apple juice

We carved our pumpkins tonight. The plan was to be non-partisan until my lady stole my message with her design.

So I ditched the plan and carved something else!

Forget the U2 iPod Special Edition.

I need the iPod Photo.

Beautiful Vista
Originally uploaded by ajc3.

Here’s a photo from some road in Vermont. It’s on the way to Mad River Glen. I have no idea how to decipher the roads out there that seemingly head of in random directions.

It was beautiful out there in all directions though. It seems as though there were ten times as many trees that were changing colors out there than there is back here in Minnesota.

John also told me that that 100 years ago, 85% of vermont had been logged, and that he has seen extremely surreal pictures of the mountains with absolutely no trees on them.

Amazing to think what has re-grown, and also that people couldn’t see the beauty they were destroying at the time.

I just signed up to volunteer with ACT for their get-out-the-vote effort on Nov. 2. I am working from 8am until 7:30pm, apparently going door to door, asking people to vote.

We will see. I’m sure it will be an exhausting, but hopefully productive day.

(And they said I should bring some other people with me. Anyone interested?)

Well, I have come to another lull in the posting. I will have to once again blame it on all the pent up emotions regarding the election. I need it to be over.

But as many have pointed out, Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire was a moment of sheer joy for me. Time will tell if it made any difference, but there was an essential truth in the whole exchange. The volume knob of “debate” needs to be turned way down in this country, so the actual voices can be heard.

As it is, we have this din of primal grunting and shouting around the fire. It’s not helping. When we have polls showing 70% of people from Tennesee saying they are “very interested” in the election and then something like 75% of them not able to answer a simple quiz on which candidate supports what issue, we have a serious problem.

I was just sent this article by a friend, and I was compelled to share…. Politics in the ‘New Normal’ America

During the spring and summer of 2004 some Americans, most but not all of them nominal Democrats, spoke of the November 2 presidential election as the most important, or “crucial,” of their lifetimes. They told not only acquaintances but reporters and political opinion researchers that they had never been more “concerned,” more “uneasy,” more “discouraged,” even more “frightened” about the future of the United States. They expressed apprehension that the fragile threads that bound the republic had reached a breaking point; that the nation’s very constitution had been diverted for political advantage; that the mechanisms its citizens had created over two centuries to protect themselves from one another and from others had been in the first instance systematically dismantled and in the second sacrificed to an enthusiasm for bellicose fantasy. They downloaded news reports that seemed to make these points. They e-mailed newsletters and Web logs and speeches and Doonesbury strips to multiple recipients.

I started Swedish class last night, and in conversations with a couple students, it came out that ‘thinking about moving after November’ was on their minds, and I admitted to them that we had jokingly said that as well. When I was in Canada this summer for a friend’s wedding, we jokingly told a few Canadians that we were up there “scoping out places to live if things didn’t go well in November”. Which we thought was pretty funny, although I’m not sure if they want any more Americans coming up there.

But it has always been a joke, partially because just up and moving is difficult when you have jobs and houses and familes, but mostly because I still believe in the promise of this country, and that things work like a pendulum given that our system was set up so well. It swings right, it swings left, but in the end it returns to center.

Sometimes I wonder though if that will continue to hold… what if there is a new center?

Well, lo and behold, someone egged my car last night. Perhaps I dredged up some bad karma by calling Bush supporters fools in my previous post. On the other hand, I doubt the teenage pricks that egged my car read my blog. I don’t think I’m doing a good job reaching that demographic here.

So I spent most of lunch washing the side of the car, and I thought I had it looking all nice and clean. On the way back to work, I had the windows down, feeling the breeze. In the parking lot, windows up… ewwwww! More egg on the window! It must’ve seeped down inside the window a bit.

Bastards!

So maybe I’ll see if I can put my iSight camera to good work, I think there is some motion-sensitive recording software! I could catch the little buggers on video!

Ah, well, I probably won’t get around to that. Twins game tonight!