The Stars That Usher Evening Rose

Today is a day that when it comes for many people they dread it. Others can not wait for it. For me it's almost just another day. What day do I speak of, assuming for some reason you don't already know or have forgotten, I speak of my birthday. Only thing that makes this day much different than others is the people calling to wish me a happy birthday and the promise of gifts. Today I turn 22 years old, hard to believe. So far my birthday has been spent writing papers, reading a book for Humanities and studying for a quiz tomorrow. Though the weekend of Feb 11th-13th my parents are going up to Charlotte to celebrate my birthday along with the birthday of my two sisters whose birthdays are one the 14th and 16th of February. As for why I have not been online much the last few days it's because I have been preoccupied with all sorts of other shit lately that has taken a lot of my time. Anyway that's all for now.

I figured I should probably post since it has been nearly a week since I last posted.

The tutoring has gone well so far. I went Wednesday and Friday and met with a kid named Gary. He is in seventh grade and basically I just help him with his math homework and other math assignments. He seems like a pretty cool kid so far. Just before I left Friday he asked if he could ask me a question. I said sure and he then asked "Do you live in a dorm?". I told him I did and then he preceded to ask "Do you all have parties?". I could not help but laugh when he asked that. I found it humorous that this 12 or 13 year old kid was asking me if there was parties.

Knowing that the weather was not going to be all that great this weekend and with my sisters suggestion I decided to go to Blockbuster and rent some movies. I rented "The Forgotten", "The Manchurian Candidate", and "Dragonfly". As for the storm itself, I woke up at 4:30am this morning to the sound of sleet falling outside and peeked out the window and saw that some of it had started accumulating. I then woke up again at 7:30am and this time it was snowing and there was already some snow on the ground. So I preceded to turn on the TV to see what they were saying about the storm. Now last night they were calling for 3-6 inches of snow here in Asheville area and this morning when I checked it they had upped it to 7-11 inches in the Asheville area. Of course leave it to them to totally fuck it up and be completely wrong. The snow and sleet was supposed to last all day, it lasted until about 10am, only a few flurries since. Only got about 1 and 1/2 inches of snow on the ground, some of which is already starting to melt in some areas despite the temperature only being in the mid to upper 20s. Charlotte seems to have escaped its predicted mess as well as they have only gotten about 1/2 inch of snow, was supposed to get 2-4 inches. For the last several hours they have been dry as well. Only place that has seemed to get what they were supposed to was the Atlanta area. Anyway, unlike Michael's scorpions, I am starving so I am going to get me something small to eat.

Sunday held up to its billing. We ended up with just under an inch of snow Saturday night and it was just as windy as predicted. Even had a tree fall down into one of the parking lots, luckily it did not hit any cars. Our high Saturday despite the mostly clear skies only made it up to 20 degrees add the wind in and not many people went out that day. Our low this morning was 7 degrees, thankfully I did not have an early class. Though it is supposed to warm up and be fairly nice the rest of the week.

I have to be at the local middle school here in Asheville at noon on Wednesday to get things set up to start tutoring/mentoring (since I don't know exactly which I am doing yet) some of the students there. So hopefully by next week or maybe even this Wednesday I will be able to get started.

On Saturday my roommate moved out and moved to a new room. He told me it was because he wanted a smoking room. I guess he has picked up the habit since he has been here. The new roommate came in yesterday and I talked with him only to find out that he will rarely ever be in the room. He has a brother that has an apartment a couple of minutes away and he said that he normally stays there and that only once and a blue moon will he actually stay the night here. So even though I technically have a roommate it is actually about as close as I can get to having the room to myself without actually having it to myself. It awesome. On top of that my 22nd birthday is only a week away.

The last several days have been very dull days. Tonight is the first time anything interesting will have happened in the last several days and that deals with the weather.

Reason being is that they are calling for snow tonight and into tomorrow. But that is not it. The predicted low tonight is 13 degrees and the predicted high tomorrow is only 26 degrees. If that wasn't bad enough I get to the worst part of it. Tonight they are calling for sustained winds of up to possibly 50mph with wind gust that could possibly hit 70mph. So over night with temps in the middle to lower teens wind chills could be as low as -20 degrees and wind chills during the day tomorrow could hover around zero. My guess is that this, although maybe not temp wise but in the way it feels, will be the coldest night of the winter.

