Local News

(insert "I'm not making $$ off this website" disclaimer here):

Date Set In Cockman Murder Trial
Trial To Begin Feb. 13

POSTED: 10:26 am EDT September 30, 2005
UPDATED: 11:38 am EDT September 30, 2005

GREENVILLE -- A date has been set for the trial of two people accused of killing a well-known Greenville businessman.

The death penalty trial for David Edens and Jennifer Holloway is set for Feb. 13.

Edens and Holloway are accused of kidnapping and killing retired business executive Jim Cockman in September of last year.

Investigators said the couple stole Cockman's SUV and later hid his body in a storage center in Tennessee.

My notes on this: Jim Cockman was a friend of my mother-in-law. What they didn't tell everybody on the news was that they bound this poor man's entire head in duck tape and he suffocated before they even got him to that storage center in Tennessee and put him in a freezer. All b/c he was trying to sell his SUV and they wanted it. They called him and told him they were interested, and when he got to the place he'd put it (sometimes people down here will put cars close to the end of a busy intersection with contact info), they bound him up. I hope these people get what's coming to them.

Darn

I guess I'm going to have to redo the Latest Kitty section, b/c I didn't get enough hits on the site that was hosting the pics, imagekafe.com, and they pulled down the pics. So, I'll have to post them here first and then put them on my template. Anyone know an easier way to do that?

Actually, I don't think I know how. They gave me a ready-made html code for those, and I don't know html. Uh-oh.

Double darn.

I'm not inventive enough for a title today

Songs of the day:

• Hello, Evanescence
• Light in Your Eyes, Blessid Union of Souls
• If We Could Remember, Yolanda Adams

I guess I'm in a melancholy mood, or it seems so by looking at the music!

The Greenville temperatures are FINALLY getting lower. This is my favorite time of year, so I'm glad it's here. Instead of beautiful red, yellow, & orange leaves, though, we have crunchy brown leaves. We haven't had any rain since the beginning on September (Oh wait, my fault - we had .004 inches the other day). The weather guys here said that the lack of rain is supposed to make the colors even brighter later on in the leaf season.

My only problem with the temperatures falling is that the temperatures at my job are staying the same, so I'm starting to get cold in here. In fact, my fingertips are quite cold at the moment LOL. It's pretty bad when I'm savoring the heat from a freshly printed 8.5x11 sheet of paper. If only I could put a stack of new reports on my cold toes. :)

Cool - we're getting rain clouds - note clouds, not rain yet. I've pulled the blinds up on our floor to ceiling windows at work to watch the clouds come in (I love looking out, even if it's at the parking lot. I don't see how people can stare at those blinds all day). I hate metal 1-inch blinds. When we finally get the chance to get our own house, I'll have wooden 2 inch blinds (or faux wood if I'm poor like I think I'll be by the time we get a house) like I had in my room at my parent's house.

New profile pic (ignore post)

Well, it's not like I'm trying to show off a pic or anything, but this is the only way I can figure out to get a URL for it!

Am I really that bored?

Isn't this the saddest little Macy picture you've ever seen? I love it. I had to pick him up and hug him after this!

I'm writing despite the fact that I have nothing to write about (Doesn't that annoy you? Yeah well - it's my site!! Muhaha) in the hopes that, eventually, something write-worthy will speed past my mind and I'll catch a few words of it.

It's pathetic that the best topic I have to talk about tonight is my new lip glosses (bet you thought my grammar sucked on this huh? Nope! Check it out if you want! I have an obsession with correct grammar, though you'd never prove it here - LOL). Which, by the way, are absolutely awesome. :) I don't wear makeup (reasons: I hate my face when it is applied, I feel like my skin can't breathe, and I'm allergic to just about everything, including the so-called 'hypo-allergenic' crapola), so lip gloss and the occasional blue shine powder is all about I can handle. Blue powder JUST for the simple fact that it was blue and doesn't look blue on my face LOL, and lip gloss b/c it tastes SO good... which brings me to my new flavors: Cotton Candy Rush and Sugar Splash. I could literally chew my lips off b/c they taste so good.
Ok - funny image of me trying to talk without lips just popped into my head.

