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If Your Going to Heaven is a new rough cut of some Vaden creativity. It's not even finished yet, I think. Anyhoo, just wanted to share. Go get some growl... If you're goin' to heaven
and you think you know the way
please show me the right direction
and I'll follow you
I won't let you get away

And if you're heart is sad and heavy
you hide your face behind your hands
but if you take a chance and let me
I'll follow you
I will always be your man

You know I don't need your attention
I don't need your pity or your grief
I'm not a slave to your affection
I'm a slave to your belief

So if you're goin' to heaven
say you won't leave me behind
'cause without you I'm as helpless
as a little child
god I need you by my side...

It's frustrating that it takes me well into Sunday before I feel like the weekend is starting... when actually it's almost over. EL and saw the new MATRIX flic yesterday. It was entertaining. There was less story that the first, but more action. The CG eye candy was impressive, but almost too impressive. I liked it a lot... I felt like it was worth my admission price. That's actually saying a lot with movies these days. We had a great evening together. We went shopping afterwards and stopped for drinks before dinner. It was an evening of just us out on the town. We haven't really done that in a while. Today is lazy... just the way I like it. Oh yeah, my photo op to the park was kinda cool yesterday. I learned a lot about fighting exposure issues with the harsh mid-day sun. I took about 65 photos while I was there and ended up only keeping 10 or so... and of those ten, I'd say only 2 are really worth keeping... but it was what it was... a learning experience. Here is my favorite of the bunch:





Click on the thumbnail for full res only if you want it... it's almost 3MB and my server is ass-slow.

Trying to find beauty in urban downtown Houston is often challenging. Every time I look at this building I think of what it would be like to chill in that little room on top. How do ya book that thing?





I'm off to the park.

My Saturday morning starts at the center of a sunstar and my burry vision and cloudy head from broken sleep and what feels like a broken neck at not helping my ability to decide which arm to explore. EL continues to work on the house... sanding... painting... prepping for showing. I have work left over from yesterday that I need to turn in to my boss. I have a stack of bills to pay and some documents to read through before close. The sun is out and the park down the street is calling for me to bring my camera and look for mischief. There are scores of partially read books on the shelves that line one wall of my home office... they've almost all been neglected to a various degree and all offer some outlet to apportion some time. Decisions shouldn't be something I should have to contend with on a weekend morning. I want to think about nothing and do absolutes nothing. Let the nothing begin.

The leading cause of office injuries in the United States...

cube burn.

Holy shit balls Batman! I was over at the new Burden Brothers site this afternoon... and I loves me some Burden Brothers... and I realized at that very instant that my head has been up my ass. That sounds odd at first, but it's the truth. I started this blog on May 12, 2002... Mother's Day. My 1 year blog-a-versary came and went when I was at my mother's house and I completely missed it. It's just like real birthdays when you get older... the kinda come and go and no one cares. So, here I am... 1403 entries and 2973 comments later, this blog is still a bunch of random shit that dribbles from my brain inconsistently. Yee fuckin' haw! Happy belated blog-a-versary to me. I feel like treating myself to a Miller Lite and some Burden Brothers rock-n-roll.

She posts!

Planning a wedding with events in multiple states and purchasing a new house - what a whirl wind of events! I just finished the all hand made (with love) invitations. I still need to complete the RSVP cards and the enclosed Itinerary of Events. Postage Stamps, Cake, Flowers, bridal dresses…the list is endless. Add in that I am stuck at the current house listening to what I can only assume to be a Latin style music with a house full of min. wage tile guys that I can’t communicate with because we do not speak the same language…toss in a lot of emotional baggage from the sellers of our new house and WAHLAA! you have one flustered Erin Lynn. So how is your day going???

It really never ceases to amaze me how quickly the majority will sell their personal convictions to cover their asses... take someone else's work or thoughts and make them their own with no credit or royalty (regardless of what that may be)... skew the description of fact to mold the recipients perception to suit them best without regard to how this may detriment others. When the goin' gets tough, the scared stab the capable and use plagiarism and lies as stepping stones to a more secure vantage point. Throw in a buzz word or two plucked from a trade rag or vendor seminar and you have the Corporate America I live in. People suck and they can fuck off. I mean that in the best possible way. Really, I do.

