Candy Cane Coffee to Email Spoofing to Music to Goodies to Prayer Request

Aah, the taste of peppermint and coffee together! What a festive cup of delight this is for my taste buds. Yep, that’s right I’m indulging in a cup of candy cane coffee this a.m. DH bought this – a bag of Archer Farms Candy Cane coffee just for me.  What are you drinking this morning?

Unbeknown to me, my email address is was used by someone other than myself to send spam out. What surprised me most is this apparently isn’t the first time, either. My SIL informed me over the weekend my email address was sending her spam. She thought my account got hacked. I would have thought the same thing, but I have total access to my username and password with no problem getting into my account.

That’s when I discovered a different email culprit called “email spoofing” which basically means someone changes the email header to mask their identity to the unsuspecting party’s eye by using a friend’s email address to send bogus email.  In this case, it was a link. Who knows what that link was. My SIL’s anti-virus program flagged it as spam automatically and this is what alerted her.  Has this happened to you? 

The good news is, this type of spamming is short-lived and stops at least temporarily. As I mentioned my SIL told me she has gotten this kind of thing before from my email address, but didn’t pay much attention to it until this time. She was hit three days in a row with the spam, which prompted her to call it to my attention. I am glad she did, too.

The bad news is, there is really nothing you can do about spoofing. If you do anything with an email address,  then its a sitting duck. It’s not a question, if it happens, but when it happens.

The really awful news is your email address can be placed on a server’s blacklist due to someone spoofing your account. This means all of your emails can be blocked going to a specific person or persons. In which case, you will have to contact the server’s “postmaster” to explain your account was spoofed to get your email address off the blacklist. I got to wondering about Facebook. Maybe this is how my email address became prime picking.  What do you think, do you believe your email account associated with social media networks are an easy target for these spammers?

Yesterday’s while visiting Monday’s Music Moves Me participants, I stopped by fellow 4M co-host, Stacy Uncorked.  She featured a new tune (to me) to enjoy and is now a new favorite of mine for this Christmas season. That being said, I wanted to share it with you.

I’m always looking for new tunes to add to my music library, especially Christmas music. What is your top favorite song (new & old)?

Last week I made:

• Chocolate Covered Cherries
• White Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Balls*
• Almond Butter Crunch

*I use part of my Chocolate Covered Cherries recipe to make these. It’s easy. All you have to do is incorporate enough peanut butter to suit taste to the center mixture. It will be thicker and crumblier, but it holds together well once you roll into desired ball size. Place in freezer for 5-minutes while you melt the white chocolate. I use Make n Mold Candy Wafers Vanilla, as this works the best. Dip each PB ball into the melted white chocolate & allow the excess to drain before returning PB balls to your waxed paper lined cookie sheet. The candy wafer melts will harden quickly and the PB balls can be eaten straight away or if you want put them back into the freezer for a few minutes. I prefer to store all of my home-made candies in the freezer throughout the Christmas season to better keep the flavor and to cut temptations down a bit. Prior to serving them, I remove them from the freezer to return to room temperature.

If you’re interested in the Almond Butter Crunch recipe then I’ll try to get this up before the week is up. This is another simple to do recipe with crowd pleasing results!

This week’s goodie list includes:

Usually, I have to fight myself to not do a lot of sampling while making these little tasty sweets, but this year my cravings have been nearly zero percent. That’s so strange! If I didn’t know better, I’d swear aliens abducted the Cathy I know and replaced with something out of this world. Not that I’m complaining. I’m not. Really! Maybe this will keep me from gaining 5-pounds over the holidays and then having to work myself ragged to get them off. Do you have traditional goodies you make every Christmas? 

I have two presents wrapped beneath the tree. These belong to DH. I need to pull together the remaining gifts I’ve stashed away for family and make sure everyone is accounted for and then wrap them. How many gifts are underneath your tree?

To date, I’ve sent out a dozen or so store-bought greeting cards and have hand-stamped a dozen with plans to do at least a dozen more hand-stamped cards. Come on, be honest with us! Are you one of the few who enjoy sending out Christmas greetings regardless, if you get one back or not OR do you only respond politely to those who send them to you? 

With the New Year less than a month away, I decided it was time to print my free wall calendar off. Yep, you read that right “FREE” wall calendar. It’s nothing fancy, but it gives me precisely what I want to chart my weekly weight progression, along with marking upcoming, non-repeating events. If you’re interested, then here!  Do you like having a mark-up calendar at your finger tips? Where do you display yours? I keep mine on the side of the freezer.

DD#2 had allergy testing performed yesterday. She’s allergic to cats, dogs, mold, dust, trees, grass, pollen, bugs, …just about everything and on top of that she’s diagnosed with Asthma. The doctor put her on two inhalers.

When she moved to her own place in 2009, she insisted on getting a cat. Despite my warnings of her allergies. At that time it wasn’t official she was allergic to them, but she had the symptoms like me and I knew for fact I was highly allergic to felines. Would she listen? Let’s just say, I had better odds in the wall hearing what I said than her. Eventually, she reluctantly gave her cat away to a friend to only get her fur-baby.  She was in an apartment that didn’t allow pets, so her sister is keeping it till such time DD#2’s can move her little fur baby home.

Meanwhile, guess what she does? She gets a dog. The apartment she is in now allows pets. This isn’t her first dog, either. But, she never suspected being allergic to dogs until now. I think it’s because her apartment isn’t occupied with a cat at the moment to throw off self-diagnoses senses that she has dog allergies. I haven’t asked what her plans are for her new puppy, yet.  If I were a betting gal, then I’d say she’ll be stubborn on this and keep Brutus for a while till she just can’t take it anymore. What kind of allergies do  you suffer with?

This weekend, I discovered my grandma was to the hospital. She had a mini-stroke. It tears my mother up thinking about having to move her to a nursing home. Many of the hospitals in rural communities such as the one my folks live in lack quality medical care.

Last year, they sent my grandpa home three times with pneumonia. By the time they had him in the hospital the last time it resulted in him having to be moved to a nursing home. Things went from bad to worse quickly. The staff did not give him the necessary care and in short he became severely dehydrated on top of other problems that claimed his life prematurely. The medical staff needed to be in tune with his condition when things turned for the worse, but were not on top his care.

You can imagine this scenario plays over and over in my mother’s head.  It has to be tormenting and this is the last thing she wants to have happen again. My mother pushes herself beyond reasonable boundaries and her health is suffering. Please keep my grandma and mother in your prayers.

It was a pleasure to chit-chat with you this morning over the aroma and flavor of a cup of coffee. Next week, I may have to change things up by having a cup of cocoa. It’s now time for me to do the blog hop thingy and if you want you can tag along, then go to the top of this page look under Daily Blog Hops for my regular random/coffee chat buds. 😉

Phew, I was a bit long-winded today! I hope I didn’t bore you to tears. I hope you have a T-rific Tuesday!

 

 

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