Dwarf Planet in Purple

1. I'm writing this post on Nick's new laptop, which is now mine, of course. I wonder if I'll ever feel as if it's completely "mine." His name pops up when I go to sign in, and I enter his password (thank goodness he used the one from his previous computer, because I didn't have time to ask him about All The Things before he died). I wonder if I should try out his LOTR Online game....

2. I really should pay DW a bit of money so that I can have some new icons.

3. I want some of those icons to reflect the current political situation, but I will not use the face of a certain dictator whom I hate. I don't want to see his face on DW.

4. It's the middle of May. I should really dig out the rest of my spring clothes (and start sorting out Nick's). However, I am also really far behind on the baronial newsletter.

5. I also have about a month to figure out whether I can go to Pennsic. More about that in another post.

I had thought I was going to work as an election judge only on Maryland primary day, May 14. When I went for the usual training session, I was told that the early-voting slots had been filled during previous training sessions. Oh, well....

Then last week I received two email letters from the Board of Elections, one calling me in for the odd-numbered days of early voting and the other stating I would be working on the even-numbered days. Huh? I checked with the office and found that I am indeed supposed to work all eight of the days from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Hmmm, interesting. Since I've been specially trained as a provisional ballot and same-day registration judge, I speculate that perhaps there's a shortage of election judges in my specialty. Or maybe someone quit suddenly. Whatever.

At any rate, I have to prepare for eight straight days of getting up really early, being off the Internet for long stretches, and toting my food (at least there's a small kitchen with a microwave and fridge). The boy toy will not have the car for eight days, which will annoy him, although he does plan to take the Metro to downtown DC for the non-EU embassy open houses. Oh, well, he'll be going to see his parents in San Antonio for a week later in May, so he'll get his "change of scenery" then. And I'll be getting a nice big paycheck, almost as big as one for a feature article.

In other news, I noticed that "Three Weeks for Dreamwidth" is happening. I have never before participated, but I guess I'll check it out. Anything that gets me to interact with this site more often is probably a good thing.

Local folks: Mostly I watch the NBC Washington station, but I'm wondering if this is true for the other local TV stations. Are you finding a HUGE number of ads for the Abigail Spanberger vs. Yesli Vega congressional race? Like, to the virtual exclusion of other candidates in the Nov. 8 election?

Yes, I *know* that the district is knife-edge swingy and hotly contested. But the northernmost point in the district is Culpeper County, for crying out loud. And it extends almost down to Richmond. Most people in the DMV will never vote for either woman.

It's bad enough that MD/DC residents have to endure all the VA ads in the year following a presidential election, but to have virtually no ads for Maryland candidates when we have an open governor's race, and my congressional district has no incumbent either ... it's just weird.

And I'm just a tetch sensitive because in the 30 years I've been in Maryland, the *only* times the Republicans have won the governorship have been when there was some mix of a weak Democratic candidate and a weak campaign. This time around the GOP gubernatorial candidate is an election denier and I *really* don't want him anywhere near the fancy office.

I tested negative for covid-19 several days after Balticon and have felt fine ever since.

The weekend after Balticon, I spent a Sunday at AwesomeCon, the commercial "comic con" for Our Nation's Capital. My barony had set up a booth in the exhibit hall to attract new people, and my role in the proceedings was to teach dancing for an hour. Patches, who knows much more about teaching dances than I do, had been drilling me on the ins and outs for more than a month. Something like 70 or 75 people showed up to learn an alman, a couple of English country dances and a few bransles. Thank goodness the room was equipped with a speaker that I could plug into my phone. I had brought along my friend's battery-powered speaker, but I think the carpeting and clothing would have muffled it up completely.

After AwesomeCon, I turned my attention to church stuff. Because we would be holding our annual congregational meeting virtually for the third straight year, I volunteered to run the electronic voting. So I signed up for an account on ElectionBuddy and performed test after test to try to get everything right. I think it turned out OK; some people said they didn't get their ballots, which had ended up in their spam folders, but that's to be expected. I let out a giant sigh of relief after sending out the official ballots and turned my brain off by taking a nap on the couch.

A few weeks ago, I learned that my former partner in the Lithuanian dance group back in 2016 had died. He went by the nickname Vyts (pronounced "veets") and had really badly bowed legs and was a terrible dancer. Plus, he said he had been divorced three times, and I couldn't help feeling that he was auditioning me as a possible wife #4. (The boy toy called him my "Lithuanian boyfriend.") I saw him at the Lithuanian Hall from time to time -- the last time in April when I went up there for a dancing event. (I am not dancing anymore -- I was just in the audience.) He looked as if he'd had surgery on his legs because they were straighter. I didn't have much to say, because I know from his Facebook posts that his political views were entirely opposite mine ... bleah. Still, it was a bit of a shock to learn that he had dropped dead at the age of 65, almost 66. Apparently he really was a big supporter of the Lithuanian community in Baltimore.

I know I'm rambling here, but I can't let June 17 end without noting that today is the 50th anniversary of the one day I went to school on a Saturday. The school board in my hometown could not end the academic year on Friday the 16th, because we would have been one day short of the state regulations. The teachers strongly preferred getting the school year over with on a Saturday rather than Monday, so that's what we did. (Not that we ever did any learning on the last day of the school year. It was always like "watch a movie, then get your report card.") And that's how seventh grade ended.

My strongest memory of the day is that someone let off a stink bomb in the playground crowd just before we were allowed into the building, and our assistant principal, Mr. R., stood on the steps of the main doors and shouted, "I see who you are! You're in trouble now!" That stentorian voice of his could silence hundreds of tweens and teens like nothing else before or since. We tiptoed around his massive bulk and crept to our homerooms.

And there was a giant disruption in the Force in the form of the Watergate break-in, and nothing was ever the same again....

I had a short-article deadline of noon today. I got that puppy done with plenty of time to spare. No way was I going to miss the festivities!

Over breakfast I saw He Who Must Not Be Named Here Again give his "farewell speech." One last chance to spew the Big Lie. With a soundtrack ranging from "Gloria" to "YMCA" to "My Way." Could he have gotten any tackier?

I managed to keep my eyes dry until Vice President Harris was halfway through her oath. Then the floodgates opened. I kept wiping my eyes with tissues until the band finished playing "Hail to the Chief" for President Biden. As one of my fellow science-writer friends noted, today was a banner day for Kleenex.

The inaugural address was like balm for a weary nation's soul. The young poet laureate who spoke her words was a powerful boost. Our Toastmaster for the evening (at our online Toastmasters club meeting) cited her as an excellent example for us.

Today the boy toy cooked Pennsylvania and Delaware foods: scrapple for breakfast, goulash (a cheesy version of American chop suey) for lunch, and the roast chicken dinner special from the local co-op, because Delaware produces lots of chickens.

I wasn't expecting Katy Perry to provide the firepower for the evening television program, but the surprise fireworks were dazzling. The sound carried all the way out to my little Beltway suburb. Sound carries farther in the cold, dry winter air. Within minutes, people all over town who weren't watching TV were posting on Facebook about the possible gunshots or explosions.

Good night, all.

Since millions of words have been written elsewhere about the attempted coup (insurrection, riot, domestic terrorism incident, etc.) of January 6, I won't bother repeating them. You know the story. Last Wednesday, the 13th, was the 24th anniversary of my mother's funeral, and I am quite sure she would have been amazed that a president who in her lifetime was just a celebrity real-estate mogul was being impeached for the second time in his one and only presidential term.

We are in an era where superlative modifiers don't seem big enough. "War zone," "armed encampment," "unprecedented," "never before seen," and on and on.

Comparisons to Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation abound. Hey, I followed Watergate avidly, as it happened, and we didn't have this hate and violence. Maybe there was a little discreet door-taping and such during the actual Watergate break-in. We didn't have wild-eyed rioters wielding clubs and Mace.

Some say Wednesday will be the inauguration we can't enjoy. As far as I'm concerned, I will never be able to go downtown to a presidential inauguration again. Presidents I support will always have the specter of far-right violence, and I'm getting a bit old to face the haters. Presidents I don't support ... well, why would I want to go downtown to see them?

The first few days of the new year haven't been too bad. I started watching The Crown and The Right Stuff and had various pleasant online interactions with friends. I always get a little wistful when taking the Christmas decorations down and putting them away, but that happens every year.

On Saturday I had a "wild encounter" with actual friends -- a rare thing during this pandemic. The boy toy and I were on our way home from an excursion up to Westminster, Md., just to have a change of scenery. On the way home I was driving us down U.S. Route 1 instead of the highway, and I happened to see a red Prius C that reminded me of Patches' car. Then I saw the Kingdom of Atlantia sticker and realized, "Oh, that is her car!" I started beeping and waving to her and Maugorn and Elena/Rose, and finally I was able to exchange a few words with her at a red light, until the signal turned green again.

Yesterday the big news about Trump's criminal phone call broke in the afternoon. No, I haven't listened to the entire audio file; I can't stand to listen to the orange cheeto's whining for that long. The best summation of the whole thing came from Dan Rather on Twitter:

The audio of Trump with the Georgia secretary of state. Wow. It’s like telling the Nixon tapes to “hold my beer.”

(Second place probably goes to Carl Bernstein, who called the current snafu "worse than Watergate." Third place goes to whoever pointed out that it's hard to write laws that cover every instance of bad faith.)

I never thought I'd see the day when conservative columnist George F. Will would call a bunch of Republican senators the "most dangerous domestic enemies" of the Constitution. But, hey, Will says he is not a Republican anymore.

And what will happen tomorrow?

Over and out...

Might as well lay out my election predictions before I hit the hay. I predict Biden will win by a decent margin, maybe 340 electoral votes. Rump will fight some court battles, but the judges will start throwing the cases out of court because, with Biden clearly past 270 EV, the cases will have become moot.

Rump will never give a concession speech, but will just keep issuing executive orders and nasty tweets until a day or two before Inauguration Day. Then he'll fly off to Mar-a-Lago and hole himself up there. He won't attend Biden's swearing-in.

For the love of all that is holy, I hope the media stop covering Rump's tweets after he is out of office. Monitor them, yes, just in case he is inciting his followers to nastiness. But they do NOT have to be amplified.

Well, I take too *many* breaks. I have a feature-article deadline on Monday. I hate having untreated and exacerbated ADHD, inattentive type.

Just wanted to let you all know that I still exist.

I have received my notice that on Election Day I will be a same-day-registration judge at the local high school. But it didn't say who the chief judges will be. Usually the chief judges arrange a session the night before so that we can all meet each other and set up the polling booths and equipment. I have never even been inside the local high school and I don't even know where the front door is. The facade on the side of the main road through town has virtually no windows and doors.

Still worrying about the future, politically speaking. Please, please, please let Joe Biden win! And please let's avoid a civil war started by the right-wing idiots!

I think it's stress that has made my athlete's foot flare up worse than it's ever been. I was spraying it and spraying it with a can of stuff I found in the back of the closet. It was getting only worse and finally I noticed that the bottom of the can said "MAY97" on it. Uh, I guess the active ingredient expired or something. Finally I got some cash today and the boy toy bought me a fresh can of antifungal stuff. One spritz and my feet are already feeling the relief.

Yesterday the 18-year-old thermostat broke when we were switching off the A/C so we could open the windows for a bit (due to the nice fall weather). Of course, the A/C doesn't work at all without some sort of controller, and it gets stuffy in here at night with the windows closed. So today we went to Lowe's and got a new thermostat, a basic $20 model, and the boy toy managed to get it installed with only a few shouted curses. Of course, there are a couple of marks (missed paint job) where the older and larger thermostats had been attached to the wall. Someday we will paint that room.

Today I tried to track down a Facebook notice that said the county's free flu-shot clinic was coming to my community on a couple of dates in late October. The notice had vanished, so I started calling around, and was finally told that the county had had to reschedule them and the new dates were not known yet. I hope the county gets its act together with this. It's not as "sexy" as the coronavirus pandemic, but still very necessary.

Also, today the boy toy voted by depositing his ballot in the drop-box at Laurel High School. There was a county cop stationed nearby, presumably watching the box in case of shenanigans. I will vote in person during the early-voting period, just to scout out how the procedures have changed in practice. (Yes, I've already had my training, but I want to verify how well everyone's being protected before I work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Election Day.)

Tonight I registered for my national professional group's annual conference, which is of course totally virtual, like everything else in 2020. It is a paid thing because the conference is using all sorts of apps -- not just Zoom, but Whova and Remo, whatever they are. Today was the deadline for registering because many of the events are spread out over October, not just concentrated in the Oct. 19-23 window as originally planned. It's a little dicey for me, because I have a major assignment due on Oct. 26, but supposedly most of the events will be archived online for six months, so it'll be worth it in the end. Plus, the next three national conferences (2021-2023) will be in Boulder, Chicago, and Memphis, which are all pretty far from Maryland, so I probably won't be attending them. Dang, these conferences get expensive fast these days.