No Trouble with Earthquakes

I just realized that I haven't been in a major quake in a long time, like 17 years. huh.

Trouble with time again, or not

So far, this evening is going pretty much as planned...well, not really planned, but as I intended for each task that I thought of doing. So, I had to leave work a bit early to drop off some components for rework. I left that machine shop around 4 and headed home. As I headed home, I figured out that I could possibly have enough time to do all of my laundry at the nearby Laundromat. I get home, gather the laundry and head over. I got all the loads started in the washing machines and headed next door to discover a sandwich restaurant at around 4:45. I finished my sandwich, walked back over to the Laundromat and started moving clothes to the dryers. As the last load was transferred, I looked up to see the time was about 5pm. I thought about the nice shirts and sweaters that I need dry cleaned. I headed back home and gathered my dry cleaning load and drove to the near by cleaners. After dropping off my dry cleaning, I'm thinking about how hella low on gas I am. Ok, I head down the street to the gas station and pump a nearly full tank, 15.25 gallons. Ya'no, I went 365 miles on that 15.25 gallons. That's pretty good. Anyways, after that I head back to the Laundromat. As I walk up to my dryers, the first load finishes. Talk about prefect timing. While I'm folding my clothes, the second load finishes. Just as I'm done folding both of those loads, the third and final load finishes. I get all that done, and everything back to my home at just about 6:55. That's 5 minutes before my grocery delivery time window starts. And here I am blogging about the whole journey.

Daytime Motorcycle Cop with Radar

Well, my record is now 18 and 3. For some reason, I haven't been able to avoid a ticket when I'm pulled over by a motorcycle cop with a radar gun at daytime. All three of my tickets have been issued by this very specific demographic! Cops are normallly pretty cool about thangs when they pull me over. Normally, they give warnings of some type or another. But for some reason, when they fit that particular demographic, they issue a ticket to me. Bummer. Traffic school, here I come.

Haunted Room

When I was growing up, on house my family lived at was frequented by ghosts.  I don’t know who/what the ghosts were, or where they resided specifically.  I just know that every now and again, we’d experience strange things.  Often, our entire family would get strange dreams within a very short period of time.  Once, when I was seven, the ghosts got a bit more impish with me.

The house was part of a duplex; each side had 3 bedrooms on a corner lot.  My room was small and in the middle of the house with large windows along the backyard.  It had one normal door to the hallway that lead to the other two rooms, and one sliding door that opened into the kitchen. I often keep both doors shut at night.  My room was only illuminated by distant street lights thru closed roller blinds.  This one night, I was awoken in the middle of the night, in my bed of course.  I remember being on edge and scared, but still curious.  I felt something in the room with me.  I didn’t know what.  My parents had taught me about demons (from the Christian Fundamentalist perspective), and since I had nothing else to reference, I immediately associated my sensations with my limited understanding of demons.  My mother also taught me that if I had an encounter with such demons, I could simply call upon god’s name and that would scare them off.  For some reason, this night I did not immediately resort to this.  I was too frightened to speak or get out of bed, and I was a little curious actually.  I tried to get a handle on what I was feeling.  I imagined Halloween style ghosts floating near the ceiling. Of course, the reality is, doing this did nothing, and I soon found that out.

Trying to convince myself that it was all just in my mind, I started to relax a bit.  For a short while, I just laid in bed, awake.  I was lying on my side when I noticed something coming from my closed closet on the oppose wall from my bed right, in front of me.  There was a dark half circle shadow that appeared from the crack between the closet door and door rim, as though it was a hand reaching out from inside my closet.  I couldn’t believe it.  I stared as long as I could dare.  I was so frightened, I hide under my blankets.  My heart was pounding. I never saw anything like that.  What I had been taught said that this was a demon.  I got up enough courage to peak out from under my blankets and looked again.  It was gone.  The sense that something else was in the room was not gone.

