A Great Monday Morning Story

Who doesn't like the exhilaration of a good first hand ghost story over your morning Starbucks venti beverage? One of my manager's at work just spent her birthday weekend at the famous Manresa Castle in Port Townsend where it appears she may have interacted with the ghost of Kate.

The Pacific Northwest has always been a turf of paranormal activities, from UFO sightings to the famous Sasquatch. You however seldom hear about ghosts, perhaps because of the "recent arrival" of settlers in the area. Enters the Manresa Castle, one of the prime destinations for paranormal investigators and curious folks like me.

According to the lore (widely disputed mind you as a staff creation) a monk hung himself in the tourette and that a woman named Kate, in a fit of great dismay threw herself out the window. In addition to this, the castle may have been at one time an annex to a neighboring hospital. Anyways my coworker went there over the weekend armed with trepidation and an EMF detector.

On her last visit there, she and her daughter had taken pictures, developed in two different location, which produced great orbs and a potential Man in the window image which I personally attributed to matrixing (brain trying to make an image from textures.) Nevertheless, the pictures looked quite compelling. This year as she returned she spent a night in "Kate's Room" and began asking questions to the invisible inhabitants of the room. After a few questions,  she was ensured that she would not be harmed that night. I don't think she was prepared for what would come. Apparently, sometime in the middle of the night, she was awoken by the EMF detector going wild and the sound of singing somewhere in the distant corner of the room.

While its no where near to a full fledged apparition, I think that this amounts to a quite perturbing night.

Kudos to you Marie for not running out of the room screaming like a Banshee. I am not sure I could!

Eat your Vegetables! An Unfortunate Saga



I am losing the battle. Every day, my daughter is becoming more and more addicted to carbs and sugars and leaving meat and vegetables in the plate. Some people say that kids mirror their parents in terms of diversifying their diets. Big fat liars! Today it was a chicken burrito with chicken, rice and of course cheese. Half way through the meal, it became clear that there was too much chicken and that the cilantro has graduated to vegetable of amazing powers.

I confess, I recall eating ground beef with potatoes and rice many times over my childhood.... Potatoes are still vegetables, right? I think that to the mother who enjoys gardening so very much, the reality of a picky eater may be more hurtful than to most urban folks. The joys and flavors of the earth are certainly absent in the genes of my offspring. I think that what perhaps concerns me the most is that my daughter seems to care little for things which have not been heavily refined or harvested within 100 miles of the house. Fruits however do get asylum from this entire discussion, as their sugars surely must come from cookies or ice cream trees onto which they must grow.

I for once had faith in the school system and the Disney Channel. America is spending millions of dollars against child obesity, trying to have conversations around portion sizes and what is healthy, still the appeal of rice in a wrap of bread prevails. At that point, I get mad. I get angry at her for not taking care of herself and disregarding the stern warnings, I get mad at McDonalds for making sure that their extent of veggies limits itself to pickles and empty iceberg lettuce, I get mad at carbs for being so ridiculously delicious and I get mad at myself for not being more clever about this. Mad. Mad. Mad. Carb Fury.

And then I realize that the stress is probably more harmful. Deep breaths and a moment later, dinner is over and we're begging for dessert. Ugh.