Saturday Evening Out

Saturday night we had a babysitter who even managed to get lil-M to bed! Cspew and I had a very nice evening. We ate dinner at Duck and Dumpling, an Asian Bistro I'd describe as americanized vietnamese food. The food, service, and atmosphere were all outstanding. Although the Raleigh country club type was out in full force that night....maybe they always are at non-kid restaurants downtown.

Walking back to the car, we saw this on the side of a building, making the evening slightly more positive.


I just read that this projection has actually been up since Obama was in Raleigh just before the election. I'm not sure how we managed to miss it until now. Turns out the guy who owns the duck and dumpling is responsible.

I love all the hype right now. This morning I saw a framed picture of the Obama family on a colleague's desk. People are not holding back any excitement or pride!

The rest of the evening was equally good. We went to a party, caught up with a few folks we know, but also met lots of great new people. I hate to publically admit it at the risk of coming across snobbish, but it's a rare pleasure these days to come away from a party excited about pretty much everyone we met.

Political emotions

What a ride this election year has been for me. I've never before been so interested in politics. I suppose the Blacksburg town council election when the hedgepath homies were finally ousted started my interest. Maybe it's my age, my new (since last presidential election) parental role, my pregnancy hormones, I'm not really sure. In the last few weeks, I've recognized that the nastiness of the election process is really depressing to me. On election day, I was worked up about the sketchiness being reported in VA. I'm still on a VT student environmental listserv and got lots of frantic emails from them looking for help and scrambling to get students to the polls after the ridiculous polling location move. Now today I'm reading about the suspected scandal in Alaska. What? No Way? A state with Palin as governor, a convicted felon a longtime senator, and another senator with current enormous legal problems, why would one ever suspect?!

I suppose the process still sort of works, but it's difficult to come to the realization that our country's democratic system is really just as bad as the political corruption we read about in countries with dictators and ruling classes. My world politics class in college was 15 years ago, but I still remember the prof introducing some topic and talking about how all government systems are seriously flawed, just in different ways and some more than others. I wonder if my students will be shocked some day when they too learn something I told them in class is really true! E.g. wow, that Dr. Chewie lady was right, if I improve something that's not a bottleneck it has no impact on the current outcome of the line. Somehow that's not as dramatic as a political realization.

Despite it all, I'm beside myself that Obama actually got elected and appears to be taking office. I still really can't believe it. I keep wanting to give lil-m's african american teachers a high-five, but I haven't figured out the best way to do it yet. Maybe I can just train her to do it and shout gobama at the same time.

Political Categories

My most recent revelation wrt political generalizations of groups of people is Patio Man. What a great name!

Who is a patio man? Make a guess or you can read David Brooks' description.

Buses

This morning I rode the city bus to work. I've only ridden on 6 city buses since we've been in Raleigh, and had 2 break down on me. Hopefully I'm just unlucky and their failure rate isn't that bad.

It took 50 minutes to get to campus from my house. According to google maps new walking route feature (how cool is that) It's 3.3 miles and should take me 68 minutes. Which means they are assuming about a 20 minute mile. I'm pretty confident I can walk a mile in closer to 15 minutes, so it would be about even time-wise with riding the bus and I would get some exercise in.

So, I need a formula. I'm going to guess the breakpoint is somewhere around 3.5 miles at which point it might be worth it to ride. A few other factors to consider, number of bus transfers necessary, number of kids in tow, outside temperature (I don't want to be sweaty mess at work), time of day (=>road congestion), and time since last exercise.

As a side note, if I didn't have an enormous belly making it nearly impossible to bend over, I would have just ridden my bike this morning.

Anyway, it made me feel for people who daily ride the bus to and from work. What a pain. The thing breaks down and your screwed, nearly guaranteed to be late. This morning everyone got off and started walking. Fortunately I was relatively close to my building so it didn't cost me much, but I'm sure others had much further to go and were no doubt late as the bus was already running 15 minutes behind.

What a terrible system. There must be a better way!

Voter suppression

This topic is especially disturbing to me as I feel like it puts us in the same camp as those "democratic" countries who just *happen* (through a variety of threats no doubt) to elect the same dictator year after year.

The entire campaign process in which the candidates barely tell the truth and their respective campaigns spread blatant lies is really horrible already. I guess we've just learned to deal with it via things like post-debate fact-finding teams who report on which statements are true or stretched. I'm not sure why we let this happen, but anyway, at least there are sources of political truth and enough reporters working hard to hammer it out for us.

Now, voter suppression is a whole different game. To me this is a much more serious violation of our basic voter rights. Whether or not ex-felons should vote is just one small part of this problem. More seriously, regular people are purposely tricked or pressured into not voting. Hitting close to home, the 2006 VA state election has now been linked to obvious voter suppression with people receiving threatening phone calls, deceptive phone calls, and deceptive mailings to "encourage" non-voting.

In this election, the VA college student voting is clearly a problem. Now, in desperation, McCain's campaign is blasting ACORN for voter registration fraud. While this is a valid problem, based on history, registration fraud rarely results in actual fraud at the polls. Additionally, why would they be fighting a non-profit, non-partisan social justice group. Obviously, they are suppressing likely Obama voters. However, it's ridiculously cruel to continue to lay the big hand of conservative wealth again and again to strike down anything that helps the people they abuse. This organization has been around for 40 years helping people gain access to their right to vote in addition to organizing low-moderate income individuals to change things that concern them, like minimum wage, schools, fair-housing, all those things that people need!

Our country is so on track for an uprising from the low-moderate income workers. Maybe just maybe a democratic white house could push it off a little longer.

reducing? stuff

The Bronco is officially sold and out of our possession. We, and especially cspew, have lots of great memories while driving it, but we're now glad to be free from whatever window motor, wiper motor, gas tank, etc. will be breaking next. The subaru will be getting a hitch soon unless the jet skis somehow disappear.

We're also making progress on reorganizing our house to make room for a crib. Yes, a crib is not that large, but neither is our house. We are back to the sliding squares game we played while moving in. The computer gear and files are now in the living room so we have created a new blank in the game.

NC Celebs

We've had two psuedo-celebrity sightings in the last couple weeks: Mike Connell (from The Connells) at a neighborhood pot-luck and Roy Williams (UNC basketball coach) at an Outback in CH...very thrilling I know.

CSA upgrade

The Raleigh CSA group is quite amazing. There is actually quite a variety in CSA's you can join. There is a drop-off in our neighborhood and I participate somewhat regularly by placing an order a day or so before the drop off. However, we've just stepped it up and actually purchases a winter share. It's seriously an amazing deal and I'm anxious to be forced into eating my local seasonal veggies over just occasionally purchasing them. Hopefully the fam is up for all the roots we'll be consuming this winter. The CSA we bought into is Beausol Gardens. I've added a link to a site some other members maintain with recipes....basically for my own convenience and not wanting to use bookmarks on my work computer.