Election Special

Honey and I are back from the polling booth, having exercised our prerogative as citizens, performed our civic duty, etc., and so forth.  
We waited until 9:45 to allow the folks who were voting before work to clear out, and that worked well.  There were lines at each alphabetical segment of the registration desk, but they moved quickly.  By the time we signed in and got our access codes there were voting machines available.

However the votes add up tonight, I will not be completely satisfied, and I suspect that most people will feel the same way, although not necessarily for the same reasons.

Since I am a strict constructionist, State’s rights, fiscal conservative, and a human rights liberal, there has not been a president in my lifetime that fit my point of view, and I doubt that there ever will be.

The good news, or bad, depending on your way of thinking, is that who is elected President isn’t nearly as important as it is made out to be. 

Presidents, like football quarterbacks and baseball pitchers, get credit or blame for a multitude of things over which they have little or no control.  George Bush, hog-tied by a Democratic Congress, is still getting the blame for things ( the mortgage  crisis, for example)  that were the bad ideas of the legislative branch.  Barack Obama hasn’t been able to accomplish anything significant – good or bad – since Republicans gained control of the House.

However the presidential election goes, it is fairly certain that Congress will remain pretty much the same.  Republicans should retain control of the House, and may gain a seat or two in the Senate, but not enough to achieve a majority.  That sort of Congress will either provide a buffer or a roadblock. We know that will happen, we’ve seen it before, so why don’t the national parties work harder to get their congressional candidates elected? 

The only explanation I can offer is that except for the “Contract With America” in 1994 or the Tea Party movement in 2010, congressional elections are much more  local than national.  The electorate may scream about the deficit and the national debt, but they will elect the guy who dips into the pork barrel and brings money back to the district.  They may know that he is a bastard and a crook, but he continues to be reelected because he’s their crooked bastard. 

I’m trying to take a more Libertarian attitude - “The best government is one that doesn’t do anything at all.”  But I realize that once in a while, we might need to accomplish something.

Repair Update

Yesterday did not go exactly as planned. 

Dropping the 5th wheel off at the shop, which should have been easy, got to be a major production and the pool pump repair I expected to take several days is done.

When I was getting the trailer ready to tow, the battery was too low to bring in the slides.  I had to disconnect the battery and put it on the charger for half an hour before I could close the camper up.  I knew the converter wasn’t working properly – it was one of the things we’re having fixed/ replaced -  but it is the first time we’ve seen the battery get that low.

Once the trailer was delivered, I dropped the pump off at the pool store.  Before I could get home they called saying it was ready to pick up.  It cost more than I expected (Doesn’t it always?) but they had to replace three parts instead of just the one I was planning to swap. 

Got the pump reassembled and reinstalled yesterday afternoon, and it is back to normal today.

Repair Day

Today is going to be a repair day.

Actually, it is a take stuff to be repaired day – I don’t expect anything to get fixed today.

I am taking the 5th wheel back to the RV shop to complete the repairs from the last time it was there, and to find and fix a wire that got broken when they replaced the kitchen gray water tank on that last visit. 

We’re also going to get the wheel well fixed – mostly cosmetic damage from a blowout.  That is covered by comprehensive insurance, and I have a claim number.  State Farm wants an estimate before they send an adjustor to approve the repair, so I have no idea how long that might take.  A little worried though, since when our old trailer was totalled several years ago, a hurricane had all adjusters tied up.  It took six weeks to get somebody out to survey the damage back then.

Once I drop off the trailer, I’ll be taking our pool pump in for repair.  We just had the motor repaired a month ago, and now it has a leaking seal between the motor and the pump body.  I was going to fix it myself, but the bolt holding the impeller on the end of the motor shaft is frozen.  I decided to let the pool place figure out how to get it off.

A Fine Day to be Born

Today is my wonderful wife Honey’s birthday, and she shares her birthday with some pretty cool people.

First on her list is probably her aunt Jean Ernest, who had the day to herself in the family until Honey came along, but there are a lot of interesting people who share the day, including:

• Will Rogers
• Walter Cronkite
• Jeff Probst
• Laura Bush
• Doris Roberts
• Loretta Swit
• Art Carney
• Matthew McConaughey

Others born this day include the guy who composed Rock of Ages (the hymn, not the musical) and the fellow who designed the Buffalo Nickel.  All in all, a pretty good day to be born.

Astrologers say that Scorpios (Honey) and Leos (me) are incompatible, but we must be the exception to the rule.  We have been getting along very well for almost half a century.

Happy birthday, Sweetheart.  I can’t tell you how glad I am that you were born.

Tinker’s Splinter

Yesterday afternoon, Tinker – our black and tan Dachshund – limped up to Honey favoring her left front foot.  A check of the foot revealed a big splinter stuck in the pad of one of her toes. 

Honey could not get a grip on the splinter with her fingers, and I couldn’t either, so she took Tinker into the house to get some tweezers.

With Tinker (who was remaining amazingly calm through all this) cradled in her lap, Honey approached the splinter with the tweezers and it just fell off.

The splinter was not a splinter at all – it was the tip on the bottom of an acorn! 

Somehow Tinker had managed to step on an empty acorn shell and slip it over her toe like Cinderella’s slipper.  The dry, scuffed and dirty shell matched the skin on her other toes so well we did not realize what it was until it fell off.

Once it did, Tinker was fine and ran off to play.

Circling the Square

Honey and I used to square dance and we enjoyed it a lot. 

She started very young – about six – when she went to dances with her parents.  I was eleven when I was asked to join a youth square dance club by the sister of a girl I thought was cute. 

When our kids were little we danced with the North Shore Spinners in East Houston. We later joined three other couples to form our own touring square.  We called our group the Black Sheep, and visited square dance clubs all over southeast Texas. 

Not bragging, but we got pretty darn good – good enough that the Black Sheep often did what we called mirror-dancing, responding to the caller’s instructions in reverse.

When I saw this on line this morning, it reminded me of those Black Sheep days, and it made me wonder -

When the caller yells Do-Si-Do, do Australian dancers circle clockwise?

I’m With Abby

A 4-year-old Fort Collins, Colorado,  girl gained a measure of Internet fame — and an apology from National Public Radio — after her mother captured the girl’s tear-stained reaction to the nation’s seemingly omnipresent political debate.

Elizabeth Evans posted her daughter’s reaction to NPR programming during a Tuesday trip to the grocery store. In the video, a tearful Abigael Evans, when asked why she’s crying, replies, “I’m tired of Bronco Bamma and Mitt Romney.”

Assured by her mother that the election will be over soon, Abigael responds with a matter-of-fact “Yay.”

On Wednesday, NPR news blogger Mark Memmot wrote on The Two-Way blog: “On behalf of NPR and all other news outlets, we apologize to Abigael and all the many others who probably feel like her. We must confess, the campaign’s gone on long enough for us, too. Let’s just keep telling ourselves: ‘Only a few more days, only a few more days, only a few more days.’”