Back in Hobbiton

We got back from a great trip to Washington on Wednesday night. We somehow managed to see just about all of the friends and family that we still have up there and got a good sampling of all the city, country, and wilderness amenities the state has to offer. I'll blog a bit more about our trip next week once I've managed to scan some of the photos from our backpacking trip.

Today is my first day back on campus since we got back. I've managed to claw my way through all of the email that accumulated over the past two weeks, and for once I was happy that a sizeable chunk of the mail I get is for neighborhood yard sales and Oakland Green Party events. It's easy to be ruthless with your inbox when you have 150+ new messages. The rest of the day has truly felt like a first day back from vacation. After polishing off the email backlog, I've lurked on friends' blogs (and regretted that sometimes Mozilla behaves unpredictably when you try to post a comment on a Microsoft-hosted blog) and figured out the subtleties of Google Calendar. Luckily, I'd not planned to do anything truly productive until Monday.

I just wanted to write about one more thing. A day or two before I left, I got the strangest spam. It had the cryptic subject "eyhyjo" and consisted only of the following text fragment:

things he had never seen or done. He was very much alarmed, as well as disgusted; he wished himself a hundred miles away, and yet-and yet somehow he could not go straight back to Thorin and Company

Most people would guess this is an excerpt from The Hobbit. I'm a big Tolkein nerd, but apparently not nerd enough to have recognized that this excerpt was from the scene where Bilbo rescues the dwarves from the trolls. (I thought it was from the scene on Smaug's threshold.) I had to google (sorry, Tad) a part of the quote to find that, but that still doesn't answer the question of why I got sent this or who the mysterious sender, Zuberi Driver, is. I guess I should be happy that cyberspace occasionally vomits up an anonymous reference to one of my favorite books and leave it at that.