A long day doing Seattle!! Animals--real and stuffed, antique shops, Barnes & Noble Books, COFFEE!!!! Computer games--POGO!! Computer paint and creating graphics & gifs, crafts and creations, crochet NUT!! Gardening. Gemstones!!--one of my downfalls {blush}. Hours spent at my kitchen table over coffee in endless conversation, I LOVE fall!!
Italian food and heritage, and I'm finally trying to learn some Italian--it's tough!! Long long drives to nowhere in particular is a favorite kind of day. Love to mosy around the city parks, museums and zoos. Mom & Pop diners, MYSPACE FRIENDS!!! You've all enriched my life so much and I LOVE YA!!! Our pets ~"the kids", PickQuick Burgers--THE BEST burgers in the world!! Picnics at Pt. Defiance Park, poetry & quotes, POLITICS--talk radio junkie!! VACATIONS!!!! Walks...long ones, hand in hand, especially during fall. The ocean has always been my heaven....and I love a good ghost story. I have a couple of my own.
Um . . . . and being the ridiculous MySpace addict that I am, I need two profiles {blush}. Link at bottom for Stace overkill, LOL.
I'd like to meet:
"In the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it"
~Barack Obama
Thinkers!! Those with common sense . . . . who pay attention!! Those who stand up for what is right . . . . and who speak out against WRONG!! The direction this country has been and is going is a fine example of that. So I put this to you . . . one voice, millions strong and united is a powerful thing. I think we all need to remember and heed the old adage "united we stand--divided we fall"!! And we have been falling for far too long now. If we don't wake up, then one day we just might lose this democracy. Don't ever be lulled and let yourself think it's not possible. It is."The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" ~unknown
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Music:
Very eclectic. Wide taste for 40's on up, but LOVE big 80's!! And blues!! CLAPTON--a man and his guitar, it's a beautiful thing!! Eagles, Elton, Frampton, Journey, Robert Cray, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, REO Speedwagon, Santana, Sting, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Supertramp, U2, Yes and Zepplin . . . to name only very few. The 60's & 70's songs bar none bring back the very best memories. Also a second generation Beatlemaniac.
Movies:
A few Good Men, An Officer and a Gentleman, Awakenings, Beaches, Body Heat, Coming Home, Fatal Attraction, Forrest Gump, Frances, Fried Green Tomatoes, Ghost, Men of Honor, Out of Africa, Rainman, Shawshank Redemption, Steel Magnolias, Story of Us, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather I&II, The Way We Were, The Wizard Of Oz, Unfaithful, Urban Cowboy, Vanilla Sky, We Were Soldiers, What Lies Beneath....and SO many more
Television:
AMC, Dicovery and History Channel, I love Biography, Lifetime movies, Turner Classics. 48 hrs. Mystery,
I still love Little House. Truthfully TV's usually just in the background cuz I'm stuck on the COMPUTER!! -- MySpace Baby!!
Books:
Biography, History, Mystery, Poltical, Spiritual,
True Crime.
Right now
I'm re-reading
"Head Shot" . . .
about the most gruesome double homicide in Tacoma's history. I went through school with one of the accused!!Chris St. Pierre, who was a sweetheart of a guy when we knew him, with what we all thought was a bright future ahead of him. That was not to be. His brother Paul is on the cover of the book. Whom it's been said over and over by the kids who grew up around here, was just never really right in the head. --"A few clowns short of a circus".After lengthy and sensational trials both Paul and Chris were convicted on 2 counts of first degree aggravated murder and sentenced to life in prison. Only days after arriving at prison Paul committed suicide by swallowing feces covered toilet paper. Chris, I found out, was paroled recently after 20 yrs. and has MS. It turned out one of his murder convictions was reversed through appeals in the late 1980's.So the story goes . . . . his brother was an acid soaked lunatic-- a "gun crazy and blood thirsty" ex-Marine, who, along with his crazed and criminal minded old chum Andrew Webb pulled Chris into this with a threat over his own life if he did not go along. It's a very frightening and mind blowing tale that played out right at our back door. I was only 20 years old when this all happened. And it left it's stamp on me, on all of us!I'll never forget that summer night in 1984 when my girlfriend Kathy, who also knew Chris well, called me about the headlines in the paper. I could not believe or grasp what she was telling me . . . One night in the home Paul & Chris shared with other roomates, Paul instigates "just for the fun of it" the vicsious beating of 5 foot
110 lb. Damon Wells, 20, (a friend of a friend) with a toilet seat lid to near unconcious. Then driving Wells to an isolated beach and slitting his throat as he was trying to escape . . . of course causing him to bleed to death while they stood and watched. They then proceed to take a few more stabs at him, throwing the knife into his back.
