Andy and Rory at Andy's boot camp grad, 04-18-03 in Great Lakes, Illinois
- posted by barbara @ 4/30/2003 01:53:00 AM

 
Fort Meade: Welcome

Andy's here now, preparing to attend journalism school. or at least that is my understanding. he's already called twice sounding quite chipper and we get to ditch the snail mail: he's got an address with an @ in it. :)
- posted by barbara @ 4/26/2003 11:25:00 PM  0 comments

 
Court upholds burglar

a repeat felon is watched by police, who arrest him after he attempts to
burglarize a couple of places. he is convicted and sentenced to 110 years
to life in prison.

rambo gets drunk and pissed off, tears down a san pedro street, swerves
into the opposing lane and wipes my 21-year-old daughter off the face
of the earth. she does not only attempt to kill she succeeds in killing.
after that, she drags the 119-pound body of her victim about 100 yards
down the road and dumps it in the median, where approximately all
of bekah's blood leaves her body via her head. the stain left in
the median remains visible for most of a year. bekah's head is
so badly damaged we are persuaded never to see
our girl again.

rambo speeds away from bekah's dead body. in spite of the head-sized
shattering of her car's windshield right in front of her face, this
killer successfully navigates the extremely sharp turn onto the dark
winding two lane road that leads to her husband's ocean view home
without any problem. when she gets home she goes to sleep so soundly
that neither policemen in her bedroom nor the barking of dogs can
rouse her; according to the "murder book," her husband has to shake
her awake so that she can be arrested. she never expresses concern,
remorse, not even curiosity, regarding the person whose life she
stole so casually, not to bekah's family, not to the police,
certainly not in court. not at deposition.

rambo is allowed to plead out of the murder charge, allowed in
fact to plead "no contest" to felony vehicular manslaughter
with gross negligence while intoxicated and felony hit and
run. at the pleading her lawyer states for the record that
his client is not conceding blame or fault in the violent
gruesome death of an innocent beautiful 21-year-old stranger.

rambo is sentenced to 4 years in state prison. she will serve
two. it's my understanding that this homicidal drunk was 52
years old when she murdered bekah. she will, apparently,
celebrate her 55th birthday out of prison.

she was not a convict when she murdered bekah, but she did have
a misdemeanor arrest warrant for grand theft outstanding on the
day my daughter was killed. she was driving without a valid
driver's license and, according to her statement to the
detectives following her arrest, prior dui convictions.

so, attempt burglary, get 110 years to life. murder Bekah Zask,
get out of prison in two years.

say what?
- posted by barbara @ 4/25/2003 01:43:00 AM

 
back, home...great vacation. mailbox full of spam, cats crazy, tired, tired, tired.

but it WAS great. then i tried to look at my blog and, WHAT? got a weird page of code and archive links, dunno why. anyhow.

will do this right at a later date. must now unwind from seven wonderful but extraordinarily busy days. and just BE for a bit, thanks. :)
- posted by barbara @ 4/24/2003 10:33:00 PM  0 comments

 
National Weather Service : Zone Forecast : Lake , Illinois

well, the forecast is looking somewhat better, but it does look like we'll be flying into weather in chicago and the great lakes area. andy's been training on the shore of lake michigan. think it's lake michigan!

geography never mattered to me until i got to college, and then i had other things to do - english sort of things. but if and when i return for my bachelor's, master's, and Phd degrees, i'm definitely gonna soak up some geography...from the one semester [not even a full year!] of world regional geography i took at my alma mater, el camino college, i learned that the study of regional geography encompasses the study of history, sociology, economics, etcetera. i actually loved that class.

anyhow! this should be my last post until 04-24-03 unless i find a way to access the internet while on the road. in the meantime, don't do anything you don't wanna do, and drive safely!

i have a couple of tattoos; one cat on my ankle [as an adolescent ii believed i was reincarnated from a cat], a turtle and "Bekah" on my wrist. my oldest son has maybe one dozen tattoos, including a turtle with angel wings the size of one forearm, captioned on the top, "Rebekah" and on the bottom, "An angel in heaven." Bekah's preferred method of self-mutilation was piercings. i took her to a shop in san pedro when she was 17 to get this tongue ring. later, her attempt at a nose ring failed when the hole got infected and left her with a big ugly boil on her nose. when she died, she was having her ear holes incrementally increased in size; i do not know how big they were to eventually be.
- posted by barbara @ 4/16/2003 10:25:00 AM

 
Computer Stupidities: Come Again?
* Tech Support: "I need you to right-click on the Open Desktop."
* Customer: "Ok."
* Tech Support: "Did you get a pop-up menu?"
* Customer: "No."
* Tech Support: "Ok. Right click again. Do you see a pop-up menu?"
* Customer: "No."
* Tech Support: "Ok, sir. Can you tell me what you have done up until this point?"
* Customer: "Sure, you told me to write 'click' and I wrote 'click'."