Oven getting dirty again: just need to start using a pan for flaky crust items.
Laundry: done by Josh as a surprise! AWESOME surprise as far as Carri is concerned LOL

I spent two hours scanning and two hours 'quick-fixing' my hard-copy pics from my old 35mm camera last night. That was only the favorites I'd picked out from just one box of pics. This is going to be a LONG project, but the good thing is that I can finally edit my bad pics.

Funny kitty observation: When Josh holds his arms out to Macy for a hug, Macy now pitifully meows at him, like he needs a hug! We have a seriously co-dependent kitty! We haven't really taught Lucy to vocalize - she does it on her own, but not for the same reasons as Macy. Macy does it when he's pissed at Josh for egging him on (he lightly meows when he bites Josh's hand after Josh tries to steamroll him) or when he's been reprimanded (SO pitiful), but Lucy does it any other time Macy doesn't LOL.

Yeah ok - that's it for me.

Night!

Weekend wrap-up

Well, it's less than an hour now before I hit the hay. Presently, I'm chowing down on some Ben & Jerry's Brownie Batter. I don't even like chocolate ice cream, but this stuff could turn me into a fan yet.

I played flute during part of our church's 110th anniversary celebration this morning. I have played in front of 10,000-15,000 people before, but I got nervous playing in front of 200 people (I knew about 100 of them, though, which I think made it harder for me). I'll post the pictures here sometime soon... no time tonight.

My Stats: :)

1. Laundry: 1/2 done
2. dishes: clean, but not put away
3. kitties: fed
4. computer desk: messy
5. oven: FINALLY clean!
6. carpet: should really be called crapet right now (shudder)

I'm not EVEN doing the rest of that list tonight.

Dream Journal - Volume 2

Dream Journal, Part 2 (warning: Mushy kitty stuff ahead - don't read it if you don't like that)

I’ve had this recurring thought ever since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf cities (disclaimer: I was not victimized by Hurricane Katrina, so please remember that this is not a true story, and I am not making $$ off this… this is just my dream journal – you can choose to read this or not):

Our house has flooded, so Josh and I have taken to wading through chest-deep water to find higher ground. We put Macy and Lucy in Lucy’s red carrier (which is fabric, making it easier to carry, narrower, and lighter than Macy’s hard plastic carrier). We're holding them as high above the water as we can. Then, we came upon a boat. The people on board were willing to take us, but not the pids (I don’t care what anyone says, they’re our babies – they might have fur, but they’re just as dear to my heart as any child would be). They said they don’t have room for them, even though I’ve insisted on carrying them in my lap. They flat-out refuse and threaten to leave without us. It turns into a match between me pleading, half-crying, half-screaming and the boat-people still not willing to help us. Finally, Josh (which is WAY out of character for him, by the way, he’d be even more adamant than me) softly told me, “Honey, we have to go. You have to let them go.” I am crying even harder at this point (actually, just writing it down now is making all those horrible feelings come back – my dreams are SO vivid most of the time – I usually don’t know that what I am remembering while awake is actually part of my dreams). So, eventually, I pull open the zipper on the peek-your-furry-head-out side of the carrier, kiss them both, hug them tight, and sit them on top of the water, where they swiftly float away. I wake up before I know whether it sinks or whether they’ve escaped.

Now with some the stories that are popping up about people being threatened with guns, the dream has turned into a more violent one, where I have a gun pointed in my face. The boat-people scream at me that I HAVE to get onto the boat and that I HAVE to leave my pets no matter what.

One earlier part of the dream has me not opening the zipper before they touch the water. That is the worst part of my memory.

With seeing the pictures of the poor babies still waiting on their mommies and daddies to come home and get them, this dream has become flashes in my head in the daytime.

Funny, I couldn’t stand kitties before. That all changed the first time I laid eyes on all 12 ½ ounces of Macy looking up at me with the most needful baby blue eyes I have ever seen (he was the runt). He was meowing so pitifully, and when I picked him up, he stopped and started purring. From then on, he was in my heart. :)

I’ll tell the full Macy story later. It’s actually quite a funny story.

