like a love note from home...

anti-flag are up to their usual tricks... helping others, do-gooding, you know the routine. ;) if you are lucky enough to be in the vicinity they are holding a benefit show for the pittsburgh food bank on november 9th at mr. small's theater in millvale. there's a wee write up about it in the city paper, too. go enjoy the show for me, it's only $5! and don't forget your non-perishable food donation!!!!

i have been a terrible blogger this past two months... sorry to anyone who tried to read and has found the well dry. it hasn't been intentional, there's just been a lot going on.

i am cautiously optimistic about the election next tuesday. i found out that the usually utterly useless attorney general refused to investigate the voter registrations of 200,000 people in ohio, as that asshole in the whitehouse requested. shit, the guy is not only a lame duck, but has presided over one of the most incompetent, corrupt administrations ever, and he's STILL trying to steal elections. your time came and went, fuckhead. you stole your two elections unfair and unsquare, so how about leaving the cleaning up of your monumental clusterfuck to people who are actually interested in cleaning and can actually do it?

that said, i'm not counting on anything, mostly because the republicans are willing to do anything, including breaking the law, to get their way. i do think that the tide of discontent has turned so massively against them that their dirty tricks won't make enough of a difference, but i also have a history of supporting people and policies that, to my sensibility, are good, fair and sensible but leave pawns of the practitioners of the politics of resentment frothing at the mouth. it's really amazing to me how two people can see the same situation and come to such different conclusions. so, i suppose we shall see. drew and i are going to vote before work on tuesday, so we may be late if turnout is anything like they are predicting. i will then sport my "I Voted" sticker proudly (the stickers are one thing about california i missed and am happy to have again) and check the news like a madwoman for the rest of the day, praying all the while. i think it will be an even longer day than election day 2004, when i was a poll observer, and i was fucking TIRED by the end of that day. making that batch of sangria the night before was a very good idea... maybe i should do that again.

work has been busy, home has been chaotic. we got the last of drew's stuff out of trump's place two weekends ago, so for the first time in seven years drew has all his stuff in one place - our living room - and trump's house is all his own, which has left it a little bare but he doesn't seem to mind. i don't know how we did the commute from santa cruz for as long as we did. i guess you do what you have to do and you know that it sucks, but you don't fully appreciate just how much it sucked until you don't have to do it anymore. riding my bike to work is so much nicer, and i get to ring my bike bell, which always makes me happy! rainy season is starting so i don't know how much i'll get to do but i am enjoying it while it lasts. it only takes five minutes longer to ride my bike than to drive, and all that exercise!!!! :)

anyway, i'll leave it at that, and i'll try to be more consistent in the future.

priceless!

it's easy, sometimes, to think americans are idiots, stupid, gluttons for punishment or all three rolled into one. and then there are those other times when they pleasantly surprise, reminding one that the humor, ingenuity and color-outside-the-lines spirit of the american people is still alive and kicking. today that happy surprise was Rednecks for Obama. priceless.

check this out, it's brilliant. and kudos to the clever rednecks who started it all!

sorry to be missing in action; the moving thing has consumed my life. happily i can report that the house is 90% together. still a few boxes to be unpacked/moved out of the living room and lounge. the bedroom needs a bit of work... several "no where to put them just yet" boxes have been dumped there, and i need to find a home for all the crap on top of the buffet. mostly my crap, not drew's, i have to be fair. not ALL of the stuff in the way is his. he's done a tremendous job getting his computer stuff stowed and out of the way, i must say.

so the last bit of moving will be on sunday. hmmm... guess i better reserve a truck, huh? it's the stuff in trump's garage and then we'll be totally out of santa cruz. where we are going to put any of this stuff is anyone's guess, though i suppose the garage is where. too bad we don't have a nice, attached modern garage like at trump's place. we have an old, detached, vermin infested garage. i suppose old fashioned charm comes at a price, and ours is a funky garage. drew put out rat/mouse poison, so hopefully we will see some improvement there. die little ratties, die! having rats in california isn't quite the same as having them, say, in pgh, but it's still gross. with the climate being so mild rats live in palm (and presumably other) trees out here, so a place doesn't have to be dirty to get rats, just unattended. i'm guessing the people before us in our place either didn't use the garage much, or the rats made a remarkable comeback in the two months or so it was on the market for rent. at any rate, we are hoping a sustained poisoning campaign and tommy, rat family killer, will do the trick. don't worry... the kitties and zinger cannot get into the garage unless it's open and we're really on top of keeping them out when it is. that's the last thing we need, believe me.

how we did the commute from santa cruz for so long is beyond me. it seems so far and such a hassle away. on friday we went home, walked and fed the dog, made and ate dinner and were watching a movie (american treasure: book of secrets; fluffy and fun) when i realized it wasn't quite 9 pm. drew had this realization at pretty much the same time i did and we couldn't believe we'd done all that stuff and it was still so early. if we were still in santa cruz we'd have been maybe finishing up, more likely eating, dinner. this 15 minute commute is rocking! i miss the beach, but not enough to do that commute anymore. and eventually we'll normalize and heading to santa cruz for the weekend won't seem so laborious. we're both so tired right now that even the though makes me exhausted. thank God the moving is almost done! :)

next wednesday will be lovely, i am so looking forward to it. what happens next wednesday, you ask? NOTHING. a big fat nothing is happening. this weekend it's more unpacking crap, and then on monday and tuesday the two biggest events that we have here at work are happening. new faculty orientation on monday and the faculty recognition dinner on tuesday. don't let orientation fool you... there's the orientation from 1 - 6 p.m., followed by a reception, followed by dinner. it will be a long day, and me the little critter running around making it all go smoothly. tuesday is a little awards dinner for almost 300 people. again, i'm the little make it go smoothly gal. tons of planning goes into these things, so many thing to get finished, and it's almost done. as long as we have no glaring problems and no one gets food poisoning, it's all good. keep your fingers crossed. :)

perspective

ah... perspective. my great pal jack always says if people could gain just an inch of perspective outside their own view, they might just see where the other is coming from just enough that the world might be a more tolerant, compassionate place. he could be wrong, but it's always seemed reasonable to me.

