No Longer Waiting To Exhale

Logically, you'd'a thought somebody as breathlessly concerned with the outcome of our recent election as I am would have blogged quite a lot over the last few months... but in fact, I only managed a handful of posts. That's because I was actually working on the election, supporting, in concert with the Vernon Democratic Town Committee and the Quiet Corner Democrats, the campaigns of Congressman (now also Senator-Elect) Chris Murphy, Congressman Joe Courtney, Susan Eastwood for State Senate, and John Murphy and Claire Janowski for State Representative (not to mention collateral support for other state senate and representative campaigns).

And, of course, our essential president, Barack Obama.

Well, of course, now the election is over. Susan Eastwood and John Murphy ran great campaigns, of which I am proud and for which I am grateful, but couldn't overcome their long starting odds. Otherwise, though, it was a great Election Day for the Democratic candidates I supported, and for Connecticut, and, I am absolutely convinced, for the United States and the world.

"[T]he arc of the moral universe is long," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, told the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, "but it bends toward justice." I believe that with all my heart, and I believe we live in a time when the arc is bending ever more sharply. But I also believe progress can be thwarted... delayed... deferred... and I feared we were at risk for that in this election, as those who are on the wrong side of history recognized their last, best chance to turn back the tide.

Now, after not only Democratic but progressive candidates, and progressive ideas, won the people's approval across the country, I feel I can breathe again. The work is not done, of course; we can't simply rest on our laurels. But I have great hope for the years and decades to come.

And with that, maybe I'll have a renewed freedom to write out my random thoughts and bloviations here, and on my food blog as well, as opposed to just dashed off Facebook comments. I already have a few ideas in mind; watch this space.

Call Off the Dogs!

Despite my somewhat dire expectations, my upgrades — from 1 to 3 Gb RAM and from Mac OSX 10.4.latest to 10.6.latest — went very smoothly; it's just Daily Life™ that seems to be tripping me up. Not that anything has gone off the rails in that regard, either, really; I'm just readapting to the post-holiday routine less efficiently than I'd hoped. Sad when it's only 4 January, and you're already a week behind on New Year's resolutions, eh?

Well, one way I hope to meet my goal of posting more often is relying on short postings and links instead of tl;dr essays¹, so let me start by adding to my New Year's "intentions" a reboot of my long-dormant hobby astronomy, starting with observing as many of these events as I can.

I've already missed the Quantarid meteor shower (I did go outside last night at about the right time, but it was wicked cold, so I didn't stay long or see anything), and most of the eclipses are outside my geographic range (unless I win the lottery), but I'm going to shoot for as many of the others as I can, and I'm determined not to miss the transit of Venus.

And while I'm on space stuff, how cool is this?


¹ Don't worry; I'm sure there'll be plenty of those, too!

If You Don't Hear From Me by Monday...

...send a St. Bernard with a cask of brandy to look for me! I'm getting ready to do a memory/system software upgrade on my computer, and I can only hope I'll find my way back. Wish me luck!

New Years... er, Intentions

OK, so I'm getting a couple days' jump on the whole New Years resolution thing, but I just wanted to drop in a placeholder to say that I'm reanimating the shambling corpse that is this blog. I know better than to make promises, but my hope for the coming year is to post here at least twice a week, and to do the same at my other blog, Emerging Foodie. In addition, I hope to...

• Go to the gym at least 4 times a week
• Read more fiction
• Listen to more music
• Get back into model rocketry

What I'm going not do to make space in my busy schedule for all of this is yet to be determined, of course! ;^)

For now, I'll leave you with this: For reasons that don't bear mentioning, I ended up listening to an hour of right-wing radio this morning, and it seemed that about half the airtime was taken up with ads for get-rich-quick schemes and debt consolidation... which leads me to wonder: If right-wing listeners are so hard up for cash, why do they keep voting for candidates and policies that slam their very own middle-class lives in favor of the already wealthy?