Rat thoughts

If you want to hear an interesting bit of musical history, download this torrent:  http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4542748/The_Beatles_-_Magical_Mystery_Fields

It's several dozen takes and tracks that were used to create the Beatles song Strawberry Fields Forever.  It's amazing how different the song sounded when they first recorded it.

I stayed in this exact cabin when I was about 10 years old.

I slept in the twin bed in the corner bedroom.  I was the only one in the family who had a private room.  At the time, there was a door leading from that bedroom into the bathroom, a door which would stick and had to be yanked open. The window in the room was broken, letting cold air in at night, but the bed was nice and warm.

One night, I woke up and had to pee really bad, but the bathroom door was stuck. The door into the bedroom had also gotten locked somehow (probably one of my sisters), trapping me in the bedroom!  I tried not to make too much noise, as I didn't want to wake anyone up, but I could not get either door open. I was thinking about trying to pee through the broken glass, but the window was too high off the ground for me. Fortunately my mother had gotten up as well, heard me struggling with the door and let me out.

It's nice to see that the cabin is still there and even has the same name (most of the cabins there are named for trout).


Trivia: The lake scenes in Star Trek: Insurrection were shot at Convict Lake.

I noticed Google Street View now covers most of Vista, so i decided to look up my old home, the house my grandparents lived in for almost 50 years.

It's been ruined.

The front lawn was lovely Zoysia grass that stayed green all year round and felt absolutely incredible to walk on. Now it's patchy and half of it has been torn out. There was an excellent automated pop-up sprinkler system, but that's obviously been ripped out as well.

There was a magnificent magnolia tree in the front yard that had been there for at least 40 years. It's gone now. As is the trellis and star jasmine that used to be in front of my bedroom window and filled the house with perfume on summer evenings.

The backyard had all kinds of fruit trees, including a couple cherries, several varieties of orange and an avocado. These trees produced literally hundreds of dollars worth of fruit each year. Most have now been torn out so the owner could park a trailer.

The wrought iron mailbox post is gone, replaced with a plain wooden post like every other house in the world. The attractive yet strong security screen made of decorative steel loops is gone too. Oddly enough, they kept the plastic hose reel box sitting out front.

The house has been painted a hideous battleship gray. I hope that's just a bad photo or something, or else that house has now become the fugliest in the neighborhood.

One of the major selling points of this place was the fantastic views from the backyard. Surrounding the house was a simple chain link fence. It provided protection without affecting the view. That's been replaced with an ugly solid brown wooden fence that obscures everything. They might as well be living underground now.

I'm feeling so depressed now.

Disney hooked me on bunnies early.

[Poll #989724]

Imagine waking up to this for breakfast every morning:

The growth of technology quickly leads to obsolesence of older technologies and things that used to be an integral part of society are going the way of the laundry mangle and the chamberpot.  

I was listening to the radio when the song "Kodachrome" came on.  When I was a kid, slide film was well on the way out and I have to wonder how many kids nowdays even know what Kodachrome is.    Or for the matter, a "Big Ten Inch", or "Western Union".  Will these songs have any meaning at all to kids 10, 20, 30 years from now?