anyway... i just got a big old dose of perspective from my wee brother's latest blog entry for blurt magazine. not sure if i mentioned this before, but after his fisa vote i literally could not think about voting for barack obama without feeling like i needed to throw up. truly. i am not making that up. i was so fucking angry i was spitting nails for weeks. again, no exaggeration, it was weeks. after several weeks of being just infuriated i realized that it was one thing to have bush and his evil cronies shoving all the horrible, evil shit down our throats whilst telling us it was for our own good when we knew full well it wasn't, but to have the person who's supposed to be the alternative doing it? and so crassly... just so he can say he was tough on terrorism? it was more than i could take. i decided i couldn't vote him, that i wouldn't vote for him, that he'd lost my vote when all he had to do was nothing so egregious that i'd feel like throwing up when i thought about voting for him. i'm not a purist by any means, i know it's all about compromise and dealing with facts on the ground. i just couldn't stomach it. literally.

but lately i've been thinking maybe i should take some dramamine and vote for obama because the alternative is just so horrible, as justin so eloquently said as he made his case for voting against godzilla-sized evil. i always liked godzilla and felt bad that they were trying to kill him. i mean, he's a monster, what else is he supposed to do but tramp all over tokyo and shoot his death ray? that's what monsters do.

but i digress... this is a race that shouldn't even be close. when 80% of the country says we're headed in the wrong direction, even with the "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" d.n.c. running the show, it should be a cakewalk. but america is so incredibly racist, so it is. that's why the polls are so close. not because people don't know obama. that's code for "i'll never vote for a n*****." sorry to be crude, but it's true. there are lots of people who won't vote for him because he's black and has a funny name and they've never gone to snopes to check out if those ridiculous emails their cousin sends them are true, because they've never heard of snopes and basically have no critical thinking skills, but that's another post. but they'll never admit it. maybe to close family and friends, but i think the vast majority of white americans who won't vote for obama because he's black won't admit it - to anyone. they'll just say they don't know enough about him (he's black), or he's so vague (he's black), or whatever (he's black.) i hate feeling like i have to vote for someone i am not excited about (again), who wasn't the person i wanted in the first place (again), and who leaves me feeling queasy because there are too many stoopid, racist assholes out there. sometimes i wish we could just wish them all away somewhere and let them wallow in their own filthy mire while the rest of us go on and live in a nice, enlightened place. ah, to sleep! perchance to dream!

so i don't know... i guess i'll think about vote for obama, even though he's going to win california. even though i am still furious about his fisa vote. even though it makes me feel ill and i really am bone weary of voting for a candidate because they're not as bad as the other one. i think hillary would have had a much easier time getting elected, even though she's a woman, because she's a white woman. i wasn't so thrilled about her, either, but thank god my candidate of choice, john edwards, isn't the nominee. thank god he suffered from "just another white guy" syndrome when there were other more exciting, more historically significant people running. that's all we'd need... finding out the guy had an affair at this stage of the game. what a clusterfuck that would have been. i can't believe men are that fucking stupid, but apparently some are.

weddings, cousins, and chicago

a few pictures from our trip to chicago for drew's cousin nina's wedding. there'd be more except we managed to forget our camera in the heaps of unpacked crap at our new abode, but luckily these were sent to me today. i wish i could say it was entirely the disorganization of our house that made us fall down on the pictures front, but drew and i kind of suck when it comes to taking pictures. we're making an effort to be more on it, but this time we fell down on the job. i plan to take pictures of the heaps of crap to post later, if only to make myself feel better once it's all more organized; too bad we weren't more on it for the wedding.

we had a wonderful time, though! we didn't see a ton of chicago because there were a lot of dinners and brunches pre- and post-wedding, and we were really tired from the first part of the move. it was nice to just be a bit of a bum, which we heartily embraced. we stayed at the hotel knickerbocker, also site of the reception, which was quite nice and just a block from michigan avenue so we stimulated the economy a wee bit. we were just a few blocks from lake michigan so we took in the sights there as well. it's really beautiful.

the cousins, l-r: nina, drew, robyn & joe

kind of obvious who married into the family, isn't it? i'm the addition on the far right.

i've always thought drew resembled both his parents, but it was amazing to see him with his dad's side of family and realize just how much he looks like his dad/dad's family. drew and robyn look so much alike they could be siblings, with the likeness in features that i always associated with his mom (nose, mouth, cheeks), so i guess it just depends which crowd you're with for the similarities to emerge. hopefully we'll get some more pictures from those who were more on the ball in the camera department. more pictures or no, it was a wonderful wedding, and it was so great to meet his cousins and see john & bobbie (their parents) again. we're planning (just in the thinking stages) of going to visit properly sometime in the fall or spring, when it's not so hot and humid there (humid wreaks havoc with my hunny bunny). we can hang out with the family in wheaton for a few days when they aren't totally maxed out and then go into the city for a few days. that will be a fun trip.