Archives November 2006

So I left work early yesterday to take Ali to the airport.  She checked the status online and the flight was marked as ON TIME.  We had Nicki with.  Nicki has this weird fear of the noise that is made as the car goes over the metal connectors of the ramp to the departure area.  As soon as she heard it, she got up from the back seat, crawled up front and jammed herself under Ali’s feet on the floor in the passenger side.  She has this scared, timid look on her face.  It’s cute but also very strange.  For some reason she finds these terrifying.

As we pulled up I see a cop/security guard guy come popping out from behind one of the parked cars on a Segway. WTF is the point of that???  He was rolling around making sure people didn’t spend 5 extra seconds in the loading/unloading area than necessary.  What a joke.

Ali says goodbye to Nicki (who is still wedged on the floor) and me.  I unload her bags and then before I pulled away I paused for a second to roll down the passenger window to see if Nicki would come up to say good bye, which she didn’t.  As I put the window up, I turn back to the front and am startled by the f’in guy on the Segway who has now pulled up to the side of the car.  I roll down the window and he says “All set?” meaning “Get the f out of here”  I was a split second away from spitting out a sarcastic. smart ass comment about this dipshit but at the last second I caught myself and just said “Yep all set”  I was pissed at myself as I pulled away for not letting a remark fly to let the guy know that an extra 15 seconds by the curb did not require his intervention.  F’in jerk.

Well I was almost out of gas so I had to stop to fill up.  No more than 10 minutes after dropping Ali off, my cell phone rings.  It’s Ali, she says she heard a rumor that the flight was canceled due to weather in PA.  Great, well I told her that I had to stop for gas anyway so I would wait to hear back from her.  She calls me back in a bit saying that although the flight is not cancelled, it could be delayed indefinitely because of high winds in PA.  The airline people said “if it isn’t life and death, I would recommend that you reschedule”  So Ali reschuduled for this morning and I swung around and picked her back up. 

I was sort of hoping that Segway shithead would be in the area so I could get a second chance to indirectly insult him, but he was evidently at another gate being a pain in the ass.  So we scooped Ali back up and took off.  The noise once again scared Nicki.  She again crawled in the front floor area under Ali’s legs and stayed there the entire 45 minute drive home. 

We left bright and early this morning at 6am.  We took Nicki with once again.  It was bizarre, as we approached the airport, far off from those noisy strips still, Nicki was looking out the window.  She must have recognized the scenery somehow and again crawled up on the front floor to hide.  I couldn’t believe that she knew where we were going.  We dropped Ali off and Nicki again stayed on the floor all the way home.  Crazy dog.  Ali arrived safely in PA.

Of course I got a call this morning that the Camry Hybrid showed up today.  But of course we can’t finish the deal until Ali is back to sign the papers.  Her flight comes in around 5pm Monday so I am hoping we can somehow work out picking the car up on Monday night.

Finally the Dancing with the Stars champion has been crowned.  Emmett Smith won, whom was who we were pulling for.  I think he better represented what the show was about, an amateuer learning how to dance.  Mario, who was definitely a better dancer, had an unfair advantage as he had formal dance training before and it showed from the very beginning.

It pained me a bit to see Emmett wearing the sparkly green shoes with matching green armbands.  However I was happy for him to win.  Ali loves the show so I watch it primarily for her.  It is entertaining but my life would carry on just fine without it.  I know as she watches it she wishes I would be more into dancing and me knowing that makes me uncomfortable.  Ali is a great dancer and I am a lead foot.  Of all the people that danced last night I would think Tucker Carlson would be my closest match.

Today Ali leaves for another 4 day trip to PA.  She is trying to get up as much as possible because of her grandfather’s health.  It’s supposed to be quite chilly up there.

 If all goes well, we should be into the hybrid Camry before Thanksgiving.  However I am not thinking about it much.  Once it happens I will be thrilled to be in my new gadget filled, eco-friendly, spacious ride but until I am behind the wheel I am not taking anything for granted.  I am prepared for the dealer to try to change some terms right at the end and I simply won’t go for any of it. No more bullshit.