Work Rant 3

This is work rant 3 (even though you think it's part 1) b/c I haven't posted the first two - they're only drafts. I did that b/c they're mostly fragmented in composition and would REALLY incriminate me!

Part 3 (relative to part 1 since it's about the same carbon-based life form):

• CBLF is really pissing me off, as is normal at least once a month or so. My section of the dept. created a signature form for paperwork that we give up b/c CBLF and a couple of others kept losing the work and blaming it on us, saying that we never even freakin' gave it to them. Therefore, it's their fault that they have to sign a form and create more paperwork for me. Thanks! So CBLF, despite having signed our form, claims time and time again that they didn't receive it even though they signed for it and we can pull up the form and show it to them.
• Today, CBLF comes to my desk and claims, once again, they they didn't receive paperwork. Same story!! I pulled the form, showed them where they signed, and bascially went back to my job. They came back and said they 'really don't have the paperwork.' I wanted to say "Well, you really did sign for it." My co-worker is off today, so it was even harder to convince CBLF that co-worker submitted it.
• What ticked me off is that CBLF acted like it was our fault that they lost the paperwork.
• Geez... talk about being unorganized!

Name

Ok - the new name is funny, but I don't talk about the kitties during EVERY post, but the first name was boring.

I'll keep this one for awhile to see how it fits.

Forensics Word-A-Day (2)

Gas Chromatograph-Mass Spectrometer (GC Mass-Spec or GCMS)

The gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer is a combination instrument used to separate the components of some mixtures. In the forensic laboratory the most common mixture contains drugs.

The gas chromatograph consists of an injector, a column in an oven, and a detector. The vaporised mixture is applied by the injector to the column. The column is a long (25m), thin (0.25mm) tube coated with an inert material to which the components of the mixture bind with varying degrees of tenacity. The oven is gradually heated to make the components leave the column in sequence. As the separated components leave the column the detector sends a signal to a computer which produces a graph of the detected components in the form of a series of peaks representing the quantity of component and the time that the component left the column.

Info from the following website: http://www.lbp.police.uk/forensicscience/technique/index.asp#gas

Name Change!

Ok, part of my job at work is to make customer master file changes (Mu-hahaha - I have ze power!), and I have to log and archive EVERY SINGLE ONE. So, here is my log file for my official blog-name change.

DEW, if you read this yet, you'll understand - LOL! :)

Name change:
changed name from "Ramblings By the Phantom Piccolo" to "Strange Adventures of the Q-Tip Kitties" per main contact on 9-21-2005 // filed

Kitten Macy says: "Mommy, did you have permission to do this? Don't be showing my bid-niss e'rywhere!"

Pink Slip Boogey

I have my annual review at work today.

Ok, ok - no one gets fired on an annual review day here, but I'm still nervous. I know I haven;t done anything wrong other than surfing the web too much, maybe, but I'm nervous all the same.

Wish me luck!

Tom Welling

I just HAVE to post cute pics of Tom Welling - the guy who plays Clark Kent in Smallville.

Here are the places I found these pics:
http://boys.blogs.sapo.pt/arquivo/Tom.Welling.jpg
http://www.tomwelling.com


He kind of reminds me of Josh, so I have to like him! Josh even has eyes close to Tom's color. :)

Besides, Josh loves this show. Due to his birthday and a couple more purchases, he now has all four available season of the show LOL.

Forensics Word-A-Day / Fact-of-the-Day

Hopefully, I'll be able to keep this fun section going. I am online pretty much every day.

• tetrahydrocannabinol: active ingredient in marijuana, also known as TCH
  

Which, by the way, is the one word I will NEVER forget as long as I live.

Take it and run with it!

Forensics Disappointment

I just found out that news I got is false.

I was told that you don't have to be a street cop prior to being a SC crime scene tech.

Actually, you have to have two years experience to do it.

I see their reasoning, which I'm not discounting. The experience you'd get as a cop would only be beneficial to you as a CST.

However, it's a blow to my plans.

I'll still take the classes because they're a lot of fun, but I won't go for the job. I don't want to be a cop.

