Ch-ch-ch-changes!

Update:

Nudge was adopted by my co-worker who has been lobbying her husband for a few months for a kitten. He was so dirty when I saw him, I didn't see any real patterns in his fur. He has diamond shapes on his back. Looking at this, they thought about naming him diamondback, but opted to think of something related to that. Going in the initials in diamondback (D.B.) they decided on the name "Cooper". He has a good home, and I'm happy with that. That was all I wanted for the little Nudge.

On to the new...

Today was Sprout's first day of school. She was all raring to go, sat at her desk in Kindergarten, and started coloring the picture that was left there for her to color. She had he lunch in her backpack (clear plastic, per school board requirements for security), and was totally engrossed as Redd and I made our exit.

Redd on the other hand... Well, I'll say there were fewer tears than I was expecting.

Other than that, Redd and I are looking to buy a house. This would be our first (to own). Our search was brought on by our landlady deciding to sell the one we are renting right now. In our search for a new place, Redd called a number from an ad that caught her eye. The number was a California are code.

Turns out the house for sale in the ad, belonged to the grandmother of the guy in California who was selling it. Further, it turns out that the guy selling it is a mortgage broker that Redd went to school with and was really good friends with, back in the day.

Long story short, we went from wondering what we were going to do to having a chance to cut a really good deal on our first home purchase. And as a special bonus, the home is a literal stone's throw from Sprout's school.

If every there was a proof that it is a small world (and not because of the Internet. This whole transaction has been over the phone prompted by a newspaper ad), I got it. Also if there was ever need to wonder if God works in mysterious ways, I got that too.

Soft in the heart, hard in the head...

I work with waste oil. I unload it from trucks into large storage tanks, and load the blended results of that back onto trucks for our customers. It's dirty work. It's tiring work. But I like it.

I work the second shift, which is to say 4-midnight. I am alone on this shift from about 7 o'clock on. A few weeks ago, I was eating my lunch, and I saw a cat running through our garage. I can only guess that it was a stray looking for food. Several nights ago, I heard some piteous sounding meowing, and saw the source. A small kitten, several weeks old.

My guess is he was abandoned by the cat I saw a couple of weeks ago, or that she (assume the one I saw a few weeks ago was the mother) had gone to get some food and been waylaid by some other animal, or tried to cross the street, or some other ill fate.

This little gray kitten would not shut up, and basically made a nudge of himself. So I took to calling him Nudge. His meowing was quite loud, and more than a little distracting.

So there I am, Friday night, doing my job and hearing a kitten super-meowing over the sound of the radio and offering a slight distraction, and I did one of the stupidest things possible. I pulled a truck out of the building I work in, while it was still attached to the pump. The resulting oily mess took several hours to clean up, I destroyed three hoses, and did damage to a pump stand. The hose that was attached to the truck had dragged the pump stand several feet before breaking (and while driving the truck, I had no idea that this was going on. The 500 pound pump stand and the hose that is designed to put up with a lot of pressure offered no resistance to the roaring Peterbilt tractor hauling a trailer full of 7000 gallons of reprocessed waste oil), and spraying oil all over an interior wall of my building. The now broken hose offered a trail of oil that needed to be cleaned up as well.

I worked late that night as a result of my stupidity, which wouldn't have been a problem, except that I had a baptism to attend in another state, early the next day. I went to my niece's baptism with about 3 hours of sleep under my belt. Luckily, Redd drove, so I could catnap in the car.

Anyway, I had some extra work (that had nothing to do with my boneheadedness) to do on Sunday, so I went in in the afternoon to do it, and finally met Nudge face to face. The little guy was starving and had taken refuge in a broken down crane we have in our back lot. So I asked Redd to bring some cat food up, thinking I would feed Nudge, gain his trust, and come back the next day (today) to catch him, and take him to the shelter, since I could not take him in.

Well, I went up to collect Nudge, only to discover he had made his presence known to my daytime coworkers, one of which has taken him home. Aside from that, the hoses can be easily replaced, and the damage to the pump stand I dragged can be easily patched-up, so all's well, etc.

Except I got attached to the fuzzy little this-and-that.

I'm being watched (but not listened to)...

Conspiracies.

I never cease to be amazed how much that one word seems to grab people's attention.

Likewise, I never cease to be amazed how many people think that there are so many conspiracies at work that they are all controlled by one group.

THEM. Or THEY, depending upon tense and proper grammar.

Discussions of conspiracies are in hushed tones, because THEY are listening. Posting of knowledge of the conspiracies is risky, because THEY can read everything on your computer, even when it is turned off, and unplugged. Having online conversations via e-mail is impossible, because anything you send in an e-mail, even if it is encrypted, can be read by THEM.

Heck, for all I know THEY are reading this as I am typing it.