 No Nicki accidents the past two nights.  Every morning I fear seeing a dark spot in the shadows of the dimly lit floor.

At lunch instead of hitting the gym, I decided to run out and return the extra memory stick to Best Buy.  The snowbirds are flocking back to our area and with them comes an increase with the moronic driving on the roads.

As I pulled out of our lot, maybe 200 feet up the road is the exit for a church.  As I pulled out I saw a line of cars slamming on their brakes in the right lane.  As they got a chance they all angrily whipped out around whatever obstacle was there.  It turns out the obstacle was an older than dirt man, with the entire front end of his Honda Civic blocking half of the road.  He was just sitting there, looking old and blocking traffic.  There was noone behind him so he could have easily backed up but he didn’t, he just sat there.  I hammered the horn hard as I went by this codger and threw up my arms in disgust.

As I got closer to Best Buy I had incident number two.  The oncoming traffic had a green arrow to turn left in front of us.  Our light turned green but we still had a stream of vehicles turning left.  We were ten seconds into our green and we still had assholes turning left in front of us, the last idiot in the line of lemmings was a woman in a big SUV on her cellphone.  Once again I rip into the horn, longer and louder this time, wanting to make sure the woman was well aware of her bullshit driving.

The last incident was on the way back.  I was at a T intersection, waiting to turn left.  The road I was waiting to turn onto had 3 lanes for traffic and two lanes for turning left onto the road I was on.  The turning lanes for that road had a red arrow.  Well yet again, another old man is driving, he is in the left most thru lane, next to the turning lanes.  He decides that he too needs to turn left but he is not in the turning lane.  Well he doesn’t care so he just stops his car in the thru lane and turns on his turn signal and sits there.  His actions almost cause an accident as people jam on their brakes to stop and swerve around him.  Once again, he doesn’t care, he sits there, oblivious to the traffic danger he is causing.  The thru lane light turns red and this moron is hanging out in the intersection.  My traffic got the green arrow to turn left.  I was going to smash the horn one more time and give gramps a big, huge thumbs up for demonstrating such idiocy but I just let it slide.  It is crazy.  Old people need to be tested yearly for basic driving competence, it is terrible down here, they are a real road hazard.

I ran some more temp testing on my computer and the temps were just too high.  So I ripped it apart again and saw that the heatsink was not seated well on the cpu.  The mount for the Ninja uses a push pin system instead of screwing to the motherboard which sucks in my opinion.  There is no way to adjust the tension.  Well after attempting to reinstall it several times, none to my satisfaction, I noticed that the mounting bracket for the heatsink appeared to be getting hung up on some capacitors around the cpu.  No matter what I tried it just would not seat securely. 

Finally I got fed up and put the original heatsink back in which actually cools better than either of the two that I just tried.  The Ninja will do a better job if I can get it to fit correctly.  I did some quick research and low and behold found others complaining of the exact same issue.  The Ninja gets hung up on certain motherboards.  There were two fixes I saw, either hack into the bracket to create clearance or buy a universal mounting kit that fits properly.  I opted for the latter.  I ordered it this morning.  One benefit of this process is I can now rip my system board out in all of 5 minutes.  I have had a lot of practice.

We made it through last night without Nicki dumping on the floor.  I walked around the house this morning doing an inspection, worried that my morning would once again be ruined by the sight of excrement.  I was pleased to find none.

Last night I did a training run with Ali, a brisk, sub 10 minute mile, two mile run.  It was pushing it a bit since I just ran Saturday and my right knee felt a bit sore after we were done but nothing that I haven’t felt many times before.  I popped my ibuprofen, iced it when we got home and today it feels pretty good.  5 miles in a four day span, it’s much more than I thought I would be doing for a long time.  My next target is the 4 mile run on Thanksgiving morning.

