Tuesday's To-do List: Buy a House

By the time you read this, I may already be a home owner.

That's right, we're buying a house. I've kept it semi-quiet from the likes of Facebook for the past few months, more out of superstition than anything else. I worry that if I share exciting news too early, something is going to happen to derail it. Even now, the night before closing I am having a hard time coming to terms with sharing this with all of you before I'm actually holding the keys to the house.

We started looking for a house pretty casually a few months ago. One night I searched a bit online, just to see what was out there. Tom caught me Zillow-ing and got pretty interested himself. And the rest, as they say...

Has been a crazy mess! We are so excited about this cute little cottage of ours (I think it's cottage-like), however we have been going crazy the past two and a half months with the whole process. My original intent was to vent all over this blog post about every single bump and hiccup in this process (and there were a lot!), to outline the nightmare that is proving your money is your money and endless inspections and phone calls and faxes and banks...

Allen, our helpful home inspector from
Helpful Home Inspectors! He was incredibly helpful.

But, no. Rest assured, Tom and I encountered just as many problems as ever when we deal with beauracracies. It was tedious and annoying and boring and not as entertaining when I try to explain it.

Instead, I will tell you about tomorrow. Tomorrow we are going to sign more papers and call more people to set up more accounts and appointments. We are going to hand over a ton of money to people we don't know and drive to Jersey for the privilege to do so. We are going to have a long, hectic, inconvenient day.

And then we are going to own a house. A whole house.

I'm trying to imagine how it will feel. I imagine pretty much the same as now except with more freedom. And yet... more responsibility. Funny how that happens. 

The back of my mind is filling up with more lists. The lists of stuff I want to do (start a compost pile, DIY yoga studio) and the stuff I have to do (call PECO, ground the electrical outlets) and the stuff I've barely even thought of yet but will probably realize more once we're in the house (blinds... there are no blinds there!).

The past two months has felt crazy with all the running around we've been doing to get this house-buying thing lined up. Are we about to realize that that time was actually the calm before the storm? That we will be wishing we could go back to the days of just endless paper work rather than the endless lists of maintenance and improvements?

Nah, paperwork always sucks the worst.

Tomorrow we buy a house. Not just the house, but the land it sit on. Six thousand square feet of our town, of our state, of our COUNTRY will belong to us. If we wanted to, we could secede. Probably.

I'm nervous that we forgot to do something. I'm nervous that we are going to move into this little house and it's going to turn into The Money Pit.  I'm nervous that we are so busy that we are never going to unpack or paint or plant a garden... I'm nervous that this is a big decision and what if it's not the right one?

Best laid plants...

Well, I've never been one to shy away from bad decisions, so I guess we will just roll with it. If you or a friend enjoys painting, packing, moving or electrical work, send them our way. For now I'm going to try and relax for my last night as a carefree renter.

Tomorrow's To-do List:

- wire transfer more money than I can actually believe belongs to us (momentarily)
- deal with the seven stages of grief related to parting with said money
- call PECO
- call Verizon
- call the realtor
- call the settlement company
- call the whole thing off
- call it back on
- drive to Jersey
- sign a million pieces of paper
- worry that we should have gotten a lawyer
- sign a million more pieces of paper
- worry that my signature is SO illegible the papers will be deemed inadmissable in court and we don't actually own the house
- own a house
- go sit in empty house just because we can
- talk about how crazy it is that we own a house
- start the new house to-do list
- sleep

Encrypted Files and The Weekend That Could Have Been Better

I apologize upfront that this blog entry contains no pictures. I really like adding some pictures of things I've done or want to do. It breaks up all my rambling and is a little more pleasing to the eye. But there won't be any of those today because all of my pictures are on my computer and I am not writing from my computer. 

Why not, you may wonder. Well, dear Reader, I will tell you why. My poor, pink Dell laptop is sick. With a virus. A freakin' UNREAL virus. Like whoa. 

Have you ever heard of Ransomware? Nope, I hadn't either. And if you have, you know how sucky this story gets. 

Ransomware is a type of virus that has been developed in the last year or two. It is an incredibly effective and near-impossible to eradicate virus that locks you out of either your computer as a whole or your files. In my case, it was my files. Almost all of my files. Luckily, my blog photos are still there, but I haven't had time to fix my computer enough to use it yet. 

Here is the story of How This Virus Scared The Blank Out of Me and Ruined My Saturday Night and Most of My Sunday:

At about ten pm on Saturday night I was sitting around with Tom. We were tired and lazy, but expecting our good friends Dev and Norah to stop by. I was happily putting together a new Pinterest Board and thought maybe Norah would enjoy perusing for new projects with me while the gentlemen geeked out as they are want to do. 

At about 10:01 Tom went downstairs to let our friends in. 

10:02 and I was just adding the last Pin from a website that I was quite excited to share (more on this another time).

At 10:03 exactly Dev and Norah walked in just as my computer completely crashed. The unrelated events could not have been timed better. As the gracious host that I am, I insisted they sit down wherever they could find room and then totally ignored everyone while I had a panic attack.

Okay, PANIC ATTACK is extreme. I've had viruses before. And I'm not completely useless with a computer, so I've generally been able to fix what ails them after a little research. Trying to remain calm, I CTRL-ALT-DELETE'd my brains out to little avail. 

My screen was blank. But, not really? It was more like a huge white pop up I couldn't get rid of. Every now and then I could get the task manager to show up long enough to see that some very odd programs were running. 

