind of arrangements to have people harass Israel on his behalf to be buried in Jerusalem (and it will go on and on for YEARS – little different from the Milosovitch trial), or somewhere near Ramallah where a great tomb and symbol will be built to honor the great hero. Arafat has said repeatedly that he wants a shrine built to him that will become another “mecca” for people to make pilgrimage to and pray.

Honoring Arafat after his death will be a study in the rewriting of history. After all, what really did Arafat give to the world to make it a better place so that we should all honor him in death as he was in life? I can name tons of evil doings, but I’m running low on the specifics of the good will gestures to benefit mankind. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was not a man of peace, no matter how much spin you put on it. After all, can you imagine giving Bin Laden the Nobel Peace Prize? It is no different than giving it to Arafat. A good will gesture the world put upon him for appearing to be a peacemaker when in reality he remained a terrorist.

Arafat and Bush, the newly re-elected monster of the US Government, have a lot in common. Both are tolerated by the masses they lead because they don’t have a better choice. Both men are hated world wide but honored because there is little or no choice to do otherwise. Both men have used their office and power to funnel money into efforts that strip their citizens of their economy, security, and welfare while increasing their own personal and familial worth. Most importantly, both men have been in a place or two to change the path of the world regarding violence and could have brought groups and countries together for the good of all. Instead, both men took a path of violence and division, inciting violence and hatred around them and dividing whole national and international communities. The legacy they will both leave is one of the darkest in the recent history of the world. Come on, people. Count the dead who died under their orders then tell me how wonderful these two people are and how much they have improved the world through their presence and efforts in it.

Alas, soon this will become only my opinion and not representative of the true facts. History has already begun to rewrite itself. The spin has started.

I’ve just listened to the news. Arafat is the greatest hero of the Palestinian people. He represents the revolution for peace. Arafat is a man of peace and brought Gaza to the Palestinians and brought all the Palestinian people together to be united. Without him, there would be no Palestine, no hope, and no freedom. He is the Palestinian’s symbol of freedom.

To quote a brilliant line from the television show, Babylon 5:

The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
Kosh

Tel Aviv, Israel

I’ve given it a lot of thought and finally made a radical decision to blow out (over time, of course) our hotmail accounts. They have been very useful for a long time as they have been free and easy to access from any where in the world as we travel. Our web site email has been forwarded to them, making it even easier to get our email. Unfortunately, MSN is making Hotmail unbearable to live with.

Issue One
The first crime was the grandiose announcement that we would no longer have to suffer with only 2 megabytes of storage space for the free accounts. Millions waited patiently for the “fall change” that never happened. Oh, it happened to a few people, but usually the squeaky wheel people who wanted to know “WHERE IS THE BEEF!” I sat and waited to see if my four accounts would beef up, including my one paid accounts which was supposed to go to up to 2 gigs. Here is the announcement I received on July 1, 2004 for the free accounts:

In addition to delivering world-class antivirus protection, you can also look forward to an upgrade in your storage capacity. In fact, you’ll receive 125 times your current email storage with the introduction of a 250 MB inbox as well as the ability to send attachments up to 10 MB.

Well, it is now November 4, 2004, and I still have only 2 MB in my accounts. Screw ‘em.

Issue Two
Without warning, MSN/Hotmail closed my paid subscriber account. It took over a month of constant emails to customer support (which returned with form letters that the account was closed for justifiable reasons and they didn’t have to explain nothing to nobody), I finally got a human who told me that my account was closed because someone complained. I understood that they couldn’t tell me who or what or whatever, but they told me it was because I violated some indecency issue and because one person complained to Hotmail, it was an automatic shut down.

Now, I may cuss and swear and pontificate about what a loser and disaster Bush is, but I’m one of billions on the planet with the same opinion. I have friends who send me jokes (please don’t) about anti-Semitism (self-deprecating – the Jews have the best jokes against Jews), sex, penis jokes, and all kinds of things that even I, one of the least morally substantial people, feel is offensive. But only because they are time wasters. I almost NEVER forward them on to anyone because of the time-wasting-factor, unless I KNOW the recipient will adore the giggle. I don’t believe in blanketing the Internet with time-wasters in any form, so you won’t find me spreading around rumors, hoaxes, jokes, or spam. So what could POSSIBLY come out of my account to someone that would inspire an offense? Not a single one of my friends, and I have great honest friends who will tell me if there is a bugger hanging off my nose for all the world to see and never say anything about, admitted that the didn’t like something I sent.

What is even more bizarre is that whatever it was that was sent, went out while I was in the states taking care of my father practically full-time, and I didn’t have time to do much email other than “Hello, I’m in the states, I’m going crazy taking care of my sick father when I didn’t want to and this isn’t in the plans, and I’ll tell you more later, when I can.” So what could I have sent during that time period that could have been offensive, I’m clueless.

What is even more bizarre and upsetting about this whole thing is that Hotmail shut down my long standing paid account on only ONE incident. Come on, folks. ONE results in a closure. Isn’t that a little radical. So if I get pissed off at someone, I can send in a complaint to Hotmail and they will just willy nilly shut down there account, even if I’ve never gotten email from this person? I don’t know what the reporting process is, but closing down an account for one boo boo seems to be pretty nasty. Two, three, or 20 reports, then we’re talking about sinister, but ONE. I was informed there was only one complaint.

There is also no recourse. Of course, there wouldn’t be because it takes only one complaint and people could be going round in circles for years trying to get their account reopened on the basis of one complaint, and the protection of the complainer has to have priority (something they do very well at Hotmail, while the world is still persecuting raped women as the criminals) but still, there should be one equal attempt to justify behavior, especially on a paid account.

So fuck you, Hotmail. I have suffered plenty from you over the years with slow loading and bad filtering, and I’ve had tons of complaints against you and still stayed with you over the years. But one complaint against me and you shut me down and cause no end of misery at a time when I’m too busy taking care of my family while I’m supposed to be on vacation. Fuckers.

Issue Three
Microsoft’s MSN has been, like everyone else out there, damned and determined to stop the spamming and make the joy of email become joyful again instead of one battle after another. So they instituted a vicious anti-spamming tool to slap all of the spammers into a folder called “Junk Email” so you can just empty it and be free of the spammers.

Couple of problems with this. First of all, anyone who wasn’t on your contact list (and for those who keep our address book lists in Outlook Express and not on the Hotmail server – this means EVERYONE) gets shoved into the Junk Email folder. Problem is, everyone who isn’t on the list ends up there. Problem two is that if you don’t check the folder to see if someone who should be there is there, it is wiped clean every five days.

This is one of the BIG problems I have. When was the last time you took a week vacation, or even a four day vacation, and honestly had time to sit on the Internet during your travels to find out who is in you Junk Email box and take the necessary steps to remove them from the box so they don’t end up there in the future? Every four to five days? When I go on a four or five day vacation, I don’t have time to get to a computer, and if I do, I’m in a hurry. So emails that might be critical are wiped clean and gone forever if you don’t rush to your email within that 5 day period, which I found out isn’t a strict five days. It can be four days. More hassles.

You also can’t use Outlook or Outlook Express to your Junk Email folder to choose any of the options to remove someone from your spam list and make sure you get their emails in the future. You have to use the web browser. So you find a wanted email in your unwanted junk email folder in Outlook or Outlook Express, then you have to open a browser window and bring up Hotmail, which takes a long time to load as it is so graphically heavy and over coded, then put in password and username and wait some more. Then click on Mail, then Junk Email, select the “wanted email” (only one at a time – no group selections) and click on THIS IS NOT JUNK. You are given a couple of options to choose to categorize the email for future issues, and eventually you get back to the Junk Email window. The process, depending upon your connection, can take 30 seconds to 2 minutes per email. PAINFUL.

Brent and I use MailWasher to clean out the spam before it gets to us. It’s simple, easy, and we can blacklist a lot of the junk so it won’t show up again. Very simple to use. With Microsoft’s Hotmail Anti-Spam Enhanced Filter in place, we hardly get any spam listed in MailWasher. This would be great, but we also lose a LOT of good and wanted email because of this system.

So we had to manually go into Hotmail via the browser for each account and change the Spam Filter setting to LOW, which gets rid of the MOST horrific stuff but doesn’t use the enhancement that sweeps good email into the junk folder.

By the way, the Junk Email folder doesn’t show up in Outlook or Outlook Express. It comes in as Bulk Email.

Issue Four
No, I’m not even close to done bashing Hotmail.

Starting my new software to handle our blogs, I created a new account with Hotmail to accept questions and comments about the blogs via email. The process was the same as always, and I ended up with a 2 MB (not even the 250 MB promised in July) free account. I then went to Outlook Express and tried EVERYTHING to get the account to show up in Outlook Express but I only got errors. A little checking uncovered an announcement that MSN Hotmail will no longer be allowing free accounts to be used with Outlook or Outlook Express. Outlook has always HATED free email accounts and http accounts, but Outlook Express didn’t mind them. Now, they will be completely foreboden as of sometime Spring of 2005.

Their justification is that they have put so much effort into the anti-spamming techniques, that it just doesn’t work with Outlook or Outlook Express. That has different programming requirements and it won’t work. But if you pay for the service, you are given whatever magic recipe to make your paid subscriber Hotmail account work in Outlook or Outlook Express. As a paid subscriber, you get the full benefit of anti-spamming and easy-to-use Outlook and Outlook Express. Without it, you are back to the web, my friend, waiting for the tedious downloads of each MSN and Hotmail window, suffering the advertising and spam.

What I really believe is that by using Outlook or Outlook Express, you miss the advertising prominently displayed on your free Hotmail account. Advertisers weren’t happy about being invisible, so they are helping to put the pressure on. Money makes the world go ’round.

We gave some thought to changing to another email software program. I’ve been using Outlook and Outlook Express since its conception, and I’m tired of learning new programs every time I turn around. But this is still under consideration. The greatest part of using Outlook and Outlook Express for us as travelers is that we can grab and download the email we want and put it on our computer (Personal Folders – Inbox) and then disconnect from the Internet and read it offline. We’re heading back to life on the road in the trailer and I don’t know where our next Internet connection is going to come from and how long we will be able to stay online.

So there is my rant and rave about Hotmail. They are cutting off the freebies to the loss of long-time users of Microsoft products, not keeping their commitments to increasing storage space, rather discretionary about their closing accounts without warning, and a pain in the ass to work with, so they will soon be gone from our horizons in the Internet world.

And just a reminder, if you put our email address in as anything ending in Hotmail, please change it to lorelle@cameraontheroad.com or vanfossen@cameraontheroad.com or brent@cameraontheroad.com so we will hear from you when you email us. Thanks!

Tel Aviv, Israel

Today the count of spam in my three day old weblog with WordPress is 183. I have installed the spam words filter and spaminator, and these help, but STILL!!! I think these are the left overs from the day before that I haven’t cleaned out of my blog email inbox. So far, WordPress’s Edit Comments shows there are no comments. I’d like to scream at the public for not commenting on my blogs, yet they are just three days old using this software with the commenting capabilities. I haven’t even announced the changes. We’ll see how they work then. But I am screaming at the outrageous uselessness of spam. Total time wasters.

I had a lot of fun playing with some of the various plugins available for WordPress. There are some really great ones. One of the ones I wanted to try shows only excerpts of the post on the first page instead of EVERY post for that year. A click will take you to the blog post itself to read the whole thing, if you are interested. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work and one of the solutions was to get the latest update for WordPress which are called “nightlies”.

Let me tell you here and now, this was a big mistake. I don’t know what happened in the process of uploading the new updates to my server, but the whole thing was trashed in the blogs. So I had to upload the full version that I started with, and then go in and make changes to what I’d already changed on the files that had to be replaced. Pain in the ass. Live and learn. I just wish I’d spend more time learning from others mistakes and not my own.

Once I reloaded the old files, we were back in business. While the movers were packing up our stuff for shipment to the states, I spied on them through the curtained opening into the living room to make sure they were doing it okay (and it seemed they were) and continued on with the mindless task of copying my html blog files, stripping and changing the codes, and inserting them into the WordPress database. I’m getting faster at it, but it is mind-numbingly tedious. There are only a few more left, though I might move over some of my Telling Zone stories so they are all kept together in one set. This is really a sweet program once I figure out the little details.

I am waiting for help on the WordPress and “condensed excerpts” site to help me get back on the road to success with the blogs. Then I can fill you in on more of the details of this process as I learn it.

Tel Aviv, Israel

Okay, so far we have spent USD $660 for shipping 12 boxes of critical stuff. We’ve bought several batches of bubble wrap, probably totally around $50 worth and we will need some more before this is over. We also have gone through about six rolls of packing tape, at probably $3 a roll which adds another $18. Small change but I’m trying to keep track.

On a different note, I’ve just started using WordPress to handle and maintain this blog and it isn’t even public yet (will be within a couple of days) and already I have over 50 spammed comments. The whole point of using WordPress was to make the process easier and allow people to comment on these posts and the site in general. It’s not public and its already being abused. I’m learning right now how to stop this by using some plug-ins and I’ll supply the list and information when I get a better handle on it.

Nothing like doing too many things at once.

Tel Aviv, Israel

I just got back from the post office in part one of our move back to the states. I figure that I should keep a record of how this all works so I can remember, and others can learn from our misery.

We have to have some things in Tulsa when we arrive for our work and activities to continue. We also have a few Xmas presents and warm clothes that are just too heavy to include in the suitcases. So we just finished shipping the first big batch through the Israel Post Office using their EMS fast and cheap service. The cost is NIS 14.50 a kilo up to 20kg. That’s about $3 per kilo. We couldn’t have anything over 20kg, and when I weighed a box at 18kg, I understood why. That’s about 40 pounds, give or take.

If you mail a certain amount of boxes, you are entitled to a discount. Brent checked previously and couldn’t get any answer on how many boxes entitled you to the discount, but the clerk at the post office, who I’ve been working with for the past four years, told me that anything over one box, for me, would get a discount. The total for the 12 boxes came to NIS 3000 (about $666) and she told me that included a NIS660 savings ($150). Still, it’s an ouch.

The price we’ve been given by movers and shippers who specialize in overseas shipments is about $1500 USD, so we are WAY past our budget completely.

It’s difficult because we can only get about NIS 2000 (USD$440) out of the cash machines per day with the limits in place, and we’re maxing that every day to get enough for the shipping and to pay the landlord in cash. This makes life here REAL difficult.

So we hauled the 12 boxes to the post office in the rental car and carried them into the post office, filled out miles of forms and started lifting them onto the scales. Brent left me there to finish up and headed to the vet where he dropped off another stool sample from Kohav. We’re still battling her little intestinal parasites, though I think we might have finally knocked them down. We’ll hear in a day or two what the results are, but it is still funny to think about fitting in time to drop off some shit during the busy morning, and really mean it.

Brent then dropped the car off at the rental agency and stopped and got more bubble wrap on his way home. I went to the photo copy place on my way back from the post office and got copies of both of our passports and all stamps and visas. The movers need these for clearing customs to check to see if we have any customs fees or permits. Since we arrived as tourists with 8 suitcases, we never went through customs upon arrival.

Well, off for a quick bite of lunch and now we’re tackling the kitchen and packing it up. We’ve pretty much done the living room and bedroom. The rest is fairly simple. I’ll dismantal the computer stuff on Wednesday.

Lots to do.

Tel Aviv, Israel

We’ve got an entire living room crammed with boxes and are almost done with the packing up. Not as much to pack as I thought, but more than I really want. We finally found some movers who we hope are good. Not much you can do but trust and trust and wait. I keep telling myself it is just STUFF. While I’ve tried to cut back on paper, we still have a ton of it. Going to get a nice new (small) scanner when we get back to help cut back on even more of the stuff.

Two friends from the states decided at last minute to come spent two weeks with us to SEE Israel and we just took them to the airport to fly back this morning. It was fun to have a last fling around the country to see our favorite places and show it off. And how amazing that our friends were here for the incredible Kinneset vote to pull out of Gaza, and for the hospitalization and sensation that Arafat LOVES to promote, this time through illness. In addition to all the trouble and media attention he is generating, he wants a fight from the Palestinian people to rise up and invade Israel (or whatever it takes) to get his body buried in Jerusalem. He wants a holy shrine dedicated to him that has as much holy significance as Mecca or something. Israel has refused his request repeatedly, and continues to do so. The only shrine to Arafat that most people want is a big of indigestion they get from reading about him in the history books. While I was in Jerusalem yesterday (the Old City – full of Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs) I kept hearing from all of my Arab friends there that they couldn’t wait for the old bugger to die. Time for “young-her peoples” to take over, we were told over and over again. That’s nice to know.

Another first our friends got to experience was even more important to us on a personal scale than the pull out vote on Gaza or Arafat’s illness. On the way back from Jerusalem the last night, it started to rain. Tons of it. But only for about two minutes, but it was rain. Geshem. Real stuff. Not the fake-you-out misty stuff that comes with three drops and leaves immediately, never reaching the pavement. Real cover-the-cars-with-splatters-and-turn-on-the-windshield-wipers kinda rain. First one of the year since May. That was worth waiting for.

Tel Aviv, Israel