Last night I went through a rather tedious installation process for the jumbo cooler.  It took me over an hour to get it in.  Unlike the other coolers that screwed into the motherboard, this one uses a push pin setup that does not inspire confidence.  I can’t really be sure how tight it is, you just push the pins through and that is it.  Well after a lot of farting around, I got it in place and buttoned everything back up.  I hit the power switch with reservation, since the last time I messed with the cooler I had to crack the box back open 4 or 5 times to fix various screw ups.  Thankfully it fired up the first time.

Once it booted I opened the temperature monitor.  I was less than happy to see the idling temperature was about the same as with the other cooler.  But the true test was when the cpu was under load.  So I ran a stress test and the performance was better.  The cooler stayed about 20 degrees cooler than before but it still runs hotter than I would like.  Oh well it will have to do, I’m not f’ing with it further.  The damn thing barely fits inside the case.

This morning I woke up like any weekday.  I stumble out of bed into the bathroom and relieve myself.  I was surprised to see Nicki come in, seemingly wide awake and already looking for affection.  Normally she is passed out cold when I get up, weird.  Oh well, I thought little of it as I went out to the kitchen to start my routine.  Nicki shadowed me the entire time, looking for some sort of assurance.  I figured that maybe she just had to really go to the bathroom so I went to grab her collar.  As I did, I saw by the sliding door a huge wet spot.  She pissed on the floor, WTF??!!  Now I knew why she was acting that way.  Once she saw my anger she immediately slinked off to the bedroom to hide in shame.

I call Ali out to show her the mess.  She did the initial clean up and then I followed up hitting the area hard with the steam cleaner.  What a wonderful start to the day.  I wanted to be more severe in my scolding of the dog, wanting to make a lasting impression.  Ali was more soft shoed about it, scolding her but then giving her a treat later for doing a number 2 outside.  I told Ali that sends mixed signals.  I don’t know what the deal is.  Nicki always used to let us know if she had to go out.  I have no idea why all of a sudden Nicki would think she has the green light to use the house as a toilet.  We have to get this corrected asap or there is going to be a whole lot of drama around the household. 

Last week I snapped this pic of a teeny, tiny little car that was parked out front of our office.  It was the smallest car I had ever seen in real life.  I have seen pics of these micro-cars in magazines.  It looked like a toy.  It had 2 seats and literally no room to do as much as scratch your head.  I have no idea how you would have any options except instant death if you were involved in an accident with one of these things.  It was cool and all but damn, so, so tiny.  I guess in Europe and Japan there are tons of these tiny things so if they run into each other they just bump off.  I’d hate to see it run into and Escalade, they would have to scrape it off the tire.

I got my new heatsink for my computer today (Scythe Ninja).  The thing is MASSIVE.  If this does not keep my red hot dual core cpu cool, nothing will.  I will be installing it tonight.  With my current cooler, if I run the CPU at near 100% utilization my cpu temp spikes into the 180’s.  I’ll report my new results after the surgery.  It has a fan that is huge.  This size fan is normally used to cool entire cases, not just heatsinks. 

I love three day weekends.  I wish I could engineer my work schedule to have them regularly.  On Thursday I got a 1u server that Homey sent me.  He had a bunch of these servers at home and I needed something to replace my failing celeron server.  I started working on it the same day.  I went out at lunch and got two 1gig memory sticks for it.  I threw them in and started the Windows 2003 Server install.  It went through the text based part of the install fine but then when it rebooted to start the graphical part of the install it came up with a weird error and stopped.  I thought that was odd so I restarted the system, hoping it was a glitch.  Once again it stops with a different error.  I try again and again, each time the system hangs. Son of a bitch.  Then I start questioning myself.  Even though I did a good amount of research into making sure that I got compatible memory, maybe I missed something.  I even went as far as calling Kingston and describing the issue.  He verified I have compatible memory.  He recommended I run a memory tester on it and also that I try just running single sticks to see if I could identify one that was defective.  Hmmm I should have thought of that.