I'm floating in gluttony. It's a guilty pleasure... almost a high. There is a name for culinary extacy and it is Morton's. Today marks two months of engagement, but that isn't why we dove into the gastronomical decadence of my favorite restaurant in Houston. The “tile guys” came today. They tore up carpet and padding from the front portion of the house we lease to start putting down ceramic tile in preparation for the new, yet-to-step-forward tenants my landlord anxiously awaits. The “tile guys” treated EL to nine and a half hours of hammering, drilling, scraping, sliding, loud conversation in foreign tongue, and overall invasion of serenity and privacy. So, I think some pampering is in order at a minimum. Michael and I had a couple deep pints of Guinness after work with some guys that work in his office. My day, albeit busy, was not unpleasant and, by comparison to hers, was uneventful. She gets a five star restaurant and full body massage. It's only fair really.

I've really been into capturing window washers lately. I like how they stick out in a scene... like they belong, but not.





To Thai or not to Thai... that really was the question last night. I made my usual attempt at ordering something too hot for human consumption and they retorted with the usual we-don't-want-anyone-sending-food-back-so-we'll-make-it-mild-like-non-dairy-creamer dish. A few episodes of CSI later and EL and I were in slumberland. Today's beginning was especially hard to motivate. I was late for work... well, later than usual. Most of the day has been hazy. It's seems to be a blur from one meeting to the next. I work on network issues in between and during, but it has lost satisfaction. It's sad really. Lunch with Michael was pretty cool. He and I always talk about cool shit. It's surface conversation with hidden depth. You have to hear what is behind the words to see meaning because on top it's just chit-chat. I find great irony in how similar the circles we run in tend to be... it's good to have him back in my regular life. We kinda lost touch for a little bit. You guys remember me writing about the tree that I dug on the way to work the other day and made a mental note in invisible ink to return to it for some proper attention? Well, time constraints prevent that in the near future, but I did take the original snapshot and play with the levels a little... it's kinda surreal. Almost like my day has been thus far.

Yeah, shit happens. I worked from our office across town this afternoon. It was quiet. I was peaceful and really quiet. It was productive and the way a work environment should be... in my not so humble opinion. I just got home and had a discussion with EL about the house situation. The sellers are having all kinds of regrets about selling their house. We formed a plan of approaching this in attempt to assist them as much as we can in easing their move, but the bottom line is simple: we don't have time to find another house before we have to roll out, so we can't walk away. It funny how many times a person's perspective can change in the course of a day when you put yourself in everyone's shoes and allow yourself to be open minded and think. We need more thinkers. I ran across this at memepool and chuckled... it got a click right about the time I was thinking that we needed more thinkers. Think about that. EL is putting together the invitations that we planned on having in the mail a month ago. Our weeknights and weekends are filling rapidly with preparation as the time between now and the day gets smaller. Tick tock and the next thing you know, the time is gone. I didn't take any photographs today. Well, I did take a single photo of a tree that interests me... as fuck all boring that sounds, but the lighting wasn't right, so it'll prolly get scrapped and I that tree and I will meet again another day. Bring on the evening! Work is officially over.

There's nothing like a nine o'clock meeting to get the day off on the wrong foot, eh?

"There was a large loss of life of others as well as a large number of injuries," Powell told reporters shortly after arriving at Riyadh airport from Jordan during his tour of the Mideast. "Many other nationalities were also killed." You know, I was reading this story about the bombings in Saudi last night and it occurred to me that the verbiage coming out of Powell's mouth is exactly the same cookie cut vernacular streaming from the politicians commenting on NPR this morning (or any morning for that matter). It's as if they all send off for a teach-yourself-at-home kit that defines proper technique for delivery, intonation, and acceptable dialect. Politicians... you heard one? You've heard them all. Last night, EL and I went out to this little Italian place for dinner. On the way down the walkway toward the car, I saw what I thought was a wounded bird. It looked, from my vantage point, as if a bird had fallen from a tree and damaged it's wing. It was flopping erratically and I honestly thought it was in pain. EL and I approached to render assistance. You know, I've never seen two birds in the thick of intercourse before, so you can imagine my shock and amazement when the bird was hurt at all... just merely getting' his groove on with Mrs. Bird on my sidewalk. I liken this to that steamy sex that rolls a couple out of bed and onto the floor... yeah, they rolled out of the tree in my yard and didn't miss a thrust. It was more crow-like than sparrow or robin-ish, but how funny would it be to find this couple to be turdus migratorius? The would be thrusting thrushes... sounds like a headliner for a circus big top. When EL stopped laughing we continued on to dinner. I ran into my new boss as we entered the restaurant. There is some classic irony in living in the fourth largest city in the United States that won't stop trying to be a small town. It's a small world after all. It's cool that we're finally going to jump into some colored cash. I dig that about European currency. Speaking of things I dig... John Lienhard is a cool cat.

Tired.