Without the visible manifestation, I did start to calm a bit.  I began to think that since these demons were in my room, I would simply look out the window over my bed until they decided to leave.  So I sat up in bed and ducked under the blind with the plan of just looking into our backyard.  Well, this calmed my nerves for a second or two, until I saw a large silhouette appear as white shadow right on the window all around me.  I looked at the edge of the silhouette around me on the window, rolling me head and eyes from my right, up and to the left.  I was sitting with my face practically pressed against this manifestation!  In an instant of pure fear and dread, I zoomed back under my blankets and just started instinctively praying to god for all of this to go away.  I was tense for quite some time, but the other presence was gone. I was awake for quite some time that night.

I told no one of that event for years.  Of course, I’ve since realized that the spirit in my room that night wasn’t able to harm me, regardless to its nature.  What are ghosts?  I don't know.  In this case, I guested is that it was an earthbound ghost that was having some fun with me.  Or, maybe this are demons of some sort, whatever that means.  Anyway, other visitations did occur, but after that night, I never experienced any other tangible manifestations at that house.

Ok, so these weeks of busyness ...

Ok, so these weeks of busy-ness for me might start winding down after next week. I don't mind the busy-ness, but if it keeps up too long, I have trouble keeping up on my daily needs.
Chinese New Year's eve was spent with Allie's family with a very well cooked meal by her mom. Today, I'm not sure what I wanna do. It's already 1pm and Allie and I are barely getting out of bed. lol We watched my Snatch DVD just a bit ago. Right now, she's taking a shower. Exciting stuff, but all part of the busy-ness. :)
My new apartment has come together nicely. It just needs a bit of cleaning up now. Everything is in order. I like what I was able to do with the living areas and the bedroom. The only thang left is for the landlord to fix a couple of items with the bathroom. Once that is done, I'll pretty much feel 100% settled in.
I'm hungry.

Future talking points

I grew up in a protestant fundamentalist home. The thing about protestant fundamentalism is that followers are told they have the answer for everything right directly from the bible. From my observations, each individual protestant fundamentalist group tends to take a core set of scriptures and ideas and build their beliefs around those; then they go through the bible picking and choosing other scriptures to support their conclusions. Normally they are able to form some grand harmonious scheme that convinces the group’s followers that they are the only ones on the right track in figuring out the bible, the universe and everything.

There are plenty of protestant fundamentalist groups in existence. Each one has convinced itself they are the only true path to fulfilling God’s will. Of course, the question comes up, if God was so interested in saving lives in this manner, why would he give his word to so few at such a later period in time?

Anyways, as I was growing up, I was taught that the bible says all modern supernatural phenomena are the work of the Devil or his demons who are trying their damnedest to pull people away from the word of God. Of course, this belief did nothing but reinforce the notion that Satan was succeeding because so many did not accept our version of God’s Word. I was taught that ghosts were demons pretending to be the deceased, psychic powers came from conjuring demon influence, and other supernatural events were the efforts to turn people away from God or at least distract us from doing his will. So, much of my life, I had both a fear of the supernatural and an unnatural arrogance about having the ability to know what it is and how to eliminate it.

This led me to completely misinterpret what was really going on around me. This led me to not understand my place in this world. I treated events around me too matter of factly (natural, human, and supernatural), almost with arrogance because I so strongly believed myself to be immune to them. Looking back now, I can say I was pretty ignorant, but that my heart was in the right place.

I'm now far more skeptic, but I'm also skeptical of skepticism. 

