hillison.com

Rob is in Iraq officially now

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Posted by Michelle on Apr 23, 2003 in Michelle

From my friend Rob:

Hey, I am Tallil, Iraq. I will be here for a while. Everything has been fine.

We are just trying to establish our office right now. The building we are in was bombed during the last gulf war and the Iraqis never rebuilt the place. Lots of work to do and we are running on generator power. Hard to get much done when it gets dark. We have the usual legal issues, plus we have been able to do some work with POWs. I will write when I chance.

I think he is here:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/tallil.htm

Tags: iraq, robert

Mosaic backsplash in progress

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Posted by Michelle on Apr 23, 2003 in Michelle

Still a bit messy and it isn’t done yet – we’ve got the first two levels of sealant down and will keep applying it until it stops absorbing. Also we are going to run a thin line of caulk in the bottom and top gap. We left that gap so the grout could expand.

And you’d have to see the rest of the kitchen to see why we used a tile with a bright blue with the countertops in a milder blue. We have a bunch of bright blue accessories in the kitchen. Plus the kitchen is huge, so the bright blue/yellow stands out.

Thanks to www.smashingtimes.com for the tile and help. I wish I lived in Dallas to visit them!

Tags: crafts & cooking, house

In my house, if you get up from the couch

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Posted by Michelle on Apr 11, 2003 in Michelle, pups & other pets

In my house, if you get up from your seat and disturb nap time, you come back to this:

They take your seat and look at you all pissed off 🙂

Tags: funny, pups & other pets

Our library is done!

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Posted by Michelle on Mar 21, 2003 in Jeff, Michelle

The make your own wallpaper experiment is done – and it looks great!

Tags: cool, house

Researchers to see who gives up ghost

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Posted by Michelle on Mar 8, 2003 in Michelle

Cool article about a group of researchers who are staking out a local historical house to see if they can get the rumored ghosts to appear.

It’s extra cool to us because we had our wedding reception at the old house. It’s a great old house with a gorgeous lawn. ….

Researchers to see who gives up ghost
Durham center invites ghostbusters to work

By ANNE BLYTHE, Staff Writer

CHAPEL HILL — There no doubt will be much spirited debate during this event. Ghost hunters plan to hole up in the historic Horace Williams house tonight to try to coax answers to mysteries that have haunted the 1840s farmhouse for nearly half a century.

The investigators — from Seven Paranormal, a nonprofit organization based in Carthage — are likely to arrive with infrared scopes, motion detectors, thermal scanners and different kinds of recorders to log anything paranormal that might happen.

Horace Williams, a frugal, eccentric philosophy professor, lived in the cozy, one-story home for the last four decades of his 82-year life and for the first four of the 20th century.

It is he, residents have said through the years, who reappears as an apparition.

Images of the thin, bespectacled man also have been reported in the halls of the venerable Caldwell Hall, a 90-year-old building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus that once housed the campus philosophy department.

“I guess that’s how he stays so thin,” joked Catherine Frank, an administrator with the Chapel Hill Preservation Society, which has offices in the Horace Williams house. “He moves around a lot. I know this is serious research that they’re doing, but it’s one of those things that if you don’t approach it with a bit of levity, it can be tough.”

Not only have there been reports of the phantom philosopher appearing, some objects in the Horace Williams house seem to disappear from one room and mysteriously resurface in another without the visible or admitted aid of humans.

A trip through the house today offers a second close-up look at the old haunt. Ghost hunters took their first look around Feb. 8.

“The places that they found any activity at all were places like the office where electronic equipment could have been part of the reason,” said Frank, who opted to stay home with her young daughter that night. “They said they found some violence in the bathroom closet and at the end of the evening, they said there had been a presence following one woman the whole time.”

There is one theory about the paranormal presence in the bathroom.

Williams, who was said to be very tight with his money, was loath to spend the cash necessary to hook up to public water and sewer. His wife, so the lore goes, returns to the house, which now boasts such modern amenities, and flushes the toilet just because she can.

Who knows whether any ghosts will be given up tonight, Frank said.

The investigation is a try-out of sorts.

Durham’s Rhine Research Center, one of the world’s oldest institutions of paranormal study, is sponsoring the event as part of a series of ghost hunts at historic homes to do a bit of research. In recent years, the interest in paranormal activity seems to have surged, according to Maggie Blackman, publicist at the Rhine center.

“We get so many calls here,” Blackman said. “We seem to be a lot of people’s first point of reference.” The center, though, does not do such field work. The idea behind the hunts was to get a look at some of the people who do such research and review and compare their methods. With a better understanding of the kinds of ghost hunters in their midst, center staffers might feel more comfortable referring calls.

“We’re just trying to take a look at what people are doing out there,” Blackman said.

Photos: Around town photos

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Posted by Michelle on Mar 6, 2003 in Michelle

I live in one of those sprawling suburbs that is rapidly moving out the country and farm people with development after development.

(Shot of from inside my car at an automated car wash)