Sooooo...
I've delivered all but a few whatsits of cookies. I showed Justin how to set up pages. I've seen the magazine proof.
And la.
All-Around Smart
You are all-around smart. Essentially, that means that you are a good combination of your own knowledge and experience, along with having learned through instruction - and you are equally as good with theoretical things as you are with real-world, applied things. You have a well-rounded brain.
20% applied intelligence
0% learned intelligence
Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com
It's hot in this house. Yesterday, when I was sacking the cookies, I had a hard time keeping the partially-melted chocolate chips from smearing chocolate all over the tops of the bags. It was p*ssing me off, that these chocolate chips were still half-melted even though they'd been "cooling" on the rack for a few hours. It is that hot in this house.
My mum thinks that keeping the house at 80 degrees F downstairs (meaning, it's 90 degrees F upstairs) is fine because then the energy bill will be lower. It's ridiculous. In the winter, she has no problems with turning on the heat, but come warm weather, she becomes The Grinch Who Won't Turn On The Air Conditioning. After a while of this sort of temperature, I become limp and extreeeeemely cranky and beg for the A/C. She always tells me to turn on the fans - which I always do anyway - and my response is always, "All that does is circulate hot air!" Fortunately, she's had to spend some time upstairs, to work on my prom dress (the sewing machine is in my room, lucky me), so now she knows how miserable it is to be upstairs during warm weather - and so she's more sympathetic now.
You might wonder how I'll survive in New Mexico, since I'll be "roughing it" in a platform tent that definitely won't have A/C, but you'd be surprised by how lovely the weather is up at Philmont. At night, it goes down to 40 or 50 degrees F - sweater weather, essentially. The daytime temperature usually hovers somewhere in the 80's, but there is absolutely no humidity. The dry air makes everything better. And there's always a cooling breeze. Compare that to H-town, whose summer temperatures rise to the 90's and sometimes the 100's (trust me on that: every day last summer, since we were filming outside, I checked the temperature forecast to make sure we wouldn't be filming in dangerously hot weather) and whose summer heat is enhanced by the high humidity. The humidity is everything, really.
Speaking of Philmont, I've been doing a little research. I love learning the history of places where I'll be staying for extended periods of time - i.e., SJS - so I've been digging around for information about Philmont and the town on whose outskirts it lies, Cimarron. Most of the Philmont history is pretty bland, much to my disappointment, but the Cimarron information is absolutely fascinating.
For example, the St. James Hotel. It's a very old hotel about five minutes from Philmont and that lies a bit outside of the centre of Cimarron (which is a very tiny town that's just big enough to have its own school). Ever since I first came to Philmont - in 1999, I think? - I've heard about the haunted St. James Hotel. I never really took its being haunted seriously until two years ago, in 2004 when I was at Philmont as a Bronco. The other girl in the Bronco group, Cristina, visited the St. James Hotel on the day off (Wednesday) and came back and showed me photos she'd taken with her digital camera.
"All of the photos are messed up," she said, fiddling with her camera. "They say that the ghosts mess with all cameras so that you can't really see anything, and it's true. Look, all these photos? You see that white hazy stuff in front of every single one of them?"
I took her camera and went through a dozen or so of the photos she'd taken. She was right: anything that I might have seen in those images was obscured by a wisp of white haziness.
"Maybe it's the camera," I said.
Cristina shook her head. "No, my camera works fine! See these other pictures I've taken since then? They're all fine. You see? The hotel really is haunted!"
Anyway. Now that I'll be staying in the Cimarron area for a little more than two months, I've been rooting up information about the area, and the St. James Hotel has quite a few stories surrounding it. It was founded in 1872 by Abraham Lincoln's personal chef, Henri Lambert, who had gone west to hunt gold after the president was assassinated. Instead of making his fortune in gold, he established a good restaurant in Elizabethtown but was soon persuaded to move to Cimarron in 1872. The St. James Hotel was originally a saloon, but Lambert later converted it into a hotel as well and called it "Lambert's Inn."
According to my research, the hotel and saloon were patronised by a roster of A-list Western stars, since the saloon was such a popular stop for many cowboys, traders, miners, and other travellers in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range (a part of the Rocky Mountains, of course). (In fact, Cimarron lay on a well-travelled trail: the famed Tooth of Time, which lies on Philmont property, was a welcome landmark to travellers, as it meant that there lay ahead only a two-/three-week journey to Santa Fe.) With all the traffic the St. James received, and much of it from vagabonds and famous gunman, it's no surprise that there were 26 recorded murders at the Hotel - and doubtless there were many that went unrecorded. This website says...Many well-known people stayed there over the years. Wyatt Earp, his brother Morgan, and their wives spent three nights at the St. James on their way to Arizona. Jesse James stayed there several times, always in room 14, signing the registry with his alias, R.H. Howard. Jesse James' nemesis and would be killer, Bob Ford, also stayed at the St. James.
Buffalo Bill Cody, who was a goat ranch manager for Lucien Maxwell for a short time, met Annie Oakley at the hotel and began to plan and rehearse their Wild West Show. When Henry's son Fred was born, Buffalo Bill nicknamed him "Cyclone Dick" because he was born during a blustery snow storm, and he was soon asked to be Fred's godfather. As Fred Lambert grew older, Buffalo Bill would be one of the first to give him instruction in the use of guns. Fred Lambert would spend his entire life upholding the law as a Cimarron Sheriff, a member of the tribal police and a territorial marshal. When Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley left Cimarron to take their show on the road, they took an entire village of Indians from the Cimarron area with them.
Other notables who have stayed at the historic inn include Bat Masterson, train robber Black Jack Tom Ketchum, General Sheridan, Kit Carson, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, Clay Allison, Pat Garret, artist Fredrick Remington, Governor Lew Wallace, and writer Zane Grey. [Note: I thought that I'd add that legend says that Clay Allison, a famed gunman, once danced naked on the bar and that Lew Wallace wrote part of Ben-Hur while staying at the inn.]
The development of railroads led to a dwindling in business for the St. James Hotel, but it's remained standing. From the outside, it looks like a large, shabby adobe building and is rather plain, but the interior is quite lavish. The original floorboards are still in there, and part of the original saloon ceiling remains in what is now the dining room, with 22 bullet holes still intact (the entirety of the original saloon ceiling had more than 400 bullet holes!). Antiques furnish every room, and the original furniture from the living room - built to be extra strong, thanks to the unruliness of the guests - is still there.
And the ghosts are still there. I've found a wealth of information about the ghosts that haunt the St. James Hotel. The Hotel is a popular spot among ghost hunters and psychics, so naturally they've all come up with different "readings." Below, I've compiled a list of the ones I've come across most often in my research...
1. T.J. Wright
Supposedly, the ghost of Thomas James Wright haunts Room 18. He and some others were playing poker in the Hotel, and eventually the game came down to T.J. Wright and the then-owner of the Hotel. The owner bet the hotel - and T.J. won it. After the game, T.J. was heading toward his room when he was shot in the back. He managed to drag himself into his room, where he bled to death and was found in the morning.Room 18 is so malevolently haunted that no one is allowed into this room. The door is kept padlocked and the window shades are always drawn. If someone enters the room, T.J.'s angry ghost becomes enraged. Hotel staff has reported that when anyone goes into the room, horrible and bad things happen in the hotel. In fact, before permanently closing the room for overnight guests and visitors, over 20 mysterious deaths occurred in this very room. To try and appease T.J.'s discontented spirit, a bottle of whiskey is kept in his room. Only the hotel owner has a key to the padlock on the door, so every Halloween he enters and fills up T.J.'s shot glass. Surprisingly, the shot of whiskey is gone by morning. This has been a ritual for many years and recently, on All Hallows Eve, the shot glass mysteriously appeared on the floor in the hall just in front of Room 18, waiting for it to be filled.
- http://www.travellady.com/Issues/November05/1981Spirits.htm
2. Mary Lambert
Mary Lambert was Henri Lambert's wife; her ghost occupies Room 17. Unlike T.J.'s malevolent ghost, Mary's ghost is a kind and gentle one. She gave birth to several of her children in the hotel, and in 1926, she died there. Her room continues to be let out to patrons, and there her presence is supposedly detected in many ways. For example, if the window in her room is left open, there is a tapping there that does not stop until the window is closed, and at random periods of time, her rose-scented perfume inexplicably wafts about the room.
One patron reported staying in another room (one on the same floor as Rooms 17 and 18) and could not sleep at nights. Finally, she consulted a psychic who was visiting the hotel. The psychic found that the spirits of T.J. Wright and Mary Lambert were engaging in a supernatural struggle every night in that room: T.J. was trying to possess the patron's soul, and Mary was protecting her. The patron asked the psychic what might happen if she remained in the rooom; the reply was that T.J. might eventually win the struggle. So the patron moved to a different room, and she could finally sleep at nights.
All of the above reports concerning Mary Lambert's ghost support the hotel staff's belief that the spirit is continuing to watch over the hotel and the people it houses, just as Mary Lambert used to do.
3. "Little Imp"
This is the ghost of a dwarf-like old man who has been nicknamed "Little Imp" by the hotel staff. He plays tricks especially on the kitchen staff, and everyone blames him when a staffer finds something that has been missing for a while and that has turned up in the most unusual place.
4. Johnnie Lambert
This is the two-and-a-half-year-old son of Henri and Mary Lambert. He has been sighted running around the hotel on numerous occasions. Once, a staffer saw a little golden-curled boy wearing a white nightdress spinning bottles at the bar. The staffer asked the boy to go upstairs to his room, but the boy looked up at him - and the staffer saw that half of his face was scarred with grotesque burns - and disappeared into the floor. Later, the staffer discovered that little Johnnie Lambert had run into somebody who was carrying a plate of hot food and suffered fatal burns.
5. Other Hauntings
Several guests have reported looking into a mirror in the dining room and seeing in the mirror a friendly-looking cowboy. But upon turning around and looking about the room, they would find that there was no cowboy behind them.
A large crystal chandelier would turn itself on after the hotel owner switched it off for the night, even though she would hear nobody approaching the light switch (apparently, the floorboards creak loudly enough to wake the dead, pun intended). After several nights of this, the owner gave up and the chandelier has been left on ever since.
And, of course, there are the normal paranormal features. Cold spots. Unpredictable computers and telephones. Items randomly falling off of walls and tables. Patrons' feelings of being watched by unseen eyes. And, as Cristina found out firsthand, cameras often work erratically or not at all.
I personally don't believe in ghost stories, but they're enjoyable to read and difficult to forget. In all honesty, I'm delighted that the St. James Hotel has such a rich history that it can boast all of these stories more than I'm delighted that the St. James Hotel does boast all these stories. Yes, there's a difference.
At any rate. The St. James Hotel, I'm certain, is the landmark of the greatest historical significance in Cimarron, so I'm not sure what else there is to research about the area. But I'll dig around some more. Extremely local-ised history - that is: for example, I'm not interested in Houston as a city, but I take interest in the establishment of local neighbourhoods and other specific areas - is great stuff.
And la.
All-Around Smart
You are all-around smart. Essentially, that means that you are a good combination of your own knowledge and experience, along with having learned through instruction - and you are equally as good with theoretical things as you are with real-world, applied things. You have a well-rounded brain.
20% applied intelligence
0% learned intelligence
Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com
It's hot in this house. Yesterday, when I was sacking the cookies, I had a hard time keeping the partially-melted chocolate chips from smearing chocolate all over the tops of the bags. It was p*ssing me off, that these chocolate chips were still half-melted even though they'd been "cooling" on the rack for a few hours. It is that hot in this house.
My mum thinks that keeping the house at 80 degrees F downstairs (meaning, it's 90 degrees F upstairs) is fine because then the energy bill will be lower. It's ridiculous. In the winter, she has no problems with turning on the heat, but come warm weather, she becomes The Grinch Who Won't Turn On The Air Conditioning. After a while of this sort of temperature, I become limp and extreeeeemely cranky and beg for the A/C. She always tells me to turn on the fans - which I always do anyway - and my response is always, "All that does is circulate hot air!" Fortunately, she's had to spend some time upstairs, to work on my prom dress (the sewing machine is in my room, lucky me), so now she knows how miserable it is to be upstairs during warm weather - and so she's more sympathetic now.
You might wonder how I'll survive in New Mexico, since I'll be "roughing it" in a platform tent that definitely won't have A/C, but you'd be surprised by how lovely the weather is up at Philmont. At night, it goes down to 40 or 50 degrees F - sweater weather, essentially. The daytime temperature usually hovers somewhere in the 80's, but there is absolutely no humidity. The dry air makes everything better. And there's always a cooling breeze. Compare that to H-town, whose summer temperatures rise to the 90's and sometimes the 100's (trust me on that: every day last summer, since we were filming outside, I checked the temperature forecast to make sure we wouldn't be filming in dangerously hot weather) and whose summer heat is enhanced by the high humidity. The humidity is everything, really.
Speaking of Philmont, I've been doing a little research. I love learning the history of places where I'll be staying for extended periods of time - i.e., SJS - so I've been digging around for information about Philmont and the town on whose outskirts it lies, Cimarron. Most of the Philmont history is pretty bland, much to my disappointment, but the Cimarron information is absolutely fascinating.
For example, the St. James Hotel. It's a very old hotel about five minutes from Philmont and that lies a bit outside of the centre of Cimarron (which is a very tiny town that's just big enough to have its own school). Ever since I first came to Philmont - in 1999, I think? - I've heard about the haunted St. James Hotel. I never really took its being haunted seriously until two years ago, in 2004 when I was at Philmont as a Bronco. The other girl in the Bronco group, Cristina, visited the St. James Hotel on the day off (Wednesday) and came back and showed me photos she'd taken with her digital camera.
"All of the photos are messed up," she said, fiddling with her camera. "They say that the ghosts mess with all cameras so that you can't really see anything, and it's true. Look, all these photos? You see that white hazy stuff in front of every single one of them?"
I took her camera and went through a dozen or so of the photos she'd taken. She was right: anything that I might have seen in those images was obscured by a wisp of white haziness.
"Maybe it's the camera," I said.
Cristina shook her head. "No, my camera works fine! See these other pictures I've taken since then? They're all fine. You see? The hotel really is haunted!"
Anyway. Now that I'll be staying in the Cimarron area for a little more than two months, I've been rooting up information about the area, and the St. James Hotel has quite a few stories surrounding it. It was founded in 1872 by Abraham Lincoln's personal chef, Henri Lambert, who had gone west to hunt gold after the president was assassinated. Instead of making his fortune in gold, he established a good restaurant in Elizabethtown but was soon persuaded to move to Cimarron in 1872. The St. James Hotel was originally a saloon, but Lambert later converted it into a hotel as well and called it "Lambert's Inn."
According to my research, the hotel and saloon were patronised by a roster of A-list Western stars, since the saloon was such a popular stop for many cowboys, traders, miners, and other travellers in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range (a part of the Rocky Mountains, of course). (In fact, Cimarron lay on a well-travelled trail: the famed Tooth of Time, which lies on Philmont property, was a welcome landmark to travellers, as it meant that there lay ahead only a two-/three-week journey to Santa Fe.) With all the traffic the St. James received, and much of it from vagabonds and famous gunman, it's no surprise that there were 26 recorded murders at the Hotel - and doubtless there were many that went unrecorded. This website says...Many well-known people stayed there over the years. Wyatt Earp, his brother Morgan, and their wives spent three nights at the St. James on their way to Arizona. Jesse James stayed there several times, always in room 14, signing the registry with his alias, R.H. Howard. Jesse James' nemesis and would be killer, Bob Ford, also stayed at the St. James.
Buffalo Bill Cody, who was a goat ranch manager for Lucien Maxwell for a short time, met Annie Oakley at the hotel and began to plan and rehearse their Wild West Show. When Henry's son Fred was born, Buffalo Bill nicknamed him "Cyclone Dick" because he was born during a blustery snow storm, and he was soon asked to be Fred's godfather. As Fred Lambert grew older, Buffalo Bill would be one of the first to give him instruction in the use of guns. Fred Lambert would spend his entire life upholding the law as a Cimarron Sheriff, a member of the tribal police and a territorial marshal. When Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley left Cimarron to take their show on the road, they took an entire village of Indians from the Cimarron area with them.
Other notables who have stayed at the historic inn include Bat Masterson, train robber Black Jack Tom Ketchum, General Sheridan, Kit Carson, Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, Clay Allison, Pat Garret, artist Fredrick Remington, Governor Lew Wallace, and writer Zane Grey. [Note: I thought that I'd add that legend says that Clay Allison, a famed gunman, once danced naked on the bar and that Lew Wallace wrote part of Ben-Hur while staying at the inn.]
The development of railroads led to a dwindling in business for the St. James Hotel, but it's remained standing. From the outside, it looks like a large, shabby adobe building and is rather plain, but the interior is quite lavish. The original floorboards are still in there, and part of the original saloon ceiling remains in what is now the dining room, with 22 bullet holes still intact (the entirety of the original saloon ceiling had more than 400 bullet holes!). Antiques furnish every room, and the original furniture from the living room - built to be extra strong, thanks to the unruliness of the guests - is still there.
And the ghosts are still there. I've found a wealth of information about the ghosts that haunt the St. James Hotel. The Hotel is a popular spot among ghost hunters and psychics, so naturally they've all come up with different "readings." Below, I've compiled a list of the ones I've come across most often in my research...