So I pulled one stick out and viola, it ran through setup just fine.  Once the install completed, I cautiously added the second stick and the system came up ok.  But then after awhile another stop error came up.  Ok well now that the system was up I could test the memory.  I tested the shit out of it.  After all sorts of scenarios, one stick, the other stick, both sticks, I arrived at the conclusion that both sticks of memory are fine but the second dimm slot is not.   Whenever I have a second stick in that slot a stop error will always be around the corner.  So I went through the weekend working on it with only one stick of memory and had no further memory dumps.

On Friday Ali was out most of the day doing stuff so I stayed home and did a few chores along with working on the new server and playing WoW, with playing WoW commanding the majority of the time.  The weather outside was great.  I had the windows wide open allowing a nice breeze to flow through the house.  I had it in my mind to have a enjoyable weekend, slim on work, fat on enjoyment.

Ali was signed up to run the Midpoint Madness run on saturday.  This was the run we started off our 5k careers with last year, the first race we ever ran.  Last year it was held in the evening which was cool.  This year it was a typical 8 am start.  It is a race back and forth out over a bridge with a big bump in the middle, a challenging course for florida runners that are used to flat surfaces.  Well I had been belly aching off and on all week to Ali about how I wished I could run it with her.  I wanted to do it but with my hernia/ab strain thing, knee problems and the fact that I hadn’t run a distance more than a mile and a half since May I knew it would be stupid. Well for whatever reason Friday night a wave of inspiration and optimism flowed over me and I proclaimed to Ali that I was going to try to run the race with her on Saturday.   She was surprised by my intentions and reminded me that it wasn’t very smart considering my current situation. But I told her I felt like I could do it so I was going to try.  I was excited and would have a hard enough time sleeping without….

I started to become restless around 3:30.  I thought I may have stirred initially because I was pumped to go out and run.  But as I lay there semi-awake, I smelled something that at first I dismissed as sulfur water, maybe the neighbors sprinklers were firing off at this early hour, I did have the bedroom window open so that was a possibility. However it normally doesn’t smell this strong.  Then my mind wandered some more, hmmm I had some gas issues before bed, could this strong odor be eminating from me?  If it was this was pretty serious.  But once I determined that the smell is not coming and going as flatulence normally does I dismissed it.  As I thought more and more about the smelly situation, the more I woke up.  The more I woke up the more the stinging stench became apparent until I was to the point where I had to get up to investigate.

I get up and see a dark shadow on the mat in the bathroom.  Instantly I fear what is going to be revealed when I light up the room.  I flip the light and am witness to the horror of a big, round puddle of dog diarhea.  Ali who was still asleep was woke up by my activity.  I blurted out to her that Nicki shit in the bathroom and she shot out of bed.  At first she looked for other culprits.  She asked if maybe the diabetic cat did it.  I told her I had the bedroom door shut all night, there was only one culprit.  Normally when we discover a dog accident, Nicki is all ashamed and hides.  For whatever reason this time she remained zonked out on her dog bed, seemingly unaware that we just discovered the bomb she dropped.

So here I am at 3:45 am, carefully carrying the bathroom mat like a diaper full of shit to the washing machine.  As I dump it in, some of the shit gets on the edge of the washing bin so we had to use the utility sink hose to rinse it off.  I don’t think I breathed through my nose during the entire process.  It was disgusting.

Normally if Nicki has to go she would try to wake me up to let me know.  There was no such effort made that I know of which is a bit disturbing.  I left Ali to dump the detergent in the washing machine and I went back to the bathroom to wipe out the drips that didn’t hit the mat.  Well after it was all said and done it was a little after 4am.  I told Ali that I would not be able to go back to sleep, so I didn’t even try.  While Ali went back to sleep in the still smelly bedroom, I got up and started my day, f it.

