I hope the gray-scale will melt away into Oz

11/28/06
Georgia receiving military training from NATO. Not yet joined, however, it is in serious consideration.

1/11/07
Brazil's economy expected to grow by an annual increase of 4%, Lula's hoping for 5%. Federal response to gang/drug-dealer violence promised to Rio and SP.

12/3/06
The Man In the Road

I am a Californian girl through and through. Not because I'm some kind of beach betty, but because I have friends and family all the way from Mendocino county to San Diego, and even into Baja California. I lived in Los Angeles for a long time, but some of my closest friends are located in Northern California. As a result I have had more car trips via the I-5 than I can count. There was once a period where I refused to take the I-5. It always creeped me out for some reason.

Once I was taking a trip to Santa Cruz with my boyfriend (now ex). I told him that we should take the 101 (less creepy), which he did not agree with because he was convinced that I-5 would be faster; I relented. I drove from San Pedro to wherever Magic Mountain is, then we switched (I refused to drive over the Grapevine). We ascended and descended the Grapevine without event, and I began to fall asleep. I awoke to hearing my boyfriend say "What the hell?" I was sleepily opening my eyes when I saw in the middle of the road a fuzzy figure of an old man. I barely had a chance to focus my eyes before my boyfriend began to swerve to the side of the road to avoid hitting him. He pulled off to the side and came to a stop. He asked me if I saw the man in the road, I nodded my head. We both got out of the car to go back and find the man to take him out of harms way. We didn't find him. What we found instead was a puff of mist, like a cloud, hovering above the road directly in the spot where we had seen the man.

My boyfriend had NEVER believed in ghosts before that incident.

12/08/06
The Stereo

When I was a little little girl we had an old analog stereo, you could only turn it on by twisting a knob. This stereo would come by itself only when I was in the room; I was too little to be scared but old enough to remember. The stereo was low enough that I could have reached it so I took the wrap for turning it on every time.

At one point we were moving to a new house and just about everything was packed up. The stereo wasn't in a box but it was unplugged and ready to be loaded in the car the next morning. My entire bedroom was packed so I was sleeping on the couch in the living room. In the middle of the night the stereo came on full blast when my mom came into the room and realized that there was no way I could have turned it on, 1) I was still on the couch groggy from sleep, 2) and most importantly, THE STEREO WAS UNPLUGGED.

My mother addressed the entity directly and told it to leave me alone. As a result, I was never bothered by it again.