(At this point I had to put the caller on hold to tell the rest of the tech support staff what had happened. I couldn't, however, stop from giggling when I got back to the call.)

* Tech Support: "Ok, did you type 'click' with the keyboard?"
* Customer: "I have done something dumb, right?"

i could never, ever be tech support. i laugh too much. these stories have me crying, i'm laughing so hard.

aren't people the greatest things? :)
- posted by barbara @ 4/15/2003 05:20:00 AM  0 comments

 
National Weather Service : Zone Forecast : Lake , Illinois

oh, goody...looks like we'll be flying into thunderstorms. yippee. lol
on a lighter note, i'm so excited that we're going i can no longer talk straight. i start to say something with a lucid thought in my head it comes out absurd. whatever! to all [two] of my faithful readers, i will be OUT OF TOWN from the 17th to the 24th of april, seeing my son graduate from navy basic training and then on to vegas to gamble like the fool i am. among other things! :)

like seeing some real weather, apparently. ha! can't hardly wait...

i got a picture from the great lakes recruit training center's homepage, and believed that the recruit front and center, facing the man who was speaking, was Andy. 10-15-05: it was not. but this baby is. :) Rory says it is not, Denise says, "That's Andy. Of course that's Andy." So we'll find out Friday for sure, hopefully...i've decided that for his grad present i'm getting him a computer, his choice, laptop or desktop, so either way i guess we'll be able to find out. :)
- posted by barbara @ 4/14/2003 01:28:00 PM

 
Computer Stupidities
it's always good to laugh...go laugh today, you have my permission :)

the first story i clicked:

Customer: "One of my friends gave me an ImageWriter printer and this keyboard. He said he gave me all the cables, but I can't figure out how to connect them. Am I missing something?"
Tech Support: "Well, a computer would help."
Customer: "You mean this keyboard isn't a word processor?"
Tech Support: "No ma'am, its just an input device."
Customer: "Then I need to buy a computer, right?"
Tech Support: "Yes."
Customer: "Do you think I'll need a monitor, too?"
- posted by barbara @ 4/14/2003 10:15:00 AM  0 comments

 
Kajama Send me No Flowers

Yesterday was the not the first time Bekah woke me up. This "amazing but true" story won me sixty minutes of free readings, which did not lift my spirits an inch compared to the special moments afforded by Bekah herself.
- posted by barbara @ 4/12/2003 06:56:00 AM  0 comments

 
Online Candlelight Vigils

for three nights now i've kept the candles "burning" while i slept, here on the couch in front of the computer...i've watched the number of candles grow from 234 to 468 to 831 to 948. this random tribute page automatically refreshes every thirty seconds. yesterday evening i scrolled through one to two hundred random tributes without seeing one of bekah's. i've taken to copying the victims' names then looking up their stories and oh, the stories i've read.

ten minutes after i am idle my screensaver kicks in. you know how it works...just now i woke up in time for the last five minutes of "White Nights," an old cold war era movie with a tearjerker ending; slightly awake and given to tears, i pushed the enter bar.

of 948 candles, bekah has five that i know of [thanks yndy!], three of which originated from this computer. when i pushed the enter bar upon sitting up this morning, this is what i saw on my computer screen:


it was not this...replaced photo 3-18-07 as i no longer have that graphics server.

love is indeed a many-splendoured thing. thank you bekah-la, you wonderful daughter of mine. amen

p.s. if this post appears twice it's because in my zeal to share this latest item in the bekah church of wonder catalogue of unexplained phenomena and amazing small world stories, i apparently went too fast for either my computer or one server or another...will rectify when things calm down. :)
- posted by barbara @ 4/11/2003 07:21:00 AM

 
Online Candlelight Vigils

for three nights now i've kept the candles "burning" while i slept, here on the couch in front of the computer...i've watched the number of candles grow from 234 to 468 to 831 to 948. yesterday evening i scrolled through one to two hundred random tributes without seeing one of bekah's. i've taken to copying the victims' names then looking up their stories and oh, the stories i've read.

ten minutes after i am idle my screensaver kicks in. you know how it works...just now i woke up in time for the last five minutes of "White Nights," an old cold war era movie with a tearjerker ending; slightly awake and given to tears, i pushed the enter bar.

of 948 candles, bekah has five, three of which originated from this computer. when i pushed the enter bar this is the image on my computer screen: