jheaton tagged me for this a while back:



I have to say I kind of love the idea of a band named "Rock-Wallaby," clearly following in the footsteps of Men-at-Work, Midnight Oil, and, ummm.... Men-at-Work! The full quote from which the "Album Title" came is "You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers." - John J. Plomp. I don't think that adorable child in the picture is at that age yet. (photo credit is here). ANYway....

( Meme instructions behind the cut )

Anyone here on Facebook? I just joined, and am a bit overwhelmed and disoriented by it. And people I completely forgot about have found me, literally overnight - a couple of times it was delightful, but some of them I forgot quite happily, honestly. Anyway, I'd love to see any of you there if you are there. Are you there?

Poll #1352038 Facebook
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 8

What name or e-mail address can I find you under on Facebook?

(Only I can see your answers)

I have for some reason started watching Buffy again lately. Hayes & I are watching it in order together - we just started Season 2 last night - but I've also been sort of randomly watching episodes from all the other seasons. I'm nursing the nastiest ear/sinus infection of my adult life (and that is saying something), so there's been more laying about watching TV than is usual for me. Hilariously, I own all the DVDs except Season 6 (Hayes thought I had that and got me Season 7 for Christmas when he saw I was revisiting BtVS). Since I met most of my f'list through the Buffy fandom, I feel compelled to post my thoughts ( behind the cut )

In other news, Hi! How are you?

Every year I'm horrified all over again by what a COMPLETE DICK Rudolf's dad is.

Hey, did you miss me?

There were so many times I wanted to post, and so many things that I've wanted to say, but I just didn't make the time for LJ. It's a shame, but there it is. And of course I wanted to post yesterday, but I wanted to sleep more ;)

Where to start? Do I begin with describing the whole experience of the past year? Because for me, it's been a year. A YEAR. I guess I'll start with a post about me me ME, and (hopefully very) soon I'll do another post about the President-Elect.

( The Political is Personal )

Here's the local news from Election Night - I am the unidentified white woman. (I'd like to point out that the local campaign was actually much more racially mixed than you see in this clip - and to say how glad I am I took the time to redo my makeup before I went out for the party. Hee.) I said a lot more, but was done in by the editing! I tried to embed it, but it started playing automatically; I didn't want to do that to my f'list, so here's the link instead: Look, Ma, I'm on TeeVee!

Yay!

As you may or may not know, Nashville has been almost entirely out of gas since Hurricane Ike hit Houston. The latest story was that this was because of unfounded panic created by the media, but I can assure you that long before the media reported it, I drove to 10 different gas stations before I found gas. That was over a week ago. Now it's to where a gas station gets gas, lines form for blocks, and the station is out of gas within a couple of hours. Cabbies are idle. School buses are running only sporadically. Thank god for extremely fuel efficient cars.

Anyway, a lot of the references here to local restaurants and sports teams are funnier if you know Nashville, but I still think the "gas shortage makes Hitler freak out" message is universally hilarious. (I should point out that Nashville Mayor Karl Dean is a fine mayor, and is in no way Hitleresque.)

Yes, I know it's an ad for a politician. However many grains of salt you take it with, though, there is a fundamental difference between the parties, and their candidates, on the economy. The McCain/Republic version remains Ronald Reagan's "trickle-down" theory - give massive tax breaks to corporations and the wealthiest people, who will then hopefully create jobs and wealth for everyone else. Oh, and while you're at it, let's get rid of those pesky "regulations" that stifle industry by requiring it to, say, not gamble people's pensions away. And anything we want we'll buy with money we borrow from China.... The Obama/Democratic position on this is that we've tried that for 28 years and IT'S NOT WORKING for the vast majority of the people, whose wages have flatlined and whose benefits have been slashed, and the way to build this economy is to bolster the middle class, impose the regulations necessary to guide the economy, and to use taxes on the wealthiest individuals and corporations to bring about a balanced budget. I've been meaning to post this graphic for ages, and kept putting it off, and now I've seen it everywhere - but I found it first! From the Washington Post, an independent analysis of the McCain and Obama tax plans:

I am at the campaign HQ, calling the government housing development agency to find out if there is anywhere I can get maps of the various projects so that we can plan our voter registration drives more efficiently. I had to go through the phone menu and call through to the same extension which people use to apply for subsidized housing. So I'm on the same line as people needing to apply to live in the projects, and I'm on hold, and the music is that "You had a Bad Day!" song they use on American Idol. Heh.

Followed by "Harden my Heart" (Quarterflash!)

Spend all day Saturday at the largest of Nashville's public housing developments. We registered about 100 people just at that one location (yay!). (btw, if the polls are freaking you out, registering voters is a much better use of your time than spending the day at Huffington Post fretting about it....)

I finally made it to the local Obama HQ again today - I've been in a few times in the past month, for meetings, but today was the first day I went for the full day (ie, the full school day), which is something I'm going to try to do at least twice a week through the election (not counting voter registration pretty much every Saturday through October 6th). Anyway, I got there and was given the button pictured below, which Giselle, a woman I worked with during the primary, had made. She was making variations: "Tennesseans for Obama," "Nurses for Obama," et al, and decided to make these for those of us who were there from the beginning. Having taken several months off from working on the campaign, I kind of feel like I don't deserve this, but I'll be wearing it every day between now and the election. Hee!



This brings me to another point. Starting last October, I got involved in the Obama campaign. It was (and is) one of the most rewarding experiences of my adult life. By December and January (leading up to Super Tuesday) I stopped using livejournal - in part, because I was suddenly VERY busy (the campaign is the only work I've ever done where I have ZERO desire to surf the web instead), and in part because I feared that my LJ would become all-campaign, all-the-time, and I felt like that wasn't fair, somehow. Since dipping my toe back in to LJ, I find myself wanting to post all the time - but almost everything I want to post is election-related.

I kind of hate it when people make announcements about their LJs or blogs, it's so self-important, but I feel the need to make this one. This LJ is going to be pretty much all-election all-the-time through November 4th. Hell, through November 11th - win or lose, I'm not going to stop talking about it immediately. If you don't want to hear it, feel free to defriend me, but please come back after the election! I'm not going to filter it, though, in fact I'm not even friends-locking (at this point), so if you (ie, spicedrum) know anyone who might want to hear my occasional thoughts on the subject, feel free to point them here.

See, the thing is, this is what I think about these days. It's what I want to share publicly. Yes, ANTM is back (woohoo!), but I can talk about that on other's LJs. Yes I love my girls, but there's only so much of that that I feel like sharing. Yes, I have domestic issues (why did I decide that Maggie being in charge of snacks tomorrow warranted making two different kinds of homemade cookies?) but they can go unremarked upon. But I'm dying to compose a post on polling and the many different ways it's skewed to not reflect the current electorate. I have, routinely, lots of links I'd like to share. If you are undecided, I hope you stick around for a little while, because I'd like to make the case to you. I'm not going to try to browbeat anyone, but I'm not going to pretend I don't have strong feelings about this. I hope you all stick around, but no hard feelings if you don't, I promise.

That video cuts out some of the middle, where Obama goes into real specifics on his agenda. If you're curious, a longer version is here (though it doesn't have the part after CNN's edit, which is why I posted this video, instead, despite the crappy quality).