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2008

Vice President Palin?

What in God’s name is John McCain thinking?If he really believes this particular choice of running mate is going to pull in thousands of Hillary Clinton supporters, his grasp on reality is even more tenuous than I thought. And I’m skeptical that it’s going to help  him much with the right wingnuts he’s so actively pursuing these days either. It seems sort of like an “I waited until the last minute to find a girl to ask to the prom, and all the good ones had better things to do and turned me down” kind of desperation.

Some women said that the pick could be seen as patronizing, a suggestion that women would vote based on a candidate’s sex rather than on positions. But others saw the choice of Ms. Palin as a welcome step. 

“I think it’s absolutely fantastic,” said Kimberly Myers, a retired transit worker in Pittsburgh who had originally supported Mrs. Clinton but who said that Mr. McCain’s choice would win him her vote. “She’s actually broken the glass ceiling.”

So at least McCain gets the “retired transit workers who speak in clichés” vote. That’s a plus, I guess.

I used to have some respect for the guy, but I’m starting to wonder now if he might just need to be placed under observation.

Cohabitiversary

It was six years ago today that the boy who had already moved into my life also moved into my home. Suddenly, it became our home, which was a pretty wonderful thing once we got all our stuff consolidated and all the boxes unpacked. And it’s been a pretty wonderful thing ever since, as well.

Right now, we don’t get to spend a lot of time together. Mark’s job has him in San Francisco more than he’s in Winston-Salem by a factor of something like three-to-one. That’s hard, especially for him, and maybe that’s why I find myself thinking of this particular anniversary so intently tonight. Of the three days we recognize as part of our “anniversary trilogy” (the others being the day we met and the day we got hitched at City Hall in 2004), we probably give this one the least attention. Yet it’s possibly the most important one of all in some ways, since it really sort of marks the specific moment when we started living our lives together.

Tonight, we’re three time zones apart, but I’m thinking of him, and remembering that day when we moved all his furniture into my already crowded hovel in San Francisco. I’m remembering dinner with his sister and brother-in-law at The Dead Fish (and developing a craving for scallops) and how completely worn out we were afterward. I’m pondering how nervous I was at the prospect of having my first “live-in”, but also how excited I was at the thought of waking up next to him every morning.

Tonight, we’re at opposite ends of the country, and I’ll be waking up alone tomorrow morning. But the thought that we’ll be together again, even if only for a few days, at the end of the week still gets me all giddy and excited. And it allows me, once again, to experience the anticipation of being able to do it every day again soon.

I love my boy, and I wouldn’t want to spend my life with anyone else. Heck, I wouldn’t even consider it.

Updates

Notice that the archives links on the right now go back to September 2003. The migration of my old posts from HTML to SQL is moving along pretty quickly, I think. For reference, I won’t be correcting the internal links within the posts until I’m done. I’m also consolidating the rants and road trips into the journal entries so everything will be nice and chronological, but I’ll still have a page that links to them directly as well.

I’m hoping to finish up this project before all my school-related stuff gets too nasty. I fear I may have overcommitted myself a bit this semester.

The Week

It’s been a week of insanity, complete with 18-hour workdays, augmented by homework and one big family gathering on Sunday. I’m pretty well worn out and not really ready to start the whole thing over again this morning. This week should be slightly calmer, though. I think.

A few weeks from now, when I’ve lost all brain function, someone please remind me of how all this extra stuff I’ve taken on this year is really good for my career, OK?

Photos from our annual “It’s the Weekend After Labor Day” cookout, held Sunday in the lovely subterranean 1968 Room of MurderingStream Estates:

Randomly Friday

Randomly Friday:

  • Since one of my primary professional passions is making old newspaper archives available online, this is pretty exciting to me. I’m a little disappointed that the demo suggests there will be no built-in mechanism either for printing or saving the content in question, but it’s still better than nothing. I assume the print and save restrictions are part of the copyright agreement wit ProQuest and (presumably) with the original publishers.
  • Warning to candidates: don’t mess around with librarians. We will fuck you up. Or at least cause you mild embarrassment in a relatively polite and professional manner.
  • Speaking of libraries (sort of), I ran across this interesting book in my local one the other night. It’s a good read; the author derides such modern “geniuses” as LeCorbusier, Sert, and Gehry among others not merely for having needlessly expensive and  ridiculous-looking buildings that don’t integrate with their surroundings, but also for designing buildings that don’t even serve their stated purposes well, either because of generally bad design or through astronomical maintenance requirements. It might be worth owning, methinks.
  • The crazy week is over. I still have a lot of work hanging over my head, but I may be able to sneak out for a little drive this weekend, assuming gas prices don’t jump a dollar or so over the weekend like they did during Katrina.

The Gas Panic Has Begun

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Since there obviously will be no gas anywhere on the planet by the end of the weekend, the lines have started to form here in the Triad. The Texaco station on Silas Creek Parkway where I bought gas on the way home last night for $3.59 was up to $4.19 by tonight. I think I’ll probably skip that little road trip tomorrow.

I just heard some guy on CNN say that “the Gulf of Mexico has become very agitated”, which struck me as a rather odd turn of phrase. By the way, Larry King’s is not really the voice I want to hear leading live team coverage of a crisis. And isn’t it time CNN got some new dramatic hurricane music? They’re using the same stuff they used during Katrina, and frankly I’m ready for a change.