THEY caused WTC 7 to collapse in a controlled detonation, because THEY had a secret CIA office/repository hidden in the depths of the building. THEY funded the hijackers on 9/11, to offer a cover for destroying the twin towers, which fell, not because of superheated jet fuel, but because of demolition charges placed by THEIR agents (After all, traces of thermite were discovered in the wreckage, and there is no possible way that thermite could have been produced by the super heating of aluminum and iron building materials. To suggest that is to show naivete as to how THEY work).

THEY killed JFK, and have all kinds of blackmail material on anyone who could be useful, including THEIR own agents, like J. Edgar Hoover. THEY keep items, Like JFK's brain, in carefully concealed locations, like the Skull and Bones vault, and THEY will eliminate anyone who is too knowledgeable of how THEY work, like JFK Jr. (his magazine was close to revealing carefully hidden truths, so his plane was shot down), and THEY silence through intimidation any witnesses to such events (rather than eliminating them).

THEY operate in secret, and use Diebold produced touchscreen voting machines to manipulate elections, and have orchestrated the selection of presidents, Prime Ministers, and leaders the world over. THEY use THEIR willing dogs in the CIA to do THEIR bidding, who in turn use the lapdog Zionist Israel intelligence community, Mossad to do the dirty work the CIA can't be associated with (never mind that if the CIA were really as powerful as the conspiracy theorists believe, they would need to use the Mossad for anything).

If THEY want Hillary Clinton to win in '08, she will. If THEY want Rudy Giuliani to win, he will. THEY can manipulate elections, wars, legislation, and even the stock market. To insure the stability of the American dollar, which is weak because of chaotic forces in the Chinese government, THEY manipulate the stock market to go higher, higher, and higher (yet when the market is down, THEY seem to have no responsibility, and in fact are caught off guard, even though THEY have THEIR hands into everything).

THEY can do whatever THEY want, because of a lack of morals, ethics, or accountability. If you make too much noise about the "truth", and come too close to revealing that THEY are funded, supported, and ultimately answerable to the aliens who have been experimenting on humans for centuries, you will disappear.

How do I know all this? Because it all has been explained by people on the radio. "Sightings" with Jeff Rense has frequent guests and callers who explain how THEY work. These people have evidence through public records, secret documents, and their own minds (they have PhD's after all), and they know that it is important to share the information they have on THEM with the world. Many callers do not give their names, because they don't want to be tracked and eliminated by THEM.

How do these brave men and women avoid elimination by THEM? How can they share the information they have gathered without angering THOSE WHO CONTROL EVERYTHING?

I guess radio offers protection that one's own home doesn't offer. Being on the radio, or on the phone, offers protection from THEM, since telephone calls cannot be traced, and radio programs are the only media that is not monitored by THEM.

THEY control everything. If THEY don't want you to know, if THEY want to keep you ignorant, THEY can. If THEY want to manipulate the price of oil, the level of the stock market, or even election of the next president, THEY can do so with impunity.

THEY are unstoppable.

I know, because I have been told so by people who are safe as safe can be on the radio.

Seven years.

That's how long Redd and I have been married. We officially tied the knot on September 2, 2000.

The church was a beautiful building, resembling a cathedral that had been shrunk to fit the corner lot it sits upon. It was one of the more straightforward Catholic weddings one could find. We used bubbles rather than birdseed, or some other substitute for traditional rice. The whole thing went off without a single hitch.

In a pig's eye.

My brother, Teach, served as my best man. He didn't arrive from his home in North Carolina until less than an hour before the wedding in Pennsylvania. One of my friends from high school was in attendance, and I was asked him to serve as best man, in case Teach didn't show.

Redd arrived shortly after I did (to this day, she says I arrived seconds before her, but I had been there about five minutes or so...). Once she had been tucked away at the back of the church, so I wouldn't see her in her dress before the wedding, I went back to wondering about Teach's location. Then he showed up.

"Great", I thought, "Now things should get back to normal." Of course, we were in northeastern Pennsylvania, and my idea of normal was a little different than the area's norm.

In fact, just the wedding party was enough to show this. Redd's family and friends served as her maid of honor and bridesmaids. My brother was my best man, m y niece and nephew were flower girl and ring bearer, and my friends were my groomsmen. Therein lay the strangeness.

I love my friends. They are the best a guy could hope for. But I grew up in an area that wasn't as... uniform... as the Pennsylvania coal belt (just outside Washington DC). I got more than a few comments from the people in the area who knew me about the odd makeup of my groomsmen (or people, as will become clear in a moment).