I ate my breakfast, checked the headlines and my email all before 4:30 am.  Then for the hour before I had to get Ali up for the run I played WoW.  I knew I would be exhausted later but I would just deal with it.  I got Ali up at 5:45.

We allocated plenty of time to get to the race and arrived about an hour early.  I filled out the form and got my timing chip and bib.  It felt great to be a participant as opposed to the spectator I had been at the races for the last 5 months.  Ali confessed to having mixed feelings about me running on several levels.  She was concerned about me running with the mix of physical issues I have had, she also wasn’t looking forward to running with task master Shawn.  When I was still running 5k’s with Ali she had gotten her time down to a best of around 28:15, I was constantly trying to push the pace just a little more each race.  However since she has been running the races herself the times have jumped back up over the 30 minute mark.  Ali often tells me how she just doesn’t feel the need to run a distance as fast as she can as much as just completing the distance.  Of course that is far from my ideas on a race.  To me, a race is an opportunity to push yourself, to see what you can do, to come up against your self-imposed mental/physical boundries and try to break through them.  Well anyway, since I was going to be by her side she was worried that I would be verbally encouraging her to run faster, which she despises.  So I made an effort to not tell her to giddy up and go as I have in some races before.  

I had no idea what to expect from myself.  I just hoped I would be able to finish without significant pain, anything on top of that was a bonus.  I did a lot of warming up and ample stretching in preparation.  The gun sounded and we were off.  Running outside is different than the treadmill, it’s harder.  After a mile I was already feeling tired but not in pain.  We had a good pace going, under 10 minute miles and that was as fast as I needed to go.  Running the hills was tough on the way out, tougher on the way back.  Ali pushed hard to maintain her pace and pushed through the tough spots.  We started near the back of the pack and did a decent amount of passing as the race went on which always makes you feel a bit better.  We passed numerous people that had to stop on the hills.  Even though I was physically tired, I wasn’t feeling any abnormal pain in my knees or groin so I was happy.

  During the last half mile or so we were running with a rather chunky woman.  She kept stopping and walking and then once we passed her she would start running again to catch up and pass us, then she would walk again for a bit and repeat the process.  As we approached the finish she once again started running and was about even with us.  As we approached I had visions of kicking in the after burners and blowing her away but I thought that would make me look sort of pathetic to the many onlookers.  However Ali put on the jets a bit and nipped the woman at the finish, good for her.  We crossed in 10:20 somethin official time, 30:10 according to my gps watch (which was more accurate)  Ali ran strong throughout the race and I got through it intact, with minimal discomfort.  It felt great to finish.  I really thought after the Rumble in June that I was done running and playing volleyball, permanently.  Now I’m back.  I am entertaining playing in a vball tournament with Randall in December to complete the comeback.  I tipped the scales at 189.5 last night so I am officially back at my fighting weight. I’m hoping through careful attention I will be able to extend my athletic hobbies a bit longer.

After doing some stuff around the house, Ali zonked out and took a nap for a good portion of Saturday afternoon.  She was tired from the run and the limited sleep from the dog diarhea alarm clock earlier that morning.  I refused to nap and continued to push on.  I did more work on the server.  I had plans of cloning my old server using the NTBACKUP method where you back up the old server, install the OS on the new server and then restore on top.  A couple tweaks later you have an identical server on new hardware.   Well after an 3 plus hour backup of the old server, I went to restore on the new one but had a glitch.  The old server had Win2K3 Enterprise on it, all I had to install was Win2K3 standard.  You can’t have different versions when you try to restore this way.  My Win2K3 enterprise media was at work, damn it.  Origianlly I resigned myself to waiting till Monday to continue the migration but later I decided I would just start fresh and move the stuff manually.