1. T.J. Wright
Supposedly, the ghost of Thomas James Wright haunts Room 18. He and some others were playing poker in the Hotel, and eventually the game came down to T.J. Wright and the then-owner of the Hotel. The owner bet the hotel - and T.J. won it. After the game, T.J. was heading toward his room when he was shot in the back. He managed to drag himself into his room, where he bled to death and was found in the morning.Room 18 is so malevolently haunted that no one is allowed into this room. The door is kept padlocked and the window shades are always drawn. If someone enters the room, T.J.'s angry ghost becomes enraged. Hotel staff has reported that when anyone goes into the room, horrible and bad things happen in the hotel. In fact, before permanently closing the room for overnight guests and visitors, over 20 mysterious deaths occurred in this very room. To try and appease T.J.'s discontented spirit, a bottle of whiskey is kept in his room. Only the hotel owner has a key to the padlock on the door, so every Halloween he enters and fills up T.J.'s shot glass. Surprisingly, the shot of whiskey is gone by morning. This has been a ritual for many years and recently, on All Hallows Eve, the shot glass mysteriously appeared on the floor in the hall just in front of Room 18, waiting for it to be filled.
- http://www.travellady.com/Issues/November05/1981Spirits.htm
2. Mary Lambert
Mary Lambert was Henri Lambert's wife; her ghost occupies Room 17. Unlike T.J.'s malevolent ghost, Mary's ghost is a kind and gentle one. She gave birth to several of her children in the hotel, and in 1926, she died there. Her room continues to be let out to patrons, and there her presence is supposedly detected in many ways. For example, if the window in her room is left open, there is a tapping there that does not stop until the window is closed, and at random periods of time, her rose-scented perfume inexplicably wafts about the room.
One patron reported staying in another room (one on the same floor as Rooms 17 and 18) and could not sleep at nights. Finally, she consulted a psychic who was visiting the hotel. The psychic found that the spirits of T.J. Wright and Mary Lambert were engaging in a supernatural struggle every night in that room: T.J. was trying to possess the patron's soul, and Mary was protecting her. The patron asked the psychic what might happen if she remained in the rooom; the reply was that T.J. might eventually win the struggle. So the patron moved to a different room, and she could finally sleep at nights.
All of the above reports concerning Mary Lambert's ghost support the hotel staff's belief that the spirit is continuing to watch over the hotel and the people it houses, just as Mary Lambert used to do.
3. "Little Imp"
This is the ghost of a dwarf-like old man who has been nicknamed "Little Imp" by the hotel staff. He plays tricks especially on the kitchen staff, and everyone blames him when a staffer finds something that has been missing for a while and that has turned up in the most unusual place.
4. Johnnie Lambert
This is the two-and-a-half-year-old son of Henri and Mary Lambert. He has been sighted running around the hotel on numerous occasions. Once, a staffer saw a little golden-curled boy wearing a white nightdress spinning bottles at the bar. The staffer asked the boy to go upstairs to his room, but the boy looked up at him - and the staffer saw that half of his face was scarred with grotesque burns - and disappeared into the floor. Later, the staffer discovered that little Johnnie Lambert had run into somebody who was carrying a plate of hot food and suffered fatal burns.
5. Other Hauntings
Several guests have reported looking into a mirror in the dining room and seeing in the mirror a friendly-looking cowboy. But upon turning around and looking about the room, they would find that there was no cowboy behind them.
A large crystal chandelier would turn itself on after the hotel owner switched it off for the night, even though she would hear nobody approaching the light switch (apparently, the floorboards creak loudly enough to wake the dead, pun intended). After several nights of this, the owner gave up and the chandelier has been left on ever since.
And, of course, there are the normal paranormal features. Cold spots. Unpredictable computers and telephones. Items randomly falling off of walls and tables. Patrons' feelings of being watched by unseen eyes. And, as Cristina found out firsthand, cameras often work erratically or not at all.
I personally don't believe in ghost stories, but they're enjoyable to read and difficult to forget. In all honesty, I'm delighted that the St. James Hotel has such a rich history that it can boast all of these stories more than I'm delighted that the St. James Hotel does boast all these stories. Yes, there's a difference.
At any rate. The St. James Hotel, I'm certain, is the landmark of the greatest historical significance in Cimarron, so I'm not sure what else there is to research about the area. But I'll dig around some more. Extremely local-ised history - that is: for example, I'm not interested in Houston as a city, but I take interest in the establishment of local neighbourhoods and other specific areas - is great stuff.