The rolling green fields of Murrieta were first discovered in april of 2002. By march of the following year it was completely built out. Construction of tracts had to stop because they had only installed six foot concrete water mains and the system couldn't handle the additional hundred thousand homes in for planning approval. Oh and apparently a construction worker had stepped on a mouse that kind of looked like a mini-Kangaroo and a group of environmentalists felt compelled to burn him alive on a large wooden stake. So yeah, obviously the place has a lot of history.
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Ok, you guys are going to have to stop this or I'm going to have to file for a change of address. Posts: 128 | Registered: Jan 2009
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Hey! tnwilz, I know what your back yard looks like, remember?
Denem, my cousin's name is Tenille Bonoguore, perhaps you have read some of her stuff. Who knows. She just married a fellow named Anthony Reinhart, he works there too.
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Oh I wasn't bragging. Notice the endless horizon of rooftops capping tract after tract after tract. It's the price you pay to live in Southern California. Just too entrenched to get out now. With the first grandkid on the way, there's no turning back anymore. I've lived here since I was 20 having grown up in the UK... but you know what's strange, it's never felt like home. I came looking for my father who had abandoned us when I was 8 and somehow never found my way home (even though I had promised my mother who had begged me not to come). It's funny how life turns out isn't it? My sister told me a few weeks back, mums 73 and still waiting for her boy to come home.
Posts: 556 | Registered: Oct 2006
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Of what use are rolling green fields, if somebody doesn't do something with them?
When I moved where I am now, there were about thirty thousand people...now there are about two hundred thousand around. (Figures off the top of my head subject to verification.) The roads may all be two- and three-lane now, but they're just as jammed as they ever were.
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I know what you mean, tnwilz. I'm from a small island on the east coast (Newfoundland) where there were less than a thousand people living in my hometown and the Atlantic Ocean was my backyard. Now, my backyard is towering masses of concrete, glass and steel. I'd love to go back, but my wife is a city girl so I'm kind of stuck between a 'rock and a skyscraper' so to speak.
Ah, to smell the salty sea air, to carouse through the woods...
Oh great, now I'm homesick.
[This message has been edited by Denem (edited September 09, 2009).]
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I wonder how common that is, the feeling that where you are isn't home, like there is a place you could go where you would feel like you are coming home? For me that would be Colchester, England. Or even my my grandmothers old house in Banbury... we lived there for a year when I was quite young but very impressionable. Is it different for women? Somehow I feel that perhaps all men are little boys who love their mummy, but women nest. If a woman gives birth in a home she prepared, wouldn't that feel like home more than any other place to her? If she went to her mother's house, wouldn't she just feel that she's in her mothers home, another woman's home? I'm not trying to reduce women to animals here, I just wonder if it's different for them. I should probably shut up now.
Posts: 556 | Registered: Oct 2006
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By the way, I did run over and buy the boxed Beatles-remastered set this morning. So far all I've had time to do is watch the DVD of minidocumentaries that came with it---fun stuff there, though, with a lot of brand-new-to-me studio chatter of the kind I found most amusing while watching / listening to the "Anthology" stuff.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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The place I gave birth (San Diego) didn't really feel like home; what I miss is the beauty, the weather, friends, certain spots around town--but I was so glad to get out of that noisy, cramped apartment. I'm not much of a nester. My idea of decorating is to store my paintings on the walls, and rearrange the still-unpacked boxes from time to time. Home is where my family is (and my computer and a comfy chair).
I'm homesick for a place I can't get back to. I grew up in Pennsylvania and sometimes wish I'd never left. But my parents are dead and I can't go home. I was so eager to get away when I was younger... sigh. At least we had a few really good visits together before they went downhill. I don't think I've been back to see my siblings since the second funeral, and I miss them. Yeah, I could go, but it seems harder now...
The other place to go home to is my mother-in-law's home in PA, where we spend every Christmas. This year will be our last chance at a good snowfall there. She's planning to sell her sprawling house next summer and get a litte place close to us. Good to have her closer, but its hard to see the place go--my husband's grandfather was the architect.
[This message has been edited by MrsBrown (edited September 09, 2009).]
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It should not take ten times as long to edit a story than it did to write it. I've always enjoyed the editing phase, but at the moment I can't understand why.
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Lest you think I forgot, it's now Day Six from when my paycheck was supposed to be handed to me---and I still haven't been paid.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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Must be the sign of the times, Robert. My company informed us all that the payroll didn't get sent out on time. They are hoping that everyones money will be deposited tomorrow but warn that it might not be until monday is when they'll be in our bank. Tough news considering we get paid every other week (got big bills that are due). We'll be okay only because the tour I have been on all summer pays well, but get this news during lean times.... not good.