You see, I asked my best friends to stand by me as I took the most important vows of my life:

Steve, my Jewish-Canadian friend, who wore a yarmulke to show his respect to being in a religious place. In itself, not a bad thing. That the yarmulke in question had the logo of the Montreal Canadians hockey team on it was another thing. The symbolism would have been lost on most people around here;

Ryan, a rather stoic individual, who is a good friend nevertheless, and is black. My friends arrived the day before, and came to visit me at home. To get there, they had to pass a store that had, among other things in the window, a Confederate battle flag. Steve and Ryan told me later that they vowed at that moment to operate on the buddy system;

Shayne, a friend I had made working in Pennsylvania. He looked like he could have been in a band playing drums on stage somewhere. As a side-note, he had recently had every tooth in his head removed. He said something about some karate incident leading to the tooth loss. I had asked him when my friend Lawrence couldn't make it (he had been sent to China by the DoD to I think he said, learn Chinese. Since he himself was Chinese, and he and his parents spoke Chinese in the house, I wondered at the logic, but for fear of stepping into "I'd tell you but I would have to kill you" territory, I let it go). At the time, Lawrence was a pretty big guy, so rather than have a large Chinaman as a groomsman, I had a long-haired toothless tech-support guy;

And finally, Rebecca, a close friend from my short time in collage. Yes, one of my groomsmen was a woman. She was fitted for, and rented a tux for the event. She wore it very well, but it turned out to be an interesting obstacle later on.

I wouldn't have changed a thing, except having Redd's mother there. She had died earlier in the year, and was remarkably missed by more than half the people at the wedding.

The wedding itself was a beautiful event. family member read the readings from scripture, and the priest (5'1" if he was a foot) offered a wonderful sermon. At the end of the ceremony he did do one thing for which I have yet to hear the end of from my friends.

He introduced Redd and I using Redd's maiden name.

*sigh* Well, things can't get too more odd, I hoped. What a foolish mortal I was.

Redd had spoken to Matt, a friend of mine, online frequently. Until he became familiar with Redd, he referred to her as "what's-her-butt", and she as "Mattermew". Matt was there, and brought his boyfriend. Redd was looking at the gathered friends and family trying to figure out who these two guys she never saw before were, and oh, my God, will we be able to feed them at the reception?

Fast-forward to the receiving line. Matt comes closer, and Redd whispers urgently to me "Who is that?" I tried to respond, but was unable to. Matt arrives, grasps Redd's hand, and says "Hello, What's-her-butt." Redd shrieks (a rarity), throws her arms around him and gives him a hug.

She later told me it was less glad-to-meet-him, and more relief at knowing that the guests at the reception will be covered appropriately. Now, everything should be fine.

Not to be.

The reception itself was great. The short priest cut a rug to "Zoot Suit Riot". Redd and I smashed cake into each other's faces (Redd was blowing icing out of her nose for days), and then came the bouquet and garter tosses.

Redd tossed her bouquet, and it was caught by the only woman to wear a tux to the wedding. Rebecca caught it, and visions of silliness reigned in my head.

I tossed the garter removed from my new wife's leg, and a short struggle ensued, as Rebecca's boyfriend made sure he, and no one else, would slip the garter on Rebecca's leg (the video is pretty amusing. It was a very brief struggle, and Rebecca's boyfriend pointed at the other men, as if to say, "in your faces!").

When the time came for the garter to be put on Rebecca, the logistical problem of how to do so to someone in a tux presented itself. Over the pants leg? Under? How?

He opted for under, and the struggle began. Again, an amusing bit of video, and almost as silly as the visions I had in my head moments before.

Anyway, all this rambling is leading to my point.

A little under seven years ago, I vowed to love my wife as long as we both should live.

Not only would I do it again, but I would do it with greater conviction today than I did then.

And that's knowing the Sprout and Squirt would be arriving in the next couple of years.

Life in the turn lane...

It seems that many people do not grasp the concept of a double turning lane, which is to say more than one lane at an intersection dedicated to turning left.

Many people move from the right-most turn lane at the start of their turn into what would be the left-most one at the end of the turn. This normally wouldn't be a problem, unless you are the unlucky schmuck who started his turn in the left-most lane.

And then saw the pick-up truck that pull a lane change into the right-most driving lane at the end of the turn, where he would have ended up had he stayed in the same turning lane in which he started.

Add to that the number of people (better than about 85% or so in Northeastern PA) who think that cruising across empty parking spaces in a large lot trumps drivers who are actually driving in the correct driving aisles. If I had a nickle for every time I got a dirty look, yelled at, flipped off, and generally disrespected for following the proper driving rules by some idiot who thinks that they have right-of-way because they are who they are, I wouldn't have to consider putting per-click advertising on this blog (not that anyone reads it. But I digress).

The more drivers I encounter, the more I love the fact that my 5-year-old doesn't know how to ride a bike. The longer I can spare her from having to deal with said idiots, the saner she will end up.

I hope.