Knowing that this weather was coming I went out yesterday and went to the movies and saw the movie "White Noise" that I had been wanting to see for a while now. I thought the movie was pretty decent. It kind of reminded me of "The Ring" in some ways but I liked it better than "The Ring" since to me it fit a little better with the horror movie genre. After the movie I went to the mall and went to FYE to return a movie and exchange it for "Underworld" and I ended up getting "League of Extraordinary Gentleman" along with it. After leaving the mall I thought about stopping at the new "Cheeseburger In Paradise" restaurant here in town owned by, as you probably could have guessed, Jimmy Buffet. I ended up deciding against it since I didn't know how much it cost and after spending money on the theater and at the mall I didn't really want to spend much more so I went back to campus. The few days before yesterday I watched a couple other movies, "Patriot Games", "Clear And Present Danger", and "The Great Santini".

For now I just sit back and hope that we get enough snow or something to cancel classes on Monday, but I am not counting on it.

It has been a fairly crazy weekend, especially today because so far it hasn't been what I would refer to as a good day.

Friday I left for Charlotte and arrived there a little after 6pm. Saturday was waiting for my parents to arrive and football day (Falcons playoff game that night). Sunday was a very busy day. Started with unpacking the trailer my dad had brought up with furniture in it for Cathy. We brought all the little stuff in and left the heavy stuff next to the floor until we got some help. We then went to Jacqueline's horse riding lessons, she did great. After returning our help arrived and we carried all the big furniture upstairs. Once we completed moving all that we left and went to Jeralyn's to open very late Christmas presents and then left to go out to eat at Red Lobster before returning to Cathy's place. Monday my parents left around 9:30 in the morning and about an hour later they call telling us they forgot some items. So I had to go to the mall to meet them and give the stuff to them. I had planned on leaving around 4pm but Cathy need more help moving some things around and before I knew it the time was after 5pm. Cathy offered for me to stay for dinner so I did. After packing the car and waiting for the last bit of clothes to dry, that Cathy had decided to wash at the last minute, I became exhausted a decided to stay the night instead of making the drive that night. At 6am today Cathy woke me up and I had intentions of being gone by 6:30am in order to arrive on campus on time for my 9:25am class. After I put the last of the stuff in the car I ran back to the house since it was freezing outside and tripped on the planter bricks in front of the door(why they put a planter in front of the door I don't know) and I fall and scrap up my hands bump my head and now have a sore left hand (unrelated to being scrapped up). Finally I leave over 10 minutes later than originally planned. About 10 minutes out I pull off an exit to make sure I had my notebook for school because I was afraid I had forgot it, luckily it was in the back of the car. Then about 30 minutes out I hear a cell phone ring and realize it is Cathy's. I then have to get off the interstate and got lost trying to get back on going north so I could head back to Cathy's to return her phone to her. So now an hour and a half after I planned on leaving I leave Cathy's for the final time around 8am. So making it to my 9:25am class was not out of the question. Now it was trying to make it for my 11am class. Luckily everything else went smoothly from there and I arrived back here just after 10:40am. Plus during all of this my cell phone was dead as the battery died Saturday evening. Also found out I do not meet with the appeals board today it will be later.

For now though it is time for me to go to class.

The last few days have been a pain in the ass. Some of this I might have mentioned before and if I have then you get to read about part of it again. The school is charging me out-of-state prices this semester when they are supposed to be charging me in-state charges. Come to find out I had to fill out some paper work to get my status changed to in-state. Over break I filled out all the paper work and mailed it all in. Then today I get a call back from them saying they have declined my request for in-state status saying that by state law I can not get in-state status at the university because one of my reason for moving to North Carolina was to get in-state prices. So now my parents and I plan to appeal the decision. Problem is that the appeal board meets next Tuesday so that gives me little to no time to get things put together in order to make a good appeal. So we shall see what happens but I am definitely not counting on the appeal working.

Other than that there isn't much going on. As for classes so far they seem pretty cool other than Calc. II which is going to be a back breaker.

I am back in Atlanta, we returned from Orlando yesturday evening. Though I will not be here for long as I leave tomorrow to head back up to Asheville for school and work. It's kind of sad this time around though since once I leave tomorrow/today it will probably be the last time that I will be in Atlanta with any family ties. As for the Orlando trip nothing really post worthy there as all we really did was move things around getting everything ready for my parents actual move down there at the end of February.

I do not normally post about my dreams on here like Michael does on his but last night I had one of the most fucked up dreams I have ever had so I have to post about it. The Dream started out normal enough but about halfway through it changed in a fairly big way.

