Tag: newportbeach

I found Bree’s sentencing info.

I spent 75 cents or so at the federal court website because I wanted to know what happened to her, what her sentence was etc. They took her in May of 2004 and she didn’t get sentenced until March 2005. One count of armed bank robbery and one count of using, carrying, or brandishing of firearm during crime of violence.

Looks like she got 18 months for the bank robbery and 5 years for using a gun to do it.

She pled out on 3/25/2005:

Docket Text: MINUTES OF SENTENCING held before Judge Cormac J. Carney as to Brianna Catherine Cery (1) count(s) 1, 2. Bureau of Prisons for a term of 18 months on count 1 and 60 months on count 2, to be served consecutively. Supervised release for five years on count 1 and three years on count 2, to be served concurrently under terms and conditions of the United States Probation Office and General Order 318 and 01-05. Special assessment of $200. Restitution in the amount of $108.00. Defendant is advised of appeal rights. C/R: Maria Dellaneve (tso)

For those who aren’t local and/or are confused by this, I’m referring to this bank robber, who was a regular at the Diedrich Coffee we all hung out at. She also worked at the local Kinko’s and as a bagger at the grocery store.

She was always an odd person, very much obsessed with the occult and “magick,” and willing to bore almost anyone with lectures on the beauty of Crowleyian thought. I got along with her okay. After the grocery strike she was the only worker at the market who didn’t get the raise/good benefits deal on rehiring. She blamed this on her transgendered status and I have to agree. I’m not sure what led to the bank robbery but she wasn’t doing too well after the strike and fallout afterwards.

Whoo, 5 years in federal. Gun bad.

Local characters: The landscaper

The gardener

Here is the gardener for my neighbors. She is in her late fifties or early sixties. She does their whole yard, lawn and plants, with one helper, once a week. Her pickup truck is stickered with patriotism. She clearly has arthritis or knee injuries and walks with a kind of swiveling cowboy swagger that says: I am in pain and I don’t give a damn. She chain smokes. While she is working she does not stop except to take stock of progress or give instruction to her assistant. She’s so focused that it takes two or three attempts to contact her before she’ll break away from work.

She is a force of nature.

The gardener

rhinoceros

Behind me two women talk about their “awesome” pastor. In front of me another woman reads with the Life Application Bible and a Josh McDowell apologetics text called “A Ready Defense” stacked next to her. The parking lot is full of ichthyomobiles.

The groupthink is dreary. I feel like the last one in Orange County who’s not an evangelical Protestant Konservative Kristian Klone.

The end of the old library

Mariners Library Sign

They closed my childhood library and opened a newer, bigger one next door.

I haven’t been to the new one yet. Apparently they didn’t buy any new books but there are laptops and iPods and expansive expanses of formica. The library is now to be run like a business by business-like people, and multimedia is the future.

Mariners Library Closed

I was well-educated in our local public schools and by my parents, but the real autodidactic core of my learning happened at this local branch library. I first read through the children’s section, checking out as many books as I could carry each time. Classic children’s fiction, books about cars and guns and planes, biographies, history books, science, the whole damn thing probably except for the girly books and the sports stuff. I have a vivid mental image of the children’s librarian, a very large redheaded woman with impossibly big arrms covered in freckles.

I then moved to the adult section and chewed on it for a decade. When I got interested in a subject (history of architecture! the invention of the atomic bomb! Wales!) I went through the Dewey Decimal number for that and related interests and read every book that was not obviously stupid. I haunted the new books shelf for anything I knew was coming. I read all of the science fiction, all of the nonfiction on any subject that interested me, and a good two-thirds of the fiction. I went through the records and found peculiar worlds and visited them: who is this Warren Zevon? What does Blue Öyster Cult sound like? Why would someone switch on Bach?

Mariners Library Checkout

The library employees all knew me, and they were my friends. I’d go back and forth in that checkout, sometimes more than once in a day. The paper library card with the little metal number stamp in it went CLUNK! as each book was checked out, and they said “Now remember to read them all!”

The park outside the library contained my first ever school, a play group for pre preschool kids. It was the site of countless family picnic lunches, a thousand ball games, the annual 4th of July Bike Parade, and later on for long reading stretches after school and before I went home to deal with being a teenager.

Mariners Park

I left and moved to Los Angeles for a decade. When I came back I had got out of the library habit, which still bothers. Mariners Branch was part of my past by then anyway. It was a small place with a small collection, and I’d read most of it. I’m sad to see it gone, though. When I left that place and went out into the world, I was as prepared as books can make a boy.

Mariners Library - Looking Out

Other pictures in the set are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ch/sets/72057594129847160/

Okay, Nick, fess up.

What kind of insane death-cult ritual were you doing over there? Did something go terribly awry at the Beltane party?

Deer on Lido Isle sedated, relocated
Authorities aren’t sure how buck got across the channel. Animal is released in Crystal Cove.
By Lauren Vane
(Published: May 5, 2006)

A young male deer that found its way onto Lido Isle in Newport Beach was corralled by animal control officers Friday and taken to Crystal Cove State Park, where it was released.

A deer got WHERE?

Psychopathic Parking

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Psychopathic Parking, originally uploaded by conradh.

For some folks it’s not enough just to buy the F350 Super Duty truck. Or to buy the crew cab version. Or to get the “FX4 Offroad” package, lift it, and load it up with accessories. No, the important part here is causing a confrontation of some kind, using the truck, so that there can be some manhood and throwdowns and getting up in someone’s grill, as they say. A good way to do this is to take two parking spots in a suburban parking lot where you don’t belong, when all the other trucks are at the far end of the lot because their drivers were grownups.