Interested to see Ted Kennedy's seat lost in Massachusetts. I'm not happy with Obama in many ways, the selection of a team of foxes to oversee the financial henhouse, the endorsement and further implementation of what I consider (and many consider) authoritarian, anti-democratic practices in the administration of justice, the handling of the war in Afghanistan and his seeming inability to articulate where in the hell he's coming from (the great communicator unable to communicate?), but to elect what seems to be not just a conservative, but what may well be a wingnut conservative (siding with the birthers - Obama not born in the US - along with similar off the wall stuff, I don't yet know if they're true or not) is more than I as a voter would have been willing to do. I'm pissed, but that doesn't mean, sitting here in the frying pan, I'd prefer the fire.

Maybe this guy isn't as far out in the Rush Limbaugh - Ann Coulter sense as I seem to have heard, I don't much trust information from any of the media until I've had a chance to examine a lot of it, but I must say we do live in interesting times. They're hard, I have friends who are looking at any savings they've managed to accumulate disappear along with homes they've owned for decades. The job market is shit and when the market is shit it allows all kinds of “populist” forces to gather strength, some of them, well, not altogether good for the survival of a democratic people. If we're still a democratic people. That's democratic with the small “d”, by the way, I registered Independent decades ago. Problems, in other words, in River City. But I go on. We'll continue to watch and maybe learn and maybe escape to a cave in northern Montana before the (fill in the blank) strikes. (Yes I'm kidding. Sort of.)

Later. As yesterday, the sun came out around noon and I headed out for a walk. Back now after two, the sky dark, thunder in the near distance, rain squalls. Returning from the walk I got in the car instead of going up to the apartment and ran down to Safeway for kitty litter (the pan is now set up in the bathroom, clean, with new litter) and sake. Well, sake, orange juice, milk and cheese. I'm eating the cheese. To be precise.

Not much out there while walking. A picture or two taken from a similar location as some of the pictures I took yesterday, the clouds less dramatic in the distance. A short route starting on Broadway, over to Telegraph and then up through the City Center before bailing out when the sky started to show signs of another storm front.

A delivery early this morning from the framing people, a miter saw ordered for accurate wood frame cutting, precise angles and all that, the thing the size of a hand held rotary saw only a little larger. What in the hell was I thinking? It's designed for a framing shop, not some addle-brained idiot who'll make maybe two dozen framed photographs this year. I bought the production matt cutter rather than the home hobbyist cutter some time back, but it's not really larger than a home cutter and I got it at a large discount that made it a steal. No complaints there, but this thing has a 10 inch blade. Weighs a lot. Well, it weighs more and is larger than you'd think somebody without a workshop in the garage, somebody who lives in an urban apartment, would ever consider. I could be wrong. We'll all know soon enough.

Sounds consistent, though. You're consistent in your errors and don't learn much from past mistakes.

Not unlike my country.

Oh, and the external mirrored hard drive arrived, but it turns out mirroring, Raid 1 mirroring, the reason I got the thing, won't work on a setup like mine that uses static IP addresses. Such is life. I'm copying the images I shot in 2009 as I write, it's been sitting here copying now for a couple of hours. I'm happy to use it, it cost me half what the terabyte drive I have now attached to the computer I bought three years ago did, but this day has had it's ups and downs, concluding with the delivery of an exotic looking brushed aluminum box that won't dance under mirrored lights. Otherwise I'm fine. Indeed I am. Projects ahead. A large new hard drive for images in place. More DVD's to duplicate. More files to move. A little sake tonight to celebrate.