a ghost is bored

well im stting here in my apartment listening to the latest wilco release a ghost is born, waiting for people to come by and check out the apartment. amanda and i are moving later on this week to the apartment across the hall, and so people are checking this place out. my property managment guy called me and told me that he was stuck at work? and wondered if i could show the people around. so i said okay, and now i am just waiting.

I put on the wilco album instead of what i was listening to for the last hour... radio programming about mysterious flying craft, strange noises in the night and cattle mutilation. i figured it would be better for the folks to hear the wonderful sounds of jeff tweety's voice instead of something like this emanating from my computer:

Larry Jurjens, Rancher (40 years), Farnam, Nebraska: "I come down this canyon (valley surrounded by hills) and I seen this dead cow. I got to looking further and I looked at her eyeball and her eyeball was gone. And then I looked at her bag and it was totally slashed off. I started home and started to think about her tongue and I went back and it was also severed clear back in her mouth. There wasn't anything left of it.

WHAT DID THESE EXCISIONS OR CUTS LOOK LIKE TO YOUR EYE?

Well, it was just a clean cut. The tongue ­ I've butchered a lot of cows and I know the tongue is hard to get out ­ especially with their mouth, without cutting their mouth open. I've never seen anything like it in my life.

WAS IT CUT IN A VERTICAL CUT DEEP WITHIN THE THROAT?

It was back as far as I could see. Her mouth was closed. I pried her mouth open to see if it was still there and it was gone. This was getting about dark, so it was getting hard to see.

WAS THERE ANY BLOOD ANYWHERE AROUND ANY OF THESE CUTS?

There was no blood whatsoever no place on this cow. I didn't see any blood that had drained. Usually a dead cow will have blood around her and there was no blood whatsoever. Even on the back end ­ I never said that before ­ it was all open, but the buzzards had ate her. It was two days and the buzzards had ate her a little bit on the back, but no coyotes or nothing had touched her any place else.

the last guest of the evening just came through mid-blogpost. this guy was a total dude. in my estimation, and i was counting, i think he used the word 'bro' 30 or 40 times in our ten minute conversation. I know all about his dj gigs, and what he is planning on doing this weekend in havasu. in return he knows that this apartment has two bedrooms, three airconditioners, three ceiling fans, and fantastic water pressure. i hope my property manager doesn't rent to that douche bag. i've got to make a phone call....

some fun things

so here's a couple of fun things that have happened to me lately.

this last monday evening i was walking down to mimo's on greenleaf from my house at about 8:15pm. As i was walking i heard a couple of low booms, very different from thunder, and much deaper not loud... but low. I figured that they had to be some sort of sonic booms, though they didn't sound really high in the sky. Then as i looked up over the houses to my left, there came a bright green light streaking through the sky at a low angle. I watched as it streaked closer and closer to the ground. I didn't hear any impact, and this thing must have been super tiny at this point anyway, but all of the sudden every dog within my distance of hearing wents nuts. no loud noise... no cars driving by, but every dog started barking. I don't know if i will ever see something like that again in my life, so i figured i would share it. it's not everyday you get to see something fall thousands of miles an hour from space towards the earth.

then this morning at about 4am as i was on my way to work i discovered something new that i didn't know about the giant fir tree in front of my house. an owl lives in it, and based on the sound of his call, he's an oldy. he had a very strong call, deep and seemingly wise. I stopped in my tracks under the great tree and listened as further up the hill another owl called back. from the research that i did today on owl pages i think that the particular owl that i heard was a great horned owl. all the info that i found on it here seems to be consistent with what i heard. if you want to hear it too, click here.
also heres a photo

pastry case

so i have to be at work in 5 hours and fifteen minutes, that's 4:15am pst, and man is that not going to be fun. the happy part is that i will be on my way home at nine am. im still in training at starbucks, and my schedule is pretty eratic, hence the lack of updates. tomorrow morning i will be in charge of the pastry case, and that should be an experience. hopefully it wont be as bad as an experience i had while working at a grocery store during high school.

you know all those color coded tags on bread bags that help to keep them closed? well they indicate the freshness of the bread to the people that stock the shelves. one day while i was working as a clerk, the bakery was super short staffed and need some one to help them out. they were so short that no one had time to explain what color went with what day. so i got bread out of the back and tried to make sense of the whole thing the best that i could. i ended up ruining several thousand dollars of bread in the end though because it didn't turn out so great. oh well, at least i didn't get in trouble. maybe tomorrow (friday) during the regualr waking hours will bring another update from me to you.

CERN is at it again

here's a really cool article about a new particle accelerator that may be built in the next decade. this is going to be a dead-straight tunnel nearly 40km (that's almost 25 miles!) where mad scientists can smash particles together to try and figure out what the other 96% of the universe is like since we can only see and understand 4% of the universe now. man that's going to be crazy.

link (via fark)

ariel ramirez

the other evening i was sitting here at the computer, surfing this junk web, listening to the olympics on my tv. typical splash, cheer, pump your fist type of swimming stuff hitting my ear drums while i dinked around on fark. then slowly... sort of like a mist gathering above the lawn at dusk, the strains of a beautiful and haunting melody trailed into my ear drums. the impact was like a silent train. i was blown away by the haunting strains of this unfamiliar song.

