Nothing says Sunday like a little attempted phone fraud

The phone rang today, and when I checked the caller ID, it showed our name listing and number. Eyebrows raised, I answered. On the other end was a recorded female voice saying that our account had been locked because of potentially fraudulent activity identified by Central State Bank's fraud prevention department. It then gave the option of pressing 1 to unlock the account or pressing 2 to hear the recording again. Not sure that I heard it right the first time, especially the bank's name, I pressed 2. It played the same message. By now I had Egg listening in too, and he went ahead and pressed 1 to "unlock the account". When the recording asked that we enter our account number, we hung up, suspicions confirmed: phone phishing attempt.

I want to disinfect my phone now.

(That generic bank name was a nice touch. I googled it and found lots of banks with that as the base of their names, usually Central State Bank of Someplace.)

Serendipity

Egg linked me to an article about how it has been scientifically proven that men just don't get or utterly misinterpret non-verbal flirty signals from women. Does that really surprise anyone? Anyone female, that is? Then within an hour I stumbled across this delightful reply. (found on a random blog, originally from the PostSecret project)

I'm just not feeling very yarny the last few days since finishing the wavy socks. I ripped out the toe-up Monkey socks in the loud colorway of Wildfoote last night - the pattern completely disappeared into the riot of competing colors in the yarn. Anything beyond a simple rib is wasted there.

So, it's Knit Nite in a few hours at my LYS, and I have nothing on the needles. All my projects of late have been accessories or other little things (OK, so the entrelac bag isn't little), and I'm jonesing to do a garment again, just can't seem to find the right pattern. Sigh... Spring fever sucks.

Speaking of horror

On my way home from Knit Nite at my LYS tonight, I got stuck behind a creepy-crawly driver, and while waiting for the traffic in the passing lane to clear, I happened to look over just as I was passing a small local motel. This motel seems to cater primarily to construction workers at local jobsites, sort of low-rent TDY or extended stay place. Just then, a fellow came out of one of the end units heading to his work truck dressed only in, you guessed it, his tighty-whities! Beer gut in all its glory! Yikes - I really didn't need that image burned into my retinas! That's my punishment for taking my eyes off the road. I guess his rationale was that it was just going to take a minute, why bother getting dressed?

Vicarious knitting

I haven't exactly been lighting up the blogosphere with observations of and witticisms on my own personal yarn adventures, have I? I'm in a knitting dry spell lately, and no, the hat pattern didn't suck all the creative energy out of me. ;-) (That would be pretty pathetic, wouldn't it?)

No, blame it on the effect of noxious household cleaning products on my hands. Last week I spent a few days at the white elephant house, now that it's empty (except for the garage) cleaning in an effort to get the place to a point where it doesn't look scary-neglected. I've spent three days - so far - on the bathrooms trying to get 10+ years of hard water stains off the glass shower doors and surrounds. LimeAway, CLR, etc. - all did nothing on those vertical surfaces except smell bad and do a number on my hands. A little internet research turned up the off-label use of glass cooktop cleaner, which with a non-scratch scouring pad and LOTS of elbow grease actually worked. Still not great on the hands, but at least it did scour the lime off those damn glass panels and doors, which is more than I can say for everything else I tried.

Yes, I did start out wearing gloves, but inevitably water and cleaning product run into them, rendering them pointless, so off they come. The feeling of LimeAway sloshing around your fingers inside a latex glove reminded me of touching fire coral back in my island girl days - a momentary, odd, little tingle followed by a scorching burning like your skin wants to come off.

So, combine that with some big yard clean-up action, and I suppose my hands would make a manicurist either scream and run from then room ("The horror!") or grin with glee at what she could charge for repairing that much damage. When I did try to pick up some mindless knitting (the entrelac bag), the yarn wouldn't slide through my fingers; it was like trying to pull it through velcro. Yuck!!!

I've contented myself instead with browsing the new Knitty, scrolling through Ravelry, and stumbling across other fiber fun that other people are having and posting online. The hand lotion has started to improve things a bit, so I should get some stitches done before heading back for more adventures with cleansers, vacuum cleaners and such later in the week.

Not a funny night

The bed socks for my mother are done, as is the mini-Clapotis I made for myself. For once I have nothing on the needles, and also for once that's probably a good thing because I'm wrapped in some intense family drama involving an aging parent, a step-parent with a dubious agenda for aforementioned aging parent, a white elephant of a house that won't sell, incompetent movers, and some disturbing hoarding behavior on the part of both the aforementioned aging parent and the step-parent. You know something is wrong when you have to smuggle bags of empty glass jars, empty plastic milk jugs, broken but allegedly still repairable gadgets, etc. home to your own trash can because if you leave them there, they will get put back in the piles of stuff to be moved to the new house. I don't think I'll be looking at the knitting needles for the next few days until I have a better handle on this situation.