Spam spam spam spam

I'm not sure if I have complained here about our internet provider, but I'm not going to let that stop me from complaining again anyway.

In this case, it's not a problem with our service that I'm complaining about - ah heck, maybe I'll complain about that too.

Back when our main provincial phone provider was still an independent company, we signed up for a very competitive phone/internet package. It gave us an unlimited data plan shared between our home internet and cell phones. Thanks to regulatory capture, the federal watchdogs saw no problem with letting one of the huge national oligopolies swoop in and take over our provider. To the surprise of nobody, after a mandatory year of "change nothing", they promptly cut the number of services offered, and jacked up our rates to match the higher rates in the other provinces where competition had been eliminated.

Since we were grandfathered into our "unlimited" plan, we decided to stay with that. If we try to change anything in the plan, we will lose it, and it's a plan that (the last time I checked), none of the big carriers offer. They would like for everyone to switch from these plans to one of their limited ones, as there is good money to be made in milking people for going over their miserly data limits. To that end, they have been jacking up the cost of our plan every quarter to try and encourage us to switch. As good as this plan is, they are approaching usury levels for the rate they are charging for it.

It's not like people here didn't see it coming when Bell bought our main provider. They are one of the most vile, shady companies in Canada. At some point we will probably switch providers. It's not that we will save anything, given the collusion between the big three here, but Bell is the most crooked of them and I'm not a big fan of giving them any money if I don't have to.

Anyway, on to the original focus of this post. One of the other things they have ruined since taking over is the email accounts that are tied to this account. Very recently it started receiving levels of spam and phishing emails the likes of which I have never seen - even on my old Hotmail account at its worst. (While I was typing this line, I just got another email come in saying, "Quit your job. Trade in Bitcoin"). atara started getting them at the same time. They all come in exactly the same layout and most of them are in suspiciously broken English. My hunch is that Bell got compromised, and probably know that they did, but they're staying quiet about it and just hoping people don't notice the huge influx of scam emails flowing through on their service.

I used to have almost everything tied to that email account, but I've been slowly migrating it all to my main Gmail account.

I think that I will never not hate Bell, and nothing they have over the years has made any move to allay that.

Though I am not being as aggressive with it as I was last year, I have undertaken another "picture a day" project to keep duncandahusky company. Here are some (not entirely random) samples of it.

The eggs I picked up last week look a bit concerned.


I used one of them to make some pasta dough from scratch. I think that I have waxed poetic here in the past about how good home-made pasta is for so little cost and effort. If not, I'll make it the focus of a future post.


I employed half of it to help use some old tomatoes I found in the freezer. We had two bags of roasted tomatoes dated from 2013 that atara was in favour of throwing out. I am loathe to throw out food that might still be good, and these tomatoes were definitely good.


I rolled out the pasta and cut it into fettuccine, which I cooked to an al dente finish. While those were cooking, I dumped the frozen bag of roasted tomatoes with rosemary (also from our garden) into a small frying pan with some garlic, tomato paste, olive oil, and some frozen asparagus that I cut into short lengths. When the pasta was ready, I used a slotted spoon to transfer it in with the sauce, along with enough pasta water to help finish cooking the noodles. Finally, I served it with some ground parmesan.

And she wanted to throw these tomatoes in the trash. Puh. She missed out - this was really good.

Also, I wrote another fan story

In other news, I wrote another story for a dead little fandom. I don't know why I derive so much inspiration from these little fuzzy critters, but there you go.

The story summary on AO3 probably isn't the kind of thing to draw in readers, but I don't expect to see more than a dozen or so hits on the story anyway.

"Penny's mom inherits a cabin from somebody who is ostensibly a relative. Then nothing happens. This is one of those character-driven stories where there's lots of talking and hurt and comfort and stuff.

Edit: One of my beta readers has told me that my summary might not draw in a reader. Try this:

Imagine if the movie "Bolt" had been the product of some experimental mid-century Swedish director, with lots of essentially static, stark black and white moments with a split-screen of two actors' faces against a Stygian background, one facing right and the other facing the viewer. Their pallid visages betray no emotion as they stoically talk over each other, voicing their feelings of emptiness and ennui in the face of a meaningless existence. They end by saying, "I am alone, even when we are together" in unison.

Now imagine if this story is nothing like that, other than lots of dialogue and character interaction. And a hamster and a dog and a cat."

Anyway, it's not a story filled with high adventure, just lots of talking and feelings and stuff. <--- Hint: this is a link to the story.

And it's pretty short.