The old server served double duty for a while as a workstation for Ali, so it had a bunch of extra shit on it that normally isn’t on a server.  Starting fresh on the new one gave me an opportunity to eliminate that stuff.  So during the rest of the weekend I slowly worked on getting it up to snuff, bringin it online as a domain controller,  exchange 2003 server and file server.  Even with one gig of ram, it seems to perform well.  It is a P4 2.8 as opposed to a Celeron 2.4 so it gobbles up commands much better.  The fan in it is quite loud so I wound up running cables from the computer room to the bedroom/hobby room behind it and installed it there.  I’ll get some pics of the new setup up there.

Since Ali is going back to PA next weekend, we decided to take my mom out for her birthday early Saturday night.  We went to one of our favorite restaurants, The Watermark.  We got there early in an attempt to miss the rush of snowbirds.  We were pleasantly surprised that our plan worked and we got to sit right down.  We had a good dinner.  Mom is a daily reader of my blog so she already knows most of what goes on.  She said she hates when I go into technical tangents in the blog so she won’t like parts of today’s entry, sorry mom.  She will be 59 next week, hard to believe.  Time goes so fast.  She commented during dinner that I looked thin and then she stared at me for a prolonged period after saying that, examining me closely.  I told her I weighed right around 190, a good weight for me, what I have weighed for a loooong time.  Still she thought I looked oddly thin.  After dinner we went back to her place and had some fruity tart things Ali picked up at a luncheon/auction thing.  My mom flipped on the radio while we were there, she listens to a station that starts playing Xmas music 24/7 starting in early November.  I asked my mom why she would want to listen to this music already.  She said she likes it.  I found myself constantly drawn away from the conversation as xmas tune after tune came on.  I kept thinking to myself “It’s only November 11th….”

Over the weekend, in between my computer work, WoW playing and house chores I had been cycling the batteries for my rc planes with the intention of getting out there and flying.  So Sunday morning after changing the oil on the Sentra, I gathered my equipment and flew my speedwing.  I went through 4 battery packs and was out there for a good half hour.  It was fun.  My control was a bit shaky at first but in no time I was back to flying inverted, power dives, barrel rolls and thermal gliding.  It was fun.  I am seriously going to try to do it more than once every 6 months.

This weekend the people that live in Michigan but own the house to the right of us were down.  They are down till Tuesday.  I feel bad about it in a way but I feel very little need to be very social with them.  The really aren’t our neighbors, they are the people that live in Michigan that own the house.  From conversations I have had with them, I don’t think they will be moving down here anytime soon.  I will be surprised if they ever do to be honest.  Over the three day weekend I talked to the guy briefly from a distance and let him borrow my ladder to change the batteries in his smoke detectors.  Part of me thinks we should have them over to socialize or whatever but we didn’t.  Plus they brought a friend with this time so I  figure they are doing their own thing, although it seemed like they spent a lot of time just sitting out on their lanai.  You know how you just know when you have things in common with people that make it easy to socialize with them?  Well I don’t get that vibe at all in this situation. Plus there was an incident that happened when they first came down that cast a very bad intial impression on us. I dunno, I guess I am just a big jerk hermit.  They will probably be gone on Tuesday without any further interaction with us.  Although Ali hasn’t really said anything either way about it, she hadn’t suggested any contact with them either so I think she feels pretty similar.  In a way I think we resent someone buying Dee & Paula’s house, whom we were very fond of.  To have them buy it and then let it sit vacant for 99% of the year adds to the bad taste. 

The Eagles broke their three game losing streak with a thumping of the Redskins in wet and soggy conditions.  The game actually could have been more lopsided.  The Eagles scored almost all of their points on a handful of big plays and were more or less unable to sustain drives most of the game.  The one exception was at the end of the game where they were able to impressively run the ball to run out the clock, but the Redskins had given up at that point it seemed.  Although it was a solid win, I still don’t have a great outlook for the long term success of the team.  They just are too inconsistent and make dumb mental errors at key times in games.  The year they went to the Super Bowl almost all the lucky breaks went their way, this year they almost always seem to be on the receiving end of someone else’s good fortune.