so i freaked out, jumped up and ran to the tv. i was just intime to see that it was a volkswagen commercial. so i went to their site where they show your their commercials, but it wasn't there. so for the enxt frantic and fun 15 minutes or so, i "ran" around the web trying to figure out who it was singing that song.

i finally found out that it's a guy named richard buckner and the song is called 'ariel ramirez". This song is kicking my ass right now in a simple country sort of way. i really like it a lot. if you are one of my buddies, let me know if you want a copy of the cd. it's off of his album "Since" from 1998.

against my better judgement i am going to post the lyrics, as closely as i have been able to transcribe them through headphones. i must warn you that they do not do the song sonic justice however. remember that i called it haunting and beautiful above...

oh where you lay
your head tonight
i’ll roll away alone
and close on down

take up your reign
and fly back out
and we’ll pretend
forget we’re dead

yeah we’ll lay it down
when we’re all through
when we’re kiiled or cured
and barely heard

put ariel on
and smoke away the night
and do the white-net crawl
until the hammers fall

i kept your poem here
with all my other gear
but in the end
i missed what it meant

oh where you lay
your head tonight
i’ll roll away alone
and close on down

this strange and mournful day

this last thursday was the second anniversary of my mom's death.

i miss her a lot.

i always will.

it's funny to me that she passed away during the persied meteor shower because that was always something that both of us greatly enjoyed watching. now every time i see a shooting star i will think of her.

the other night i was listening to coast to coast and this guy called in to talk about some weird things that had happened to him right before his mother had died. the coolest thing though about this wasn't what the guy had to say... but the bumper music that the host george noory played into their next commercial break. in light of what the guy had been talking about, and what i have been thinking about a little bit over the last week, here are the lyrics...

Mother And Child Reunion

No I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away, oh, little darling of mine

I can’t for the life of me
Remember a sadder day
I know they say let it be
But it just don’t work out that way
And the course of a lifetime runs
Over and over again

No I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away, oh, little darling of mine

I just can’t believe it’s so
Though it seems strange to say
I never been laid so low
In such a mysterious way
And the course of a lifetime runs
Over and over again

But I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away

Oh the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away
Oh the mother and child reunion
Is only a moment away

it wasn't ..."neversign the bullocks"

here 's the darkness
and boy do they have balls

went to school and i was very nervous...

no one knew me
no one knew me

fun things i have been listening to lately (music and otherwise):

anything from the donnie darko soundtrack
anything that has "60's" "french" and "pop" as descriptives
serge gainsbourg, see above
tears for fears
the Spinners "rubberband man"
ann margret
françoise hardy
henri salvador, especially his "jazze" album
joy division
big country
the raveonettes
& dean martin

plus a crap load too much of coast to coast at the great expense of my sleep habits and mental health.

i start work at the local starbucks today (tuesday) and even though i have to sleep between now and then i am already wearing my sweet new black pant tightness'. they are the new new hottable.

yes hottable is now a word. i made it one.
holla

would you like a latte with this ?

so i got hired at starbucks. i start working at the store here in uptown on tuesday of next week. should be a job. glad to be employed, glad to be getting benefits and a free pound of coffee a week. glad i am also not working full time... must nurture brain and the girl. so it will be good to be a bread winner again. i like bread

in other news, amanda got accepted to the credential/masters program at the university, and should know sometime today(wednesday) hopefully if she will be getting hired to teach 7th/8th grade english here in whittier in the fall. that would be awesome. please keep praying for that.

we went up to pasadena this afternoon to visit the paper store where andrew's wife amanda works. it was great to see her and she helped us pick some good paper for our wedding invitations. now i know how valuable it was for me to have three years of graphic design classes. im going to design and print them myself, and the total cost including postage will be about five or six hundred dollars less than having them put together by someone else. and they will be exactly how i want them. look for them in your sunday paper... j/k

anyway it's time for me to finish my tea, and head of to bed. i'll be busy tomorrow... reading or eating or something.
here's a lovely picture of me to remember me by until we meet again...

photo caption: crabbing on the oregon coast, thanksgiving '03, nursing a hangover and communist tendancies

update on the prayer request

so here's the latest and greatest as of just about 2am monday morning.

amanda had an interview with the whittier city school district on thursday for a position teaching 7th/8th grade english. she had turned in her application earlier in the week, and they called her and asked her to come in on the same day for an interview. the interview went really well, but there's a couple of things that need to happen for her to be hired for the position. since she doesn't have a teaching credential, she is considered to be an intern teacher. to qualify in this position she needs to be enrolled in a credential program. so she said that she would get into one asap and get back to them. so thursday we went to the lesser satan and she applied for the cred/master program in education. the ed department was wonderful as always, mostly because of our favorite insider, and her application was processed that same day. all we need now is for her to be officially accepted by the gradute program at the school and its all perfect and she should be able to get the job. she has an appointment in the morning with a counselor to try and get everything finalized and documented so that she can show the district.

prayer would be awesome for her and for us in this situation. her having a well paying job while i am finishing up my last semster at school would be fantastic. times have been really tough lately with me un-employed and her working for crap at the coffee shop. i also have an interview this afternoon with starbucks here in uptown and hopefully i can get the job. free coffee every week, benefits and walking distance from work are as good as it gets. so those of you that feel lead, we could really really really use your support in prayer at this time. having people out there that care as those of you who read this do is a major thing for the both of us. thanks for being there