Oh No! Jehovah Witnesses!

We had a returned missionary speak at church today. His talk was really good, but he was pretty nervous and laughed at some really weird moments.

He told us about a member of the ward (let's call him "Pierre") who got baptized and did the temple work for his wife who had passed away. When he went back to the area and asked for the guy, they told him that he had died, so he said "Oh, no! Haha, what happened to Pierre!"

Then he told us about this other guy who was praying to receive inspiration to be able to join a good church, and half an hour later the Jehovah Witnesses knocked on his door and he said "Oh, no! What a horrible answer to my prayers!" Luckily, the sister missionaries came half an hour after that and saved the day.

Nobody laughed, but everyone was pretty paying careful attention after that.

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Taking It Easy

We've been having a little problem with our mailman: in two years we've lived here, he never closed our mailbox's door. It doesn't seem to be a big deal, but our mailbox is in the sidewalk, we have two schools less than half a block away, and hundreds of K-9 kids walk through by our house every day.

Scary.

Anyway, I called to report this issue, since I never see the guy, and leaving a note would be just as crappy. Since I reported it, the door has remained closed, but the day right after the call, we didn't get any mail, which was weird, since we get mail everyday (mostly junk, of course). I was worried that our mailman was mad at us and that he had kept our mail. I ordered a cable on eBay a while ago and have been expecting it, so I was thinking that the cable was in my mailman's garbage by then (I mean, how many people have use for an IDE to SATA HD adaptor?). I decided to doble check by e-mailing the guys who sold me the cable, and that's when I realized that they are located in Hong Kong. Nothing against Hong Kong, it just takes SO LONG to get stuff from there. Anyway, the guys were very kind and prompt in their response, and this is what they told me:

Hi,dear friend.

Many thanks for your letter.
According to our record, since we have received your payment confirmed by Paypal, and item was sent out on 2009-04-29 18:37.
And it normally takes 7-15 business days for delivery(Not include the Sat & Sun).

So please take it easy and wait with patience.

If there is any other inquiry,please feel free to contact us.And I will try my best to help you.

Good luck.

Best Regards,

Wise words if I ever heard any. I'm taking it easy now.

And I feel really bad for doubting our amazing mailman. I'm leaving some cookies for him next time.

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My Invisible Bookshelf

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I finally did it!

No, I didn't attach it to the main shelf. It's actually an inch away from it.

Cool New Book

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I just finished reading "What Obama Means," by Jabari Asim. And before you start rolling your eyes... well, the book is not so much about Obama as it is about the journey that African Americans had gone from the times of slavery to the present, and all the cultural and social steps that allowed a black man to be the president of the United States.

The section on black athletes, musicians, and other artists that paved the way for African Americans to be widely popular and even seen as models of what's cool is very revealing and very well done, as well as the chapter on the "Magic Negro," which explained not only what a Magic Negro is but also all that controversy with that song played in the Rush Limbaugh show.

Some random quotes I really liked:

As Maureen Dowd noted in the New York Times, "The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it." (Page 124)

As DuBois and other have put forth, casting excessive blamo on the less educated and economically disadvantaged allows successful blacks to hide their obligations to their brethren behind by-the-bootstrap myths of self-propelled ascent. In a speech delivered in 1934 on the day he resigned from the NAACP, DuBois outlined the consequences of such mythmaking in apocalyptic terms. "If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat," he said, "they are doomed for all time." (Page 139)

This Is Just Too Much

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I just got one of those massive emails from a friend who was actually commenting how messed up the email's content is. Anyway, it is in Spanish, and it says something like this: "Mexico's economy wasn't doing well, and neither did the pharmaceutical companies, so why not make up a fake disease? That way the whole world will freak out, buy the vaccine, and just like that the world's economy will improve. We hear of all these people that are sick, but we don't know any, they haven't been on tv, we haven't seen pictures of any of them, blah, blah, blah."

It's funny, because a guy at lunch yesterday said "I am amazed that they still haven't blamed this one on Bush," but conservative pundits are going crazy blaming democrats for it. "Close the borders and get those illegal immigrants away," said Glen Beck (I'm paraphrasing. I really don't feel like listening to the actual sound bite again), not stopping to think that the cases that erupted in the USA are a consequence of Americans traveling to Mexico.

Here's the text in Spanish (I don't feel like translating, but just for the record, it's full of misspellings and grammatical errors).

It's Alive!

Yes, we killed our peach tree (but not before it managed to give us one tiny, fuzzy peach, which Megan proceded to eat) but the cherry trees are blooming!

Travis at the Depot, April 14, 2009

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As I've mentioned before, this is probably the best concert I've ever been at. The guys were awesome, the music was incredible, and the place was so small that we were really, really close. In fact, Fran, the singer, came down and sang one song among the people, and he even danced with a girl in the audience.

This was the very last song, an acoustic, "microphoneless" version of "Flowers in the Window." My memory card was full by now, but luckily someone posted it on YouTube.



When we went to the concert, Megan and I saw a bunch of girls in tiny mini skits and high heels were heading to the Energy Solutions Arena, and we wondered who could be playing to atract such a crowd. After they finished their first set, Fran and the bass player came out and told us that the real reason why many of us were there is because we couldn't get a ticket "for the Britny Spears gig." That made sense. They then started their version of "Baby Hit Me One More Time," which was the very first Travis song I heard like ten years ago. I absolutely love Fran's "sorry" after he totally messes up (1:54).

Tape Sculptures

I first saw these cool tape sculptures in Hi Fructose magazine a while ago. They were awesome. The guy made a bunch of babies out of tape and put them in random places and photographed people's reactions.

After reading a couple of tutorials, I tried my first sculpture: a clear cast of my hand. It didn't turn out very good thought. That one is my hallpass now.

I wanted to try it again, but I didn't have any clear plastic bags, which is what you tape on (otherwise I would have taped my hand, and I would still be scraping it out), so I tried with one of those white plastic bags with "thank you" in red letters, and since I didn't have any wide tape, I tried the regular thin scotch tape, and it worked great, because it gave the "sculpture" much greater detail, and the red letters gave it a creepy bloody effect.

It was pretty easy and fast to make. It took longer to write this than to make the hand.

We Are Gardeners!

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We finally decided to start our garden, and since we kill everything that passes through our hands, we decided to go with the square foot garden. If we can't grow anything in it, we're joining Costco.

Grape Lady Copyrighted?

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I wanted to watch the Grape Lady for the 250th time today, and in one of the links I found this message:


What? How can they do that? The Grape Lady belongs to us, the humanity!

Also, checking out the Grape Lady groups in Facebook, I found one with no administrator, so I became it and I'm the boss there now!