Posts: 3072 | Registered: Dec 2007
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Well, here's the story. When I went in last night, there was talk that they would issue new checks next week, with the next-due check, and we'd get them then. This didn't sit well with anyone, really, but we were at a loss. Some guys went ahead and had them cut money orders, but I didn't.
Long about 1:00 AM, the supervisor---not the usual idiot but someone who knows what she's doing---came by with the check. Over the course of the night I pieced together the story of what happened.
I work in automation---I sort letters using a large machine---but there's a manual sort area. Some trays of manual mail came in from Tampa to be sorted, and a clerk going through that found it there and turned it in.
The mystery is this: we know where the checks were found, of course...but what we don't know is whether they came in mail that came in today, or whether they've been sitting over there, out-of-sight-out-of-mind, for the entire time.
(If I'd'a known they had mail like that over there---it's been years since I worked that area and I don't know precisely what they do now---I would'a gone over and riffled through the trays myself.)
I can, right now, put this fiasco right at the feet of certain people---the aforementioned "usual idiot," for one---who had charge of this matter and failed to look---in other words, failed to do their job.
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Just played through Beatles: Rock Band, and boy are my arms tired. I have a few random musings on that.
1. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds has the most psychedelic effects I've ever seen, I almost went into a seizure.
2. There were only 43 songs on it (which I guess is pretty good for that kind of game) and there were a few I missed: Elenor Rigby, Love, HELP, and that one I can never remember the name of but talks about reading horrible news, oh boy (maybe that one was Wings though.)
3. I want to know who is responsible for never playing "As my Guitar Gently Weeps" on the radio. Why did I have to live this long before I heard it? Whoever it is has some serious 'splainin to do.
4. The story mode is organized by year, not by difficulty, most of the songs on the rooftop are quite easy, and some of them in the Cavern are quite hard.
5. The game has some really gear extra features, like a Christmas album from '63 with just terrible singing. (There is also a lead in to one of the abbey road songs where George is ordering lunch.)
6. I want to watch someone play, so I can see the music videos without failing out.
7. Sometimes being afraid of chickens isn't a good enough excuse for not wearing a chicken suit.
8. John is the Walrus, trust me.
9. The opening sequence has an interesting ending (Spoiler!) a whole gaggle of things are marching towards a cliff led by the group themselves having tea atop a rhinoceros with a grassy head. The rhino moves one foot off the cliff and it cuts to the Beatles and the sound of the footstep happens and rumbles the whole everything and they all stop. The rhino would have had to take that last step off the cliff. But it didn't fall. Pretty heavy meaning there I think.
10. The songs seem to be ridiculously easy, yet they don't sound easy. My theory is, coupled with my familiarity of the band, the Beatles just wrote smoother songs than most people.
11. You can pinpoint right where they met Hendrix, right when they started to really use the power of the electric guitar. (Instead of just enhancing what they'd do with an acoustic.)
quote:3. I want to know who is responsible for never playing "As my Guitar Gently Weeps" on the radio. Why did I have to live this long before I heard it? Whoever it is has some serious 'splainin to do.
Really? They used to. I listen to sattelite radio now so I wouldn't know. Quite a magical song, isn't it? George Harrison wrote it. Did you know that it is Eric Clapton on the guitar on the album?
It might be the best song the Beatles ever did (tough choice though)
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In Los Angeles "My Guitar Gently Weeps" gets plenty of airtime. KLOS 95.5 plays it and I think Jack (KCBS?) does too.
If you're in LA and like the Beatles you've got to know about Breakfast with the Beatles hosted by Chris Carter on Sunday mornings on KLOS. I think it's like three hours at a time of nonstop Beatles. I don't know if there's a webcast.
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I have a certain regret for not having the equipment to try this out---of course, I've strummed along with a lot of Beatles songs on a real guitar, and added my voice as seems fit.
On the other hand:
2. "I read the news today, oh boy" would probably be "A Day in the Life."
3. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."
5. Congratulations on being the first person to use "gear" in a sentence since 1964.
8. "The Walrus was Paul," "Glass Onion," John Lennon, The White Album, 1968.
9. They had that sequence in one of the ads for it.
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Yesterday, after leaving here, I played the third disc in the Beatles box set---"A Hard Day's Night"---and when I got to the second track, "I Should Have Known Better," I was struck with a revelation.
(Get your hipwaders out, 'cause this'll be kneedeep in nostalgia.)
