Random points

Let's do a little round of some random thoughts and updates. 

• I currently suffer from an ear infection in my outer right ear.  Fortunately that's not linked to a cold, congested sinusses and inner pressure built up...but it's very painful nevertheless. It's day 4 and I'm starting to really pity myself. So forgive me if I try to find me some new pair of ears.
  
  I probably infected myself since I often suffer from excema in my ear shell which is itchy...so I scratch there. And so now everything is red, swollen and the ear entrance completely clogged. I sure hope that those new ear drops I got from the doctor yesterday start making a difference quickly!
  
• The potty training update is that there's no progress yet.  It'll be a miracle if Beertje hits his milestone on the same moment as his brother did tomorrow. At least he protests less again since I gave him some slack previous week and he showed some brief interest in getting new underwear to try.  But most of it is already in the laundry :(.
  
• It's the end of the vacation period and all traffic sure is back. That combined with 5 road construction sites on the major roads in and around Leuven causes a bit of a traffic infarction here. I'm so greatful that I have a local reliable babysit that can go and search the children in time so I don't have to stress when driving home.
  
• Kabouter went on a sleep date last Friday to his best friend.  Wow.  It's a milestone, right?
  
• I am missing the hot weather but I don't dare to complain because we've had such an exceptional hot long summer. But the days are visibly shortening very quickly all of a sudden and it's cold. A lot of people were complaining in the office.  Autumn is clearly coming and I don't feel ready for it yet.
  
• Kabouter loves riding his bike. We took him on Leuven car-free around on his bike and it was so cool to see him peddle through the city everywhere.
  
• I'm still a bit frustrated with the FB change, where I can't automatically get my blog posts published on my personal profile anymore. I can see very clearly that posting on my Goofballsworld  FB page reaches a lot less people than before. As soon as I manually share a post on my personal page again, reading statistics multiply right away.  So there's friends and family our there that read my blog posts...but who have not responded to my invitation to like my FB page or do not want to like pages and hence do not see the posts anymore.
  
  So please, if you read this (even if you weren't connected to me personally on FB): take the opportunity to like the Goofballsworld FB page. The more likes there, the more people will get to see my posts in their feed (as it is a %...you will not see every post each time!!).  And of course you are welcome to interact on the posts of that page as well, as that helps.
  
  I probably need to give it a bit of time but it doesn't help that FB shows statistics to the page owner so visible under each post (and so does Blogger in its edit mode).
  
• Since we are back from our US vacation, I haven't succeeded to continue my diet anymore. I simply didn't have the discipline and courage.  But the good thing is that I didn't loose all good habits. I do eat a lot less carbs at lunch time, I do pay attention on the amount of vegetables that I eat and I still eat healthier breakfast than the past. But I picked up the habit this summer to have a glass of wine again with Jan for dinner etc.  At least I am managing to keep my weight stable at the moment, but I wish I had lost one extra kilo.   So I should just get the courage to diet more strictly for another 6 weeks again, now that I know that I can manage the weight stable afterwards.  But at least I stopped that worrying trend of constant weight gain that would put my health at risk!
  
• My mailbox suffers from a lot of spam.  My e-mail address is hosted on a server from some acquaintance from Jan and it doesn't really have a good spam filter.  But I deal with it.  A few weeks ago I started receiving waves of "failed message delivery" mails. It looked as if spamming servers used my e-mail address as an alias of the "sender" of spam as well as had entered it as a reply-to address.  I checked with the provider if we could stop other servers to pretend that I was the sender but those settings were already ok...yet illegal spammers ignore that.   
  The failed mails , as well as some out of office messages first showed relative innocent spam but last week all of a sudden it was more nasty blackmail spam.  Ugh!  And then my mailing host noticed that spam was actually sent from my address from the server! My e-mail was not just used as alias of the sender and a reply to address: I was the sender.  I had no idea.  Spam bots must have hacked into my address +  password even though we had considered it relatively safe. It's not like I had the 1234 password.  Indeed on Sunday I got a massive load of "failed message deliveries", right when we got the notification from our mail host.  I'm talking about several thousands of e-mails.  I've done my best to invent a crazy safe long password that hopefully I won't forget and so far...it seems to have stopped. All seems fine at this moment. Yikes, that was spooky though. I apologize to all the people that might have received a nasty mail "from me".  I didn't want to do you any harm!  And I find my mailbox with the regular amount of spam such a relief right now.