More and less

It seems like the more busy I get, the less I talk about it. Damn, it's a buzy month though. Well, I moved into my own apt. The neighborhood is a couple steps down from my last, but it's my own place and the bedroom is all hella huge. I already got my car bumped into while it was parked in its spot. That is less annoying that it sounds. I've been hoping for sumfin like that to happen for a long time now so I could at least share the costs of replacing the bumper from previous incidents. This, coupled with a bunch of other items needing attention forced me to take a day off from work last week. I was running all over town taking care of busy that was piling up, including getting the quote estimate for repairing the damage to my car.
In Dec, I had to deal with two drunk asses (that couldn't handle their alcohol in one way or another) on separate nights, ruining two perfectly fun evenings out. Not cool. Well, New Years was laid back and enjoyable, even though everyone was sick.
Last night a group of us got together for a birthday dinner for Ronie and Fernando at House of Genji. Allie and I have had pretty good experiences there recently with fun and talented cooks, so we where a bit underwelmed by last night's cook, but overall we all had a fun time.
What else? Well, there's a bunch of other stuff too, but maybe I'll go into details later.

House not home

I'm in the process of moving out of a house that I've lived in for over 4.5 years. Although I've lived in that place for longer that I've live most anywhere else, I never viewed it as a home, only as a house where I lived. Even though I moved into that place only 4 years ago, it really does seem like a life time. I'm different now. My group of friends is different. All of this had nufin to do with the house, so maybe that's why I never thought about it before. Wierd.

My life isn't one of those stories where I find my true love and live happily ever after from the start. I've written before about living much of my early life in a haze and only coming out of that haze since I past my quarter century mark. I was alert and sentient, but maybe not as alert and sentient and I shoulda been. This caused me to miss a lot of opportunities that were laid about before me. Opportunities to further my life in career, love, friendships, etc all lost. I was dumb...Intelligent, but dumb. The problem with having intelligence is that it can enable you to fool yourself into thinking you know more than you really do. lol
Not only could I have got laid much earlier, I coulda prolly had a couple of girlfriends by my early 20's. But no. I wasn't ready. The longer one wants to explore these areas, the harder it gets to have the breakout experience that opens your world, such as a first love or even just getting laid. If this blog were to go back to my early 20's, the text would be filled with frustrations that I would prolly now find embarrassing. Maybe it's a good thang my blog beings in 2002. lol I was well on my way to becoming who I am at that point.
In my younger years, I fear I was loved long before I know what love really was. If not love, then at least there was girls who where attracted to me that I just didn't...I just was unable to know it. Insecurities were the main cause. I had nothing to be insecure about, but when one is young, one doesn't know that. I'm no exception, though I guess I hid it pretty well, even from myself. Intelligence allowed me to come up with reasonings that nurtured my insecurities rather than defeat them. It took me a long time to figure out that I wasn't ugly. It took me even longer to figure out that I'm actually fairly attractive. It took me even longer to understand that certain people are more attracted to each other than others types of people and that it doesn't matter what one person likes cuz everyone is different with different tastes. There should be a class that teaches children this in grammar school. lol ...nevermind, there is... ...I was screwed up by my parents like everyone else...hehe. Most of my insecurities do come from my mom and dad, or at least how they raised me. I'm not sure where my early life haze come from, though. I still slip into it once in a while, but I've learned to use it as a tool (hard to explain...saving that topic for another time). It holds no grip over me any more.
Nowadays, I feel as though I'm experiencing life on my own terms. I have great friends and great loves (past and present). Most of all, I look forward to the days ahead of me in this life.

Changes in store

It seems with me, a lot of major changes all happen around the same time. First, my parents move far far away. I still am a little amused and annoyed by the fact they up and went to Wyoming. I took off for a great trip to Hong Kong, only to return to find out that my best friend Dave just got a major job and is moving to Seattle this month. Just before my trip, my roommate told me he's going to be remodeling and then selling his house, so that means I gots to move too. Both of us are moving this month, only I'm not moving so far. lol I'll be a lot closer to work, and in fact only about a mile from his current address. He expressed some annoyance at the fact that only now do I move so close to him, now, now that he is moving away completing. I agree. Oh, and I'm looking for a ring like object with a stone attached to fit over my g/f's finger. hehe It's no surprise, so I'm not spoiling anything by mentioning that here. :)