I spent the next hour or so turning my computer off and on, trying to cancel out the endless pop-ups that WOULD NOT STOP popping up. As I regained very minimal control over my desktop, I noticed that there were Google Chrome icons in EVERY SINGLE FOLDER on my desktop. That can't be good, can it? Those are all folders that only contain Word Documents. And now there is an icon for a program in there that I didn't put there. Uh oh. 

I didn't get much more accomplished that night. I was tired and didn't really know what to do since I still could barely get a virus scan to run on my very slow and still occasionally crashing laptop. I was very upset, but figured a good night's sleep and a visit the next day to Dev's roommate, Cory (who is a better computer dude than I), would hopefully fix things. I wasn't optimistic, not because I didn't trust Cory's ability, but because I had never seen a computer freak out so wildly before. Either way, at 1 am there was nothing more I could really do. I slept.

The next morning I opened my computer in Safe Mode and perused. In every single folder on my desktop, nearly every folder in My Documents, basically EVERYWHERE, there were three new files called:

DECRYPT_INSTRUCTIONS

At first I was afraid to open these, that they might contain the virus. I started deleting all of them. A tedious process since they were everywhere. Of course, me being me, I accidentally opened one. It was a good thing I did, though, because it finally allowed to figure out what virus I had. 

Cryptoware. This was so much worse than I realized. The documents they had left behind were a brief explanation of what happened to my files and how to retrieve them. 

Ransom. The douchebags that made this virus were holding my files ransom. And they wanted five hundred dollars. FIVE HUNDRED!!!!!

More specifically, what the virus does is go in, copy my files and encrypt them so I can't access them without a code. It then deletes my original files and all Shadow Copies and whatever else it can clean out. To get the code, they say, you have to pay them through the anonymous Bit Coin thing. 

I still took my computer to Cory, but I was quite dismayed after reading up on this virus. Apparently this shit is TIGHT. The people who designed these viruses (purportedly mafia techies in Eastern Europe) have made bank off of this scam and they are pretty good at both making your files completely inaccessible and covering their tracks. F-My-Life. 

Cory wasn't able to recover any of the files, which was the outcome I was expecting after my research. Whole businesses and police departments had been wiped out by these kind of viruses. And, it seems, unless you have back ups, your files might as well have been wiped off the face of the earth. The only way you are getting them back is to pay. And then you will get them back when they give you the encryption code.

Maybe. These are criminals, remember? So, maybe you pay and you get your files back. But... maybe you pay and never hear from them. Maybe you pay your five hundred, thousand, fifteen hundred dollars and STILL don't get your files back. 

I am not feeding into this little plot, so paying was not an option. Besides, the files on there weren't anything critical. Well, except for all of my writing from grad school. And all of my personal writing, including some stories I was pretty excited to be working on. And a lot of my pictures. And all of the addresses I need to mail out our wedding thank you cards. Do you know how long it took to get all those addresses??

I almost lost it. Tracking down everything I lost would be near impossible in most cases, totally impossible in some. I had everything backed up in Drop Box, BUT since there was access to Drop Box on my desk top, the virus had encrypted those files, too. A few hours on Sunday were spent with me alternately moping and throwing mini-fits of rage. I could hear my dad in my ear asking why I didn't have my Anti-Virus up to date and why I didn't have back up files. 

Don't worry, though, there is a twist. 

You can search for Previous Versions of files. If ever they have been altered, a previous version exists. That doesn't work for this virus because it deleted the original and now all that exists is a NEW encrypted copy of your original file. Cory suggested I pay a computer repair shop to see what they could do about recovering my files. I still wasn't optimistic. 

Somehow, through some miracle, all of my Drop Box files had a Previous Version available. And, because Tom is an amazing husband, he had suggested a few months ago that I transfer all of my writing onto Drop Box so it would be protected if something happened to my laptop. 

Success! My files, my writing, my WEDDING ADDRESSES, all were retrievable! I didn't have to go searching through years of sent e-mails trying to track down all of the information I thought I had lost. Some of my pictures might be lost, but between my camera card and the internet I think I will get most of them back. 

Now, I probably have to go on my laptop and un-install Windows and re-install it, as that seems to be the easiest way to make sure the virus is completely gone. I actually read that the virus usually deletes itself after all the files have been encrypted, since it no longer has any need to be there, but I'd rather play it safe. Of course, this all happened when I have an incredibly busy week ahead, so we will see when I get around to doing that. 

Again, I apologize for the lack of pictures. I will share this website link, though: 

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/cryptowall-ransomware-information  

If you want more information on Ransomware, specifically the CryptoWall virus that I had the misfortune of getting acquainted with, check out that website. I love whoever wrote that article because that is how I learned to recover my Drop Box files. 

In closing, I want to thank Cory for taking an hour to try and fix my unfixable computer. I want to thank Bleeping Computer for providing the most concise and detailed information on this virus that helped me recover most of my data. And I want to thank Tom for introducing me to Drop Box, loading it onto my computer and insisting I put all of my work in there, because otherwise this story would have had a much unhappier ending. 

Also, I will take this time to remind you all to BACK UP YOUR FILES! I don't know how I got this virus. I am usually pretty good about not opening e-mails from people I don't know. Apparently this virus also can come through seemingly innocuous websites about celebrity quirks or other such nonsense. If you have virus protection, all the better. But, seriously, at least stuff that is important to you, get a flash drive or something and save a copy to something not on your computer. I still consider it luck to some extent that my Drop Box files were still there. 

I hope none of you ever go through the anguish this virus has caused me. I'm lucky that I didn't lose everything, as many others have from this awful virus.  My to-do list this week, among other things, is now revolving around getting my laptop up and running.

Have any of you ever dealt with any viruses or other computer terror experiences? Share so we can learn from you!