Back when I first started listening to the Beatles in a serious way, one of my first sources was the album "Hey, Jude." This might be obscure these days, but it was kinda a "Beatles Greatest Hits Package," with a rather eclectic mix of early and late hits. (I learned much later that a new contract with Capitol Records gave them the right to release a package of songs in this matter.)
But it wasn't one of those twelve-inch black disks we called "albums"---it was what we called "eight-track tapes."
These were, I guess, spinoffs of eight-track recording tape. What you got were four sets of matching two-track stereo tracks. You couldn't rewind, you could only play them forward. They lasted through the 1970s until, eventually, being supplanted by tape cassettes.
But the thing is, the stereo separation was superb! One of the great joys of listening to the Beatles so obsessively in those days, was taking the balance knob and turning it so just one speaker and one track played. On "Hey Jude," there were some delightful separations on several tracks, like having two separate versions of the same song.
(This extended past the Beatles---there's a stereo version of "A Little Bit of Soap" by a group called the Jarmels, that I'd pay a lot to have on CD, but that the record company can't find to release it that way, or so they said the last time they released anything by the Jarmels.)
None of the latter-day reissues of Beatles stuff, albums, cassettes, CDS, could match this---until now. I listened, then grabbed my remote and took "I Should Have Known Better" through one stereo side, then the other.
It was cool, hearing first Lennon's vocal and (mostly) acoustic-guitar-and-drums, then Lennon's vocal and (mostly) the electric guitar parts. It put me back in my childhood, playing with my parents' eight-track player.
But, 'cause of this, I now pronounce the Beatles box set good, and well worth the effort of seeking out and buying (that is, if you've got that kind of money.)
And I look forward to hearing other tracks in this manner.
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I have that one...and if it's stereo, it's not the same mix as the eight-track. Possibly the song was recorded in two-track, vocals on one track and instruments on the other, and that was the version that somehow got released.
Posts: 8809 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I think my favorite Beatles story is the one about the time they played a game of "Who can get the most atrocious lie about themselves into the papers?" They'd tell some hapless reporter, well, an atrocious lie, and get a laugh out of it when they saw it in print. (Reportedly, George Harrison was declared the winner when he got someone to print that he was Cliff Richards' cousin.)
But the thing is, some of the atrocious lies eventually wound up in the serious histories and biographies. Ultimately, it means you've got to take practically everything they've said, and everything you read about them, with a grain of salt.
Two examples:
"The Day John Met Paul" is enshrined as an important moment in both their biographies. Ostensibly, they met when John's band played at a fete in Liverpool and a mutual friend introduced them. But several people in their social circles at the time are adamant the two of them knew each other before that point. So what really happened?
At the other end of their career, there's the story about how the Beatles were having a business meeting, Paul was coming up with ideas for what the Beatles should do next, and John said something along the lines of "I think you're daft...in fact, I wasn't going to tell you, but I'm quitting the group." Most sources put this meeting at sometime in September of 1969, quoting the participants in various ways...but a recent group biography puts this meeting in late 1968, after which the group, with John, carried on. Who's right? Everybody else?...or did the biographer have more solid information about the date?
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Okay, no offence but I'm over this whole Beatles thing. I was much more a fan of The Monkeys. I used to watch that TV Show with my friends and kiss the television screen. That Davie Jones was real good looking when I was, um.. five or so.
The Jonas Brothers have a TV show call Jonas, which is just a cooler version the Monkeys. I would kiss the screen, except that my five year old is watching.
I don't know what this whole Walrus thing is about, and I don't think it's that random.
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In highschool I wrote a novel with my friend. (we are still writing together.) It was an opus to randomness. Well my buddy has a new girlfriend and he's been reading it out loud to her. It's odd hearing it, it's also funny that almost always we use their, they're, and there wrong. (And not consistently wrong either.)
I thought one of them got the papers to print that they mixed their father's ashes with cocaine and snorted it. Or perhaps that was one of the Stones or Aerosmith.
Didn't I mention it a couple of posts back? Oh, yeah, I did.
Don't know if the check cleared, though...tomorrow, when I've got some spare time, I'll see if I can find out.
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Oh, I'm a big fan of the Pre-Fab Four, too---would I have so many of their albums and the DVDs of their series if I weren't?
Sometimes, when I'm a big fan of whatever---written word or recording or TV show---I'll try to lay my hands on everything I can.
(Weird side effect with that---back in the 1970s, when I "took an interest" in things, if the person was alive, they died within a week. This happened with two science fiction writers and Elvis Presley.)
((Don't mention this to the Elvis fans...they have no sense of humor about it.))
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Steam? Steam? All it takes is more random musings and more chipmunks or guacamole covered guinea pigs or whatever to get this revived. Here is my varmint story for the day.
My office is in my basement. A squirrel spends a slice of his day down in the window well rooting around for who knows what. He (she?) lives underneath my deck and is pretty good sized for a squirrel. Did you know squirrels can run right up the plastered concrete of the window well? Straight up and out.
I have no desire to domesticate the thing. I have no idea how disease infested the little critter is. Luckily I live at a high enough altitude that there are no fleas.
My parents acquired a new cat. We saw him around the neighborhood, then he wandered up to my mother and demanded to be fed, then came inside their house...he lives there now.
(Or "she"---we're not certain. I will continue to refer to him as "him" till examination proves me wrong.)
One thing he seems fond of is, when I visit, he climbs up on my chest and sits there and licks my hand, often all the way up to the elbow.
Yesterday I was washing out my shirts and I found shedding cat hair all over one of 'em.
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Anyone have an urge to give me a black eye in Salt Lake city? Now is your chance. I know this area has tons of hatrackers here. You'll find me in the Ford dealership off I-15 in Sandy today. We are showing off the new Ford Taurus. So stop on by and give me an opportunity to talk you out of it. I'm one of the guys that drove the truck their.
[This message has been edited by snapper (edited September 16, 2009).]
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A few years ago my cat died, he was a great cat. Black Siamese, beautiful creature, terribly intelligent. Quite a leader too, he built an organization of neighborhood cats that kept the territory fights to a minimum.
Well anyways my neighbors got a cat, Black Siamese, the spitting image of my cat. (Which isn't surprising, my cat's father really got around.) The thing is I think my cat is haunting me through this cat. This cat is kindof a psycopath, and is quite stupid. (He's the only cat I've ever stepped on.) But sometimes, sometimes he gets this look in his crazy eyes and talks to me in just the right tone. And then he goes back to attacking the grass. (Also he snuck into our house once and walked around as if he knew the floorplan perfectly. He even went to where the food dish used to be.)
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Ah. I didn't read Snapper's entry until tonight or I would have drifted on over. Is it the dealership on 90th South? Will you be there tomorrow?
Posts: 1608 | Registered: Feb 2009
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My cat is chatty, and I think he knows English. When I tell him I won't let him outside, he asks, "Why?" Once, the conversation went something like: "Vic, you aren't going out." "Why?" "Because I said so." "Why?" "Because the dog gets too excited when you're outside." "Why?" "I don't know why! Go find something else to do." He walked away muttering to himself.
When we give the cat a treat but aren't quick about it, he says, "Now!"
The oddest moments are when he thinks we've left the house. Then, he paces around the living room, crying, "A-lone!"
I wish I knew who trained him. He came to us through the animal shelter, who documented him as a stray.
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I've been associated with, mmm, ten different cats in the last, well, never mind how long. They varied about as much in mood and behavior as they did in appearance.
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I was just going over the first five pages of this thread...looks like we started out posting pithy one-liners, then expanded into lengthier notes.
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So I haven't been on a vacation in a while, and I thought I'd look at the travel agency at work to see what deals they had. After a while of perusing airline tickets and accomodations by themselves I decided to take a look at the bundle deals and that's where I found it:
A couple, sensibly attired in bathing suits, being served obnoxiously tropical drinks at a swim up bar. Now, that's the whole point of a beach resort, so that's not what caused this canniption... it was the waiter dressed from the waist up in a tuxedo. What is that? I mean, seriously... if you're gonna make the poor man swim for his gratuity, is a tuxedo really necessary?
(does this qualify as a random musing? i had to share it with someone and it's almost 2 AM here...)
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I am not going to track any of you down 'cause of anything you've said here. I've never met any of you in the flesh, and...let's keep it that way, okay?
(I've known Kathleen for years before hanging out here, but I've never met her, either.)
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We once had a cat who would say "Hellllo, is anybody home?" I think she learned it from someone she talked to on the phone. When the phone rang she would knock it off the base and talk into it. She also would ring to doorbell when she wanted in.
But all of that has absolutely nothing to do with the monster under my bed. (He keeps the dust bunnies in line.)
We had a cat who would cry "let me-owt!" at the door, but that's really all she would say to us in words. The rest of the time, she'd just say "rrrmmm?" to us. To other cats, however, she had the foulest mouth I've ever heard.
Back on the Beatles for a moment...I read in one of the books, where John Lennon took up the guitar, and, it said, it took him two years to learn to play the guitar and to sing at the same time.
If I had known that were possible---if I had not thought that playing and singing at the same time was something you were born with, but rather something you could learn to do---I might have pursued music as a career.
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