The dream started with me standing outside in the evening after sunset having a conversation with Matt. He was telling me about this girl, named Julie, that he had just broken up with. He said that while they were going out he had gone out with another girl and to get back at him Julie went and slept with another guy. The last thing I said to Matt in the converstation at the time when I said it seemed to make sense but when I look back at it know I wonder exactly what it ment. I told him "Don't worry I know this girl very well, she hasn't hardly changed at all since back then, I will go see if I can straighten things out." So I walked over to her house and knocked on the door and her mother answered. Knowing that her mother probably wouldn't just let me come in and talk to her daughter around 10pm in the evening, I asked if I could just use their restroom. She thought for a moment but then let me in. So I went to the bathroom and pretended to use it. I then heard Julie's dad tell her two sisters to do something for him. I then hear the two sisters giggling coming down the hall. So I opened the door just as they quickly moved by with a big bag of dry ice in their hands. I watched them as they headed straight for the fireplace that had a fire burning in it. The two of them then threw the big bag of dry ice into the fire. Almost immediately it started to release a visible gas that for some reason I knew to be deadly. I then took off and ran for the front door. I flung the door open and as I exited I tripped on the door jam thing on the floor and fell to the ground. Now this is the point where the dream changed. It changed perspective and went from first person to third person (almost movie like). In this new point of view I saw myself laying on the ground outsided the door and I quickly began to roll as fast as I could away from the house. Only a few seconds after I started rolling the house exploded with all the windows blowing out and fire shooting out of them. At the same time in slow motion the father started to get blown out through one of the windows and then as the explosion relaxed he was sucked back in. Going back to me I was having trouble breathing so I knew that the explosion must have caused a deadly gas cloud to form around the house. I then heard a voice calling me to it. The third person view then panned up to a dark face that was in the sky. I knew that if I went to that I would die. I remember hearing myself saying "No, I want to live." Then the view panned back to me again and when it did all that was left of me was a head and neck the rest of my body was gone. The head and neck were decaying therefore I knew I must still but in that gas cloud around the house. So my neck and head starting tumbling and rolling away quickly trying to escape. Then all of I sudden I stopped rolling and a hand (as that is all I could see from that perspective) picked my head and neck up. This gave me a fairly close up look at myself or in this case what was left of it as it was very distorted due to the decay with some places on the face and neck having the skin completely gone. The view then panned out again back towards the house and there were many of these head and necks that were glowing orange (almost ghost like) floating up in the sky towards the dark face. It was then I knew that all the others in the house had died. The view panned back to my face and neck which started to repair itself. The skin started coming back and facial features became more clear. This was not my face and neck at least it was no longer. It was now a very demonic looking face with the red glowing eyes and a face that no longer looking anything like mine. At this point the view pulls out reveiling the back of this person or thing that was carrying the head and face. It walked over to another some what run down building, almost like a medium size shed of some kind, and it entered the building with the head and neck still in hand. At this point I woke up. Pretty fucked up huh?

Sorry it has taken me a while to post again. Between the computer problems, having family in town for Christmas, and the impending move of my parents to Orlando, it has been hard for me to get on the computer.

Since my last post my parents, Cathy, and I went to Nashville to stay at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel the 21st and returned home the 22nd. That link has pictures of the inside of the hotel from the first photo down to the "The View" photo are all from there. If you and your family every has some free time and a few hundred dollars, since you probably wont find a room for under $200 a night, to throw around then I recommend that you think about stay at this place. It is a unique experience you will not find anywhere else.

The 23rd and part of the 24th I spent shopping with my sister and parents where I did all my Christmas shopping while the others finished up theirs. There is another story to go with this but its for another post.

Christmas day itself was a fairly decent day. I got the "Lord of the Rings" movie Trilogy set all in the extended collectors editions. I also got a Jacket, the game "Splinter Cell" for my PS2, a pinball baseball game, a ghost book, a model car of my favorite car a 1950-51 Mercury Coupe chopped and torpedoed, an Atlanta Falcons matt, a pair of gloves, a hand held football game, and a T-shirt. After Christmas we just spent the next few days watching movies and just hanging around until Cathy and the kids left on the 29th to head back home.

New Year's Eve I went to PTC and hung around with some friends before going over to Andrew's place at 8:30pm. As for the party the only really worth mentioning is Andrew popping the question to Emily shortly after midnight. I figured its pointless to go in real detail about the party since just about everyone who reads my blog was at the party. Though I did stay the night at Andrew places. Woke up just after 10am and left to head home around noon.

Tomorrow my parents and I leave for Orlando to get things ready for the move down there at the end of February. I will more than likely have no excess to internet down there so it will probably be at least a week before I post again.

Finally I would like to say Happy New Year, hear is to hoping 2005 is a good one. Also I would like to congratulate Andrew and Emily again.