I'll let you all know which class is next for me. I'd love to share my future knowledge. :)

Name Change

Ok - those of you who know my actual name - consider yourselves lucky. If you don't know, ask and I'll probably tell you (email or chat or something), but I won't put it on my blog anywhere. Two reasons:

• It's probably not the smartest thing for me to do.
• I'm starting to incriminate myself people-wise. If someone knows me and looks me up, it'd be pretty obvious who I'm talking about in certain situations.

Sound good enough? :)

My Band Kids

I tried to get good pics of the kids on the field from Friday night, but the fact remains that if the lighting is different (such as huge stadium lights behind them), I act like a dummy with my digital camera. So, here is my best attempt at pics.

For those of you who watch the kids' website as well, these will also be posted there.

XML/RSS

Ok - I'm busy trying to make my blog better looking as time goes by. Two things I don't understand are XML and RSS. I pretty much understand what they are, and wanted to put an XML feed from my local news channel website onto mine. I got to the part where it basically said "click on this to put our XML headlines onto your site", but then it said that I have to have an RSS reader, I think? So, now I know that I need some kind of software, right?

If it makes anyone happy, I found a book online called "XML for Dummies" - ROFL! That's appropriate.

(note: Lucy says "RSS and XML are hard to understand! I'm just a little 5-month-old piddy - we need help!")

I'm digging "Blogger Images"! I didn't realize I could play with the placement of the pics. With Hello, I can only (so far, at least) post them and write something at the top. This is much better, I think.

By the way, this pic is from the first day we had Lucy. Isn't she adorable? Her eyes were already turning slightly yellow by then (she was 2 days shy of being 6 weeks old), but in this pic, you can see the blue she had left. She was so tiny!

I just finished watching Miss Evers' Boys. I always thought that was a movie about a mother and her sons, but it's actually about Alfre Woodard as a nurse treating black syphillis patients. Actually, they weren't even being treated. They were being lied to, and not getting any treatment at all. There was one man that sticks out in my mind - Willie Johnson. He was a dancer whose only big dream was to dance at the Cotton Club. Eventually, without the treatment he though he was getting, he became weak, and later could hardly dance at all. At the end, he was dancing with a cane at good as he could on the graves of some of the other men while Miss Evers testified at what I thought was a senate subcommittee? It ended up being such a sad and frustrating story. I didn't know until the end that it was actually a true story.

Putting a Stop to the Spam

Ok- that's it - I've had it with the anonymous spam comments here. Sorry for the people here who do actually comment, but I'm switching to that word verification thing. Those few small letters will make my life easier. I get excited when I see that there are comments on my page, and then to find out they're not real? Grr.

Oh yeah - there's a huge spike in my page hits on Wednesday - almost 60 hits! If it's not spam-worthy, then I'm happy!

LA troops come home

This was written by my co-worker's adult son.

If you can't find a reason to smile today, consider your blessings...


I watched the news tonight. There was a story about a National Guard
Troop that returned from a years service in Iraq. They were from the State of
Louisiana. The military jet landed, and they were formed into a group of
soldiers at attention as they were commended, recognized and dismissed...
obviously a moment they had anticipated for a long time. At the dismissal, the
camera panned around to catch many sons and daughters showered with hugs and
kisses. Most of the interviews were what you would expect - "It's great to be
home, finally," and "it was this moment that kept me going everyday, ready to
get back home." But as reality sunk in, you knew that many of these 100+
soldiers were returning to nothing. A mother said, "I have nothing to cook my
son a home-cooked meal on..." and "I don't have the heart to tell her that we
have nothing left." But the part that struck me the hardest was the image of
soldiers that had no one to hug. They simply said goodbye to their fellow
soldiers and walked off... there was no one there to greet them.


Please remember in your prayers tonight the people that are not in
the forefront of this tragedy. The relief workers, the policemen, the families
abroad... and most importantly - the ones that just have nothing. Nothing is a
powerful lack of existence that most of us can not even comprehend. When you sit
in traffic today, or complain about the quality of a meal, or just feel too
tired to attack an everyday task, remember that we are blessed. Some of those
soldiers just picked up their bags and walked off camera...