At the home a few months later, in a delusional and acid induced state, Paul shoots another man in the head at point blank range. 22 yr. old John Achord, a kid he invited to party at the house after the Rush concert in the Tacoma Dome. Both victims were virtual strangers to and innocent bystanders who happened upon this drug crazed maniac. This was just blood sport. Paul then sets about pulling his little brother into rendering and hiding the evidence, to which Chris complied under threat and fear for his life.As the weeks wore on, Paul was spiraling out of control. Then one morning in early June, caught up in a petty argument with Andrew Webb over a $7. debt, he winds up shooting and severely wounding Webb in the kitchen of the house. Webb survived. The police were summoned, Paul was aprehended, arrested and taken to jail. It was then that witnesses and neighbors felt safe enough to begin calling Crime Stoppers hotline about what they knew and the rumors they'd heard. A search warrant was issued and Chris sang like a bird. Telling the cops all, leading them to all the evidence--thinking that his cooperation would somehow prove he didn't commit any murder and he would be off the hook. He was arrested that day for rendering criminal evidence. Andrew Webb was arrested for murder in the hospital a few days later. The whole sordid story hit the papers the next day or so. Needless to say the citizens of Tacoma were in utter and absolute shock.I lived and still live only blocks from the house where both these murders occcured. Murders that were revealed to be so abhorant in nature that it just rocks
the senses . . . . stomping on the limbs of one corpse, breaking them so the body would fit into the shallow grave they'd dug. Then digging up and beheading the other corpse, dumping the head in a cement filled bucket off one of the city bridges into Puyallup River.I am still hinged and UN-hinged by it all these years later. It was the most shocking thing to ever happen in this city. And to be reading the story in detail twenty some years later is something else. It is a very comprehensive and well executed writing. It just so happened awhile back that an old friend from the neighborhood was over for coffee and chat, and somewhere along the way we got to talking about the long ago St. Pierre murders. Later I found myself Googling it and was utterly amazed to learn there was a book out on the case. I've been glued to it. Very eerie stuff!! And so grim. In the end though, it is just a profoundly tragic and sad story. But truly interesting reading as it goes into the legal twists and turns and corrupt tricks of the prosecutor that were allowed to play out. It was Andrew Webb who did the actual knifing, but he saw to it that he got to the prosecutor first, struck a deal, and in his statement laid waste to Chris--revenge for spilling the beans.
I recommend this and other books by Burl Barer for true crime readers.
And I believe
"Chasing Ghosts"
by Paul Rieckoff is a must read for all!!
Heroes:
My beautiful beautiful mom. Who became an angel in heaven
May 6, 1997.
I still miss her each and every day SO much. Our mom, her whole life was just always as cute as a button, moxie, moxie, moxie. Her smile was a sight to behold and lit our world. Her energy was boundless, and contagious. The way she lived her life with such strength, poise and grace in the face of much adversity is my example to live by. The most selfless soul, her concern was always for the less fortunate among us --"the underdogs". Her empathy was her most extraordinary quality. SO full of wisdom, the way she mentored was her greatest gift. She could get you to smile no matter how dark things might seem...even if that meant her jumping up to dance a jig to get you to laugh, which she did many times. And when she loved you, you KNEW it, it didn't have to be spoken. She loved to collect frogs.....
There were frogs looking at you from every corner of the house, but never a prince in the bunch. She could eat ANYTHING and never gain an ounce!! So tiny, she only wore a size 1-2. She always-always took such tender care of me, and we went through so much together...we had the kind of bond that not even death can break. The day God took her home our brightest light went out, and I do my best each day to carry on with all she instilled and put faith in me to do and I do it with her smile in my heart. I love you mom.
