Trying to find my Blogging/Life/Facebook Zen - Part 1 of many

There are some weeks that just seem to be about teaching humility. The Blogging/Life/Facebook Zen posts the week will be about how life seem determined to humble me.  If I keep writing them later, they may take on another theme.  We'll just have to see what life brings.

This week seems to have flown by and dragged on.  I haven't had as much time online as usual, and there are several reasons for that.  I know a lot of you have emailed, or sent me messages on Facebook, and some have been worried when I didn't get back to you right away.  I will try to get back to all of the backlogged Facebook messages soon, but if I sent you a note saying thank you for praying for me, and the link to this post, that explains part of what's going on, please don't think I love you any less.  Quite frankly, I am overwhelmed, but I don't want anyone to feel unimportant or that they are purposely being kept out of the loop.  This is my "best I can do" way of keeping everyone in the loop.

This is kind of a ramble.  I am sorry, and not sorry for that.  If you wanted something concise, this will take longer than you were hoping.  If you don't mind meandering because it helps you to get to know me more, then you will probably be okay with this.  There are several parts of this that I wrote in a Facebook private message to someone.  I am not marking them as Facebook quotes because in all the cases I am the one who wrote them, and I don't think knowing the context of the conversation, or who it was with is important to understand what I said.  (Besides, if the conversation wasn't with you, it isn't really any of your business who the other person was in the conversation. ;-) I promise, none of the conversations were with space aliens, movie stars or wanted fugitives.)

I first want to apologize to everyone that I am not up to date with the Finding Heavenly Mother Project Page.  I could really use someone who wants to help with not only putting up links from poetrysansonions, but also pulling historical posts from fMh, By Common Consent, Sunstone, and tons of other sources that have been suggested. (If you have some time and are willing to help, let me know!) 

Obviously I am getting buried trying to keep up with the Heavenly Mother project, and I haven't even had surgery yet. 

If you submitted poetry, prose, or artwork for the Finding Heavenly Mother Project, and have not heard back from me, please send me a follow up email. 
For anyone who sent submissions through Facebook or an email address, other than findingmywaysoftly@gmail, and you haven't heard back from me, please send the entire original submission again, to findingmywaysoftly@gmail. 

Explaining why I need to ask for people to resubmit work, is kind of embarrassing, but I hope by sharing it, I might save someone else going through this.  Certainly I have learned in the last 3 days why cyber-hacking and cyber-security are important, and not things that "just happen to other people."  Sometime late Monday night/early Tuesday morning, My Facebook account got hacked.  A few FB friends got spammed, I had links to pornography up on my Facebook wall for about half an hour, and my Facebook photo icon was an American flag.  None of it great, but I caught it pretty early, and it took me less than 15 minutes to delete the posts, delete the flag picture, (I like flags, but I understand files can be attached to the pictures that are essentially spyware) and change my password and account settings.  I assumed since we caught it in the first half hour, that everything was good.  Not so much.

I am not Facebook saavy, but I knew that hacker(s) oftentimes hack Facebook accounts, and I assumed that sometimes that meant they hacked their email accounts that were attached to them.  The email that all my Facebook stuff goes to, is one I created to use with Facebook, partially so that if I had time to go through FB emails, (which can get into the 100s in a few hours sometimes) great.  If I didn't have the time or inclination to deal with Facebook craziness, no problem. With the Facebook emails were all in one spot, and I could keep separate the emails in my other accounts, and wait until I was ready to deal with Facebook, on my own terms.  I thought it would also mean that even if my FB account got hacked, I would be safe, because I have no address book or contacts for this email account.  And, since the Facebook spam didn't go out to that many people, I thought it was fairly well controlled.

I googled to find out what else I could do and changed the settings on a number of things with the account. No longer having the default settings should make it less likely that either the email account or the FB account will be as vulnerable in the future.  And, if those had been the only things that were an issue, it wouldn't have impacted the Heavenly Mother Project at all. However, the two email addresses I have been using for people to send me attachments, one the gmail account above, and one a yahoo account, (because sometimes if there is a problem sending an attachment to one service, it will work better sending it to another service) did not escape unscathed. 

Luckily the account settings on the findingmywaysoftly gmail account allowed it to receive a lot of spam and emails that contained spyware, but it put them in my spam folder, and the hackers didn't actually get access to the account.  A few did not end up in the spam folder, but since I knew I had not sent emails with innocuous re: lines, like "Hello." "Missed you last night." etc., I did not open any of the emails.  I marked them as spam, and sent them off to whatever place gmail uses for the detention of spam before it is tortured with 70s music. 

The other account was not so lucky.  I had forwarded things, from the email account that I use for Facebook, to both the yahoo and gmail accounts, and I guess that when you forward things, that gets saved in your contacts.  I was using the same password for the account I use for Facebood and the yahoo account (yes, I know you aren't supposed to do that, you don't need to tell me again) which is probably why the account not only got spammed, but also got broken into, emails sent from it, and a lot of the settings changed.  My password was even changed, and I am very lucky that I was able to get into it, without infecting anything else. 

In running the virus scan programs, it deleted just about everything that had an attachment, whether it was a legitimate email or spam.  I am not sure if it couldn't tell the difference, or if the attachments all had some kind of virus attached to them, in the hopes that they would be forwarded and someone would open them and the virus would spread.  After realizing I wasn't going to really be able to save anything that wasn't backed up (luckily some important emails had been backed up on my hard drive, and not just on the web server) I just had it delete all emails from the inbox and outbox.   Virus problem solved, the 3-5 emails that had Heavenly Mother in the tag line, which I hadn't read and uploaded to the blod, not so solved.

So, again, if you sent me an email with content or a proposal for the Heavenly Mother project, or any other potential guest post, please resend it.  I really don't want to lose the work you submitted!

(I will focus more on this in my next "Zen" post, but I know a lot of you are aware that I had my appointment to see the surgeon on Monday.  We are going ahead with the surgery.  I don't have an exact date, because they are going to get me in as soon as the have the authorization from the insurance company, but it will be between now the first week in February.  Thanks for your thoughts and prayers. Trying to just hang in until then.)