What could be better than the democrats perched upon owning both branches of congress?  Don Rumsfield stepping down the day after!  It’s ironic how Bush has been steadfastly behind Donny, singing his praises.  Don has been nipping at the heels of Cheney as the biggest dirtbag in Washington.  I am thrilled to see him go.  How bad does it look for the Bush administration that the day after congress inherits the ability to fully investigate Iraq, the figure head for the Iraq mess excuses himself from the table?

  Ali pointed out that this could be just another calculated move by the puppet masters in the Bush camp.  Good ole Don quits and falls on the sword, becoming the scape goat for all that is wrong with Iraq, a way to insulate the president from it.   The administration can say Rumsfeld was the reason for most of the problems and he is gone now, no more problems.  Well to me in the big picture having him out of there can only be a good thing overall.  It is fun watching the the republicans have to get off their condescending throne and backpedal.  Of course the important part is there is some sort of change that starts moving things in a positive direction instead of a slow agonizing descent into the shitter.

We have a three day weekend coming up.  I have very, very little on the agenda for once so it should be a good time.  The weather is supposed to very good so it should be a swell 3 days.  Who knows, I may even put my planes up into the air.

My car situation is still unsettled.  The party van still sits in my driveway.  I am holding 500 bucks on it but have no clue how long it will take until I receive the balance, enabling me to close the book on it.  The dealer is annoying me with their inability to secure a Camry Hybrid for us.  I repeatedly have went online and checked the inventory for the southeast region and have found multiple cars that would fit the bill, only to hear excuses about them not being able to get one of them.  Yesterday I talked to the sales guy and expanded the colors we would accept from one to three, tripling the opportunities.  They have had our deposit for two weeks now.  The next call will be much more forward.  My patience is wearing thin.

 Ran a mile and a half on the treadmill yesterday.

I only stayed up until 10:30 or so but the election results we saw looked mostly favorable for the democrats.  When I woke up this morning the news was all good.  The republicans got stomped in the House and if a narrow lead holds in two senate races, they could also control the Senate.  Maybe people are smarter than I thought.  I honestly am surprised that it went as well as it did.  No longer having a congress that will rubber stamp laws that cater to Bush’s personal agenda is a good thing.  However they can’t pass laws without the big guy’s approval either so we will probably wind up with more or less a stalemate for the next two years.  It’s better than the alternative of continued abuse of power that has been repeated over the last 6 years.  One plus I heard was with a democratic majority they can now order a full independent investigation of anything and everything regarding the Iraq mess, something they were unable to do before.

I realize that Republican or Democrat there is no real fix for the system until two core things are corrected, campaign reform and the damn lobbyists.  These two things corrupt the system from within, allowing big business and special interest groups to pull the strings of our political leaders like puppets. They answer to their financial supporters first, everyone else second.  Regardless, it feels like a shiny new day to me.  A day when people finally voiced with their actions that they will no longer be victims of Bush brainwashing that relies on fear to keep people under control.

F Bush.    

Well I am still suffering the side effects of extended skin to greased lightning contact.  The skin on my hands is flaking off and they feel dry and coarse enough to sand woodworking projects.   I’ve used tons of moisturizer but it doesn’t help.  I took a picture of my left hand, I’m not sure it shows just how dry they are but take a look.

Well today is election day, please get out there and vote.  It would be fantastic if there would be a reversal of power in congress but I am not holding my breath.  I have little faith in people’s ability to independently think after Bush and his cronies slithered back into the White House for a second term.  I can only hope people are smart enough to not fall for the “Terror, terror, terror, 911, 911, God bless America” strategy they used in 2004.  The corruption, dishonesty , back door dealing, greed and abuse of power that is always present to some degree under any president has reached new levels under Dumya.  

I took advantage of early voting and placed my votes early last week.  I am still a registered republican but did not vote for a single republican candidate.  I’m crossing my fingers that tomorrow is